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What I want is "standing in front of a giant canvas and going a little crazy on it with a full spectrum of fun, wild colors."

"My naughty 4: Oils, Acrylics, Egg Tempera & Gouache"

If you remember one thing from this whole book, make it this: paint is just a vehicle. A taxi. The passenger is pigment.

Everything else in the tube, the oil, the plastic, the gum, the water, the fillers, is the car, the seats, the fluffy dice hanging off the mirror. The colour you fall in love with is the person in the back seat. So when you buy paint, think of it like buying liquid pigment. How much passenger are you actually getting?

One of the things I love most about painting is making sure my pigment load is through the roof. I don’t like shallow pigments. I want those particles as juicy and thick as they can possibly be, packed in like sardines at a rugby test.

Student paint will break your heart quietly. The tube looks cheaper. It is cheaper. But you’re buying a tube of water. You don’t get the kick. You squeeze it out, push it around, and it lies there on the canvas like a wet cardigan, all good intentions and no warmth.

I’ll show you what I mean. Pop the lid. Ready? Yee-ha. Homemade red oil paint. And when I say homemade, don’t think lower quality. It’s literally just the pigment with linseed oil in the blender. All the beauty of a paint, none of the nasties.

Beside it, the expensive stuff. Michael Harding. As expensive as oils can get. Beautiful. But a lot of off-the-shelf paint, to make it last the distance on a shelf and survive, has things added to it that you might not want near your lungs.

If you want the heaviest pigment of all, there’s gouache. Gouache paint has the thickest, heaviest pigment particles going. I combine gouache with egg, and the light feels like it’s coming from inside the paint itself. Look at it wet. Really wet. And yet the colour is so intense it’s as if you’d primed and painted a house wall twice.

Bigger particles make paint more opaque. And here’s the thing about shine. Some people love the gloss you get off acrylics and oils, and there’s nothing wrong with it. But if you want raw colour, you hit a problem when the surface gets too reflective. You stop seeing colour. You see the reflection of light, like chrome reflecting the whole room back at you, and the essence of the colour gets lost in the glare.

I used to love gloss and satin. I still do. But I’m falling for matte. Matte gets a bad name because usually we meet it at a cheap print shop, a flat photo that feels a bit dead. That’s not the same as matte with an extreme pigment load. Very few of us have ever stood in front of that. It’s like hearing a song you’ve only ever heard through a phone speaker, and then hearing it live.

A practical one. Buy about one tube of white for every four tubes of colour. Four tubes of colour get the colour onto the scene. The white lets you keep splicing it back towards the light.

And put your lids back on. I say this to myself more than to you. Every stream, I’m trying to get out of the bad habit of letting good paint dry out in the open air like washing left on the line in a storm.

You don’t need fancy brushes. I mean it. I use cheap synthetic flats with long handles. A 10, a 16, whatever. Soft but not too soft. Hard but not too hard. Find one that works for you. That’s the best brush.

Spend it on the pigment. The passenger. Always the passenger.