I kept studio journals from the outset of my career. At first, I tracked my sales in the journal. Then I started tracking my supplies–the number and size of stretched canvases I had on hand, and other such things.
Eventually, I started to use the journals as a daily record of the paintings on which I worked. I made an entry for each painting as I worked on it including notes about the medium I used. Eventually, I dedicated part of this journal, the one I call the “Green Book,” to the mediums themselves, including the ingredients and proportions.
The first entry in the Green Book is from 1994–thirty years ago. Eventually, I moved on to other journals but I still use the Green Book to record new mediums as I try them. The Green Book now has eight pages of medium entries, like the two pages shown in this photo. Each medium is described on a single journal line.
Recently, I started transcribing the mediums in a spreadsheet to make searching easier.