BRIGHT IDEAS

Bring the Essence of Plein Air Indoors

Recreating elements of plein air while painting at home or in the studio can lead to some unexpected and exciting places along the artistic journey.

By Sagnik Biswas

Nothing beats the fun and excitement of painting en plein air. Th e feeling of warm sunlight on your shoulders, a cool breeze brushing your face or the real-life drama unfolding right before you can all make for useful and unforgettable learning experiences along your art journey. Th ere are also times, however, when factors such as inclement weather or health issues may force you into the confi nes of your home or studio. At those times, rather than feeling like you’re missing out on the adventure of the great outdoors, you can try to make those indoor sessions just as exciting. After all, there can be just as

Larger and more detailed paintings like Parallel Lives (opposite, 16x22) or Are You in the Queue? (above, 18x14) are typical studio pieces that require several days of planning and execution.

many challenges and surprises to deal with when you’re painting inside. When I paint indoors, away from prying eyes, criticism and other distractions, I’m able to immerse myself in the search for meaningful expression. I come to a better understanding of my inner psyche and I indulge in experiments of all kinds. Mistakes and misadventures take on diff erent meanings and become important lessons as I paint, not for an outside audience but for myself.

When I fi nd myself unable to do plein air work, I like to borrow the most important elements of a plein air experience and bring it inside.

TIME

At the outset, you can set a time to fi nish the painting, pushing yourself into “speed painting.” Th is is something you’re naturally forced to do when painting outside, where a leisurely pace—due to changing light and conditions—is rarely an option. Painting in this time-limited manner provides good practice with capturing the essentials of a subject quickly. Simplifi cation—an important quality for successful watercolors—becomes mandatory. Use three values at the most—light, mid and dark. Do the big shapes fi rst and add the details later, if at all.

UNPREDICTABILITY

Most outside subjects are fl eeting. Th ey change faster than you can blink, forcing artists to make a quick mind sketch to get the basic shapes, values and perspective right. You can try that same thing at home. Don’t prop up a photo at the corner of your easel and paint from it. Instead, remove it and try to paint from your impression of the subject. Feel free to invoke your artistic license. Th at way you can paint your ideas and not just what’s in front of you. In any case, for painting in a loose impressionistic style, it’s seldom a good idea to paint directly from a photograph or to compare your fi nished painting with one. If the painting conveys your feelings to your audience, you have a reason to celebrate.

PALETTE

Over the years, you may have built up your palette with so many paints that it has become too heavy to lug around. In that case you’ve probably developed a substantially lighter “pocket palette” with just a few musthave pigments and brushes that can be easily carried around for plein air work. Why not use it indoors every once in a while? It provides excellent practice in trying out a limited palette. You’ll also get experience mixing various grays, achieving color harmony will become easier, and your paintings will look bright and fresh.

PAPER

When doing plein air work, most artists gravitate toward an A5 sketchbook or smaller watercolor blocks while the half-sheets and full-sheets are typically kept aside for studio work. Trying out a smaller size of paper when working at home will help to bring that “plein air” feel into your work. It will automatically require you to cut out a lot of clutter from your work, leaving only the essentials to deal with—the main substance of your painting.

Bright Ideas

Plein Air-Like Sketches

Plein air-like sketches are those that capture the essentials of a subject quickly but are created indoors. Such fast and impressionistic sketches will always have their own charm and identity. None of the examples shown here, along with source photography, took more than 30 minutes to complete.

LEFT TO RIGHT Lunchtime, 5x8

Mountain Hut, 8x10

Narrow Street, 8x5

SPACE

Most artists have a place to paint at home—a “favorite corner.” Be it the studio overlooking the garden or that quiet niche under the staircase—it’s the place where you feel your creativity starts flowing. Now let’s challenge that concept. While painting outside, you don’t mind sitting on the pavement or propping your easel on a light post. Try this at home, too—move out of that cozy corner and find a different place to paint. In doing so, change your usual painting posture, too. Those most comfortable painting while sitting should try a standing pose, or vice versa. And don’t use the easel; try something else to prop up that block or sketch pad. This whole exercise is a lot like braving the unknown; you’ll be forced to ignore the other elements and focus all of your energy and concentration on the job at hand—the watercolor. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the result.

SUBJECTS

Finally, try painting something you’re not familiar with. After all, while outdoors, you don’t always have an option of picking the perfect subject. So chuck that portrait in favor of a landscape, or ditch that marine scene for a fl oral. Th at carefully arranged still life can easily wait a day or two. Diversifying the subjects you paint will enrich your artistic vocabulary and boost your confi dence.

As with outdoor painting, there are potential subjects in every nook and corner of your home just waiting to be

Forgo your cozy corner at home and imagine you’re standing on a street corner or in an open fi eld. Make yourself uncomfortable. Try to make do with whatever you have available and focus only on the painting.

My limited toolkit: Ideally, you should be able to carry your entire toolkit in your hands and still be able to paint.

explored. And like painting en plein air, taking on a new challenge can help us hone our skills. So make the most of the next rainy day and try some indoor painting—the plein air way. WA Sagnik Biswas (paintpaperbrush.com) is almost entirely self-taught. Th e Mumbai artist’s style can be best described as representational, sometimes bordering on impressionism and sometimes borrowing from realistic abstraction. His paintings are like visual travelogues telling stories of the people and places he has been inspired to paint. Biswas’ work has been part of exhibitions with the National Watercolor Society and the Bombay Art Society, and his painting, Bell Tower, Dubrovnik, was published in Splash 20: Th e Best of Watercolor (North Light, 2019).

To some extent, it might seem that Nick Runge was fated to be an artist. Th e impulse runs rather heavily in the family gene pool. “I grew up in a creative family,” he says, speaking from his studio in Glendale, Calif., located just a short stroll from his apartment. “My dad is an artist and painter who taught college art for many years when I was growing up. My mom is a graphic designer, and my brother is also a painter. It’s kind of hard to escape that pull to art.”

Th roughout his upbringing and especially over the last 17 years, Runge’s exposure to the art world has been diverse, and his experiences occasionally formidable but ultimately fulfi lling. Th e path eventually led him to watercolor—a medium that challenges and satisfi es him—and to a style that suggests something that goes well beyond the brushstrokes.

FINDING HIS VOICE Runge grew up in Fort Collins, Colo., and, in 2003, he was prepared to follow in the footsteps of his creative parents. “I was going to go to college and pursue the same thing my parents did,” he says. All of that changed, however, when a working comic book writer moved to town and left his business card at a gallery where Runge was showing his art. “He was working in comics and was really famous,” Runge says. “I’d always read and loved comic books and wanted to be a comic book artist,” Runge says. “Th e writer was really blunt. He said things like, ‘Th is is how fast it has to be done; this is the level at which it has to be done. Do you want to try it out?’ And naively I was like, ‘Yes, of course!’ ”

Th e next fi ve years were a trial by fi re for Runge. He traveled to San Diego to attend Comic-Con, meeting other writers and artists, walking the fl oor and dropping off his portfolio at table after table. Th e hustle had him working consistently on projects, most of which were comic book covers rather than the inside panels. Th e work off ered Runge practical training in creating illustrations, building structure, meeting deadlines, satisfying clients and telling a story. “Th e thing about illustration that I still fi nd really fun and amazing is that you get to take someone’s idea and bring joy to it, and that’s where I got the joy, too,” he says.

At some point, though, the artist began to feel the gap between fulfi lling someone else’s creative vision and satisfying his own. “I wanted to have more of my own voice as an artist,” he says. It was about this time that Runge started talking to his family about the artists who inspired them. “It was BELOW LEFT kind of a rebirth,” he says, “talking to my Alive (watercolor on dad and my brother and my mom, and paper, 12x9) really thinking about what art means to me personally.” BELOW RIGHT Music (watercolor on paper, 10x8)

Th ese conversations opened the door to considering other forms of artistic expression, but it was Runge’s love of fi lm that ended up building the bridge to the next leg of his art journey. “With fi lm, it’s about telling a story,” he says. “But for the cinematographer, the focus is on the subtle color palettes and the subconscious. If you take a still frame of a movie, it might not tell you any story; you might just see it like a photograph.” In this way, Runge came to understand that his favorite fi lms were favorites not so much because of the overall story or plot line but because of individual scenes. “Th ere will be a moment in the fi lm that speaks to me so powerfully—one that, by itself, may have nothing to do with the larger story,” he explains. Th is insight redirected the artist’s creative interest from illustration toward more of a fi ne art sensibility.

WATERCOLOR HIS WAY Th e idea of the “momentary” is the conceptual driver in Runge’s watercolor portraits. Whereas his illustrations helped tell a complete story, his portrait work captures a single moment in time. Th ere’s an emotional quality that may grow out of something as simple as the way in which a shadow curves over a person’s nose or the place where the sitter’s eyes happen to land in the room. Th ese small, intimate scenes often inspire a more abstract response—and Runge isn’t inclined to put everything down on the paper as it is in reality. “If you know how to tell the whole story, then you also know how to leave bits of it out,” he says. “Th is is what I try to do with my portraits—paint something realistic by taking an abstract avenue to get there.” Th e artist’s time as as a comic book artist helped him master technical skills, which in turn has helped him know where to put his attention. “Sometimes I might focus on one part of the face and leave the rest out, but you have to know how to paint the whole face fi rst,” he says. “I brought those skills to my fi ne art.” “Being ‘experimental” isn’t something I really plan for; it happens quite spontaneously,” he says. “At fi rst, it may be a technical thing. I’ll think, ‘Okay, I have four hours to work on this.’ And that will determine whether I’m going to do more of a fi nished look or an unfi nished look. From there, the fi rst four or fi ve brushstrokes will tell the artist whether he likes where the piece is heading. “If I do, maybe I’ll just do a couple more things to it, and that’s fi ne,” he says. Runge is quick to add that this approach doesn’t always end in success. “I’ve certainly made the mistake of continuing a painting and then, because I took pictures of it along the way, being tortured by photos that show what it could have been if I had only stopped,” he says, laughing.

Watcher (watercolor on paper, 10x8)

No Fear Watercolor

Runge keeps his portrait work in the realm of representational; his paintings clearly bearing a likeness to an actual person. Nevertheless, he tries to avoid letting the work become overly detailed and labored. This leads to a fair amount of experimentation in his process. Sometimes it’s driven by something conceptual; other times it’s just pure improvisation. When you enter into a painting with an experimental mentality, it removes much of the fear, because the outcome is not the focus—the creative process is.

“Other times, you need to bring more finish to the work.” In other words, there’s always an element of risk. “Every day I feel like I’m walking a tightrope,” he says.

Runge says there’s a misunderstanding that a less-ismore approach to painting implies easier work. “But that,” he says, “is an illusion. The ability to complete a full idea in fewer brushstrokes takes years and years of practice, experience putting in tons of details and work in many different media.”

STARTING IN THE MIDDLE With watercolor, Runge blends traditional technique with his own process. To start, he typically uses cold-pressed paper that he doesn’t wet. “I like to have a combination of drybrush effects and texture right off the bat,” he says. “I do a tight pencil drawing on the dry paper, rendering the full face—the nose, mouth, eyes and the structure— but then, when I go to paint it, I try to focus on one element at a time, the eye, for example, or even just the cavity of the eye.”

Whereas most watercolorists work light to dark, Runge prefers to begin somewhere in the middle. “I’ll start with a medium tone, instead of working light to dark,” he says. “I’ll pick a medium-range tone, such as a scarlet red— something you might not typically use until later—and I’ll put it down as a little anchor point or a little dot or line, because I know I’m going to disturb that later. I then use that pigment as a point around which to spread a ghostly area of water.”

Runge began Faces in Time (watercolor on paper, 12x10), for example, not with a concept but as a pure experiment in mixing two faces. “What parts to leave out? What parts to render fully? Those questions stayed in my head during the entire painting process,” Runge says. “They were only answered by the mix of chance and choice with my colors and brushstrokes.”

Runge drew both faces completely, overlapping each other, in pencil. Then he picked a starting point and began to render. “Since I approached the painting as an experiment, I wasn’t worried about the subject matter representing anything,” he says. “I had no firm idea or narrative in mind, so the light didn’t have to make sense 100 percent. The shadows could be left open and the direction of light sources could collide. My goal with these kinds of experiments is to create something abstract, but with enough reality to feel grounded. Something that’s, hopefully, visually intriguing.”

LEFT

The Doctor

(watercolor on paper, 10x8)

OPPOSITE TOP

Flashback

(watercolor on paper, 10x8)

BELOW

The Road Back

(watercolor on paper, 9x12)

Runge attributes these deviations to his striving for personal voice and his love of experimentation. “My dad is a really good watercolor painter,” he says. “I think some of the techniques I used when I started I’d learned from him.” But several years ago, Runge realized he wanted to try something else. “I started taking an approach that was just the opposite, very simplifi ed and diff erent, because I really just wanted to have my own voice,” he says.

Th ere’s more risk to this way of working, and traditional painters will often question him, but Runge maintains that his approach is just another option. “It’s a bit like martial arts,” he says. “Once you’ve learned one of the basic forms, you can start learning a more technical or ‘crazy’ one—something that might be a little more dangerous.”

For many, experimenting with a medium that’s famously diffi cult to work with may seem daunting. Runge’s advice? “Fail, and then fail again. Continue to be afraid, but try it anyway,” he says. For beginners, it just takes getting past those fi rst few paintings. “When I started, I did three or four watercolor portraits in one day that I absolutely hated, and then the next day I tried again, thinking ‘Oh, this is not going to work at all.’ But it did work. It took the pressure away.”

For artists who’ve been painting in the medium longer, there’s a fear in taking risks, in trying something that may not succeed, but there’s a danger in holding on too tightly to what we know. “Don’t be afraid to get rid of stuff ,” Runge says. “I remember a time when I was young and I had these four or fi ve drawings. Th ey were the only drawings that I’d carry around. After a while, they became so precious that I became afraid to do another one. It’s getting rid of that precious quality that will actually make the work even better and, in the end, more precious.”

Michael Woodson is a freelance writer and editor in Cincinnati, Ohio, and works for the non-profi t organization the Blue Manatee Literacy Project. Visit him online at michaelwoodson.com.

Turn the page for a demo

Meet the Artist

Nick Runge was born in 1985 and grew up in Colorado surrounded by a creative family. After a decade of work as a full-time illustrator, the artist shifted focus to fine art, painting primarily portrait and figurative work in oil and watercolor. Runge, who describes his artistic style as “abstracted realism,” seeks to break down shapes while still expressing the beauty of the human form and shape. For more information about the artist and his workshop schedule, visit nickrungeart.com.

demo

Self-Portrait, Study

Nick Runge demonstrates his creative process, beginning with the initial pencil drawing and moving through each transparent layer of paint.

1 2

Step 1

To start, I establish the overall basic shapes of the head: an oval shape for the skull and a mask shape for the face. I draw and erase as I build a likeness from my reference. I spend the time to achieve a tight pencil drawing so that I have structure underneath the abstract washes of color to come.

Step 2

Next, I erase most of the pencil, leaving just a light hint of the lines. Then I start with a medium or dark tone of paint, usually scarlet red or burnt sienna. These areas are my guide for the level of darkness to which I’ll be building, so I don’t go overboard with the color washes too quickly. It provides a base for the middle values.

Step 3

I put down the first washes of color to define some of the areas of the face that I’ll be establishing in more detail. I don’t always “finish” a portrait—sometimes leaving out the eyes or mouth—but for this piece, I’m keeping the level of detail fairly even across the face.

Step 4

I start to define the hairline and larger shapes of the head, which helps me determine how I’ll approach the background. Leaving the background blank can enhance the feeling of dimensionality, as if the head is fl oating in space. Although adding a dark background can sometimes flatten the portrait, in this case, I felt that some background shapes would actually help give the portrait some “pop.”

Final Step

I finished Self Portrait, Study (12x9) by adding larger washes over all of the underlying color areas to harmonize the hues and make the lighting seem more believable. This adds to the lifelike appearance while still retaining an abstract quality in the rendering. WA

Artist’s Toolkit

SURFACE

Arches 140-lb. cold-pressed paper

PAINTS

• Daniel Smith: deep scarlet,

Prussian blue, opera pink, cerulean blue chromium, permanent orange and pyrrole red • Winsor & Newton: burnt sienna and yellow ochre

BRUSHES

• Trekell Protégé synthetic No. 4 round for precision and details;

No. 14 round and ¾ -inch wash

MASTER of the MOMENT

INSPIRED BY THE PICTURESQUE SCENERY OF HIS OWN HOME TOWN, MERRILL A. BAILEY PAINTED WATERCOLORS THAT CAPTURED THE BEAUTY AND CHARM OF MID-CENTURY AMERICA— AND THE ATTENTION OF NEW YORK CITY ART DEALERS.

By Daniel K. Tennant

Wispy tree branches featuring drybrushed foliage, like those in Below the Dam (watercolor on paper, 12x24), were a signature Bailey touch. Note how the trees on the right are semi-transparent.

MERRILL A. BAILEY (1909–1981) is an example of a highly regarded artist who achieved a large degree of success in his lifetime, but whom you’ve probably never heard of. As a painter who not only left a legacy of hundreds of works of art, but also a lot of practical advice about painting in watercolor, it’s time to raise the artist’s profi le.

EARLY SUCCESS Bailey was born in 1909 in Cazenovia, New York, a picturesque village where—with the exception of a few years in college—he lived and painted his entire life. As far back as he could remember, Bailey loved to paint. As a teenager, he was the captain of his school’s baseball, football and basketball teams. Although he was off ered a baseball scholarship, he turned it down, choosing instead to study art at Pratt Institute and later at Syracuse University.

After graduating, Bailey took a position as an art instructor at a junior college, launching a 38-year-long career teaching art. During all those years, the artist was honing his skills. His big break came in 1936 when New York art dealer Robert Macbeth saw his watercolors at a regional art show in Syracuse and invited Bailey, only 27 years old, to join the stable of artists at the prestigious Macbeth Gallery on East 57th Street in New York City. Among the other artists showing at the gallery was a 20-year-old prodigy by the name of Andrew Wyeth.

Norman Kent, an editor of the magazine, American Artist, wrote of Bailey in 1941: “For a young painter, Merrill Bailey has achieved a brilliant beginning to a career that has brought his work to the attention and marked appreciation of critics, collectors and museums throughout the country.”

Bailey went on to exhibit at venues such as the Th e Metropolitan Museum of Art, Toledo Museum of Art, the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute,

ABOVE

The Day Before Christmas

(watercolor on paper, 16x20), painted in 1943, features the main street in Cazenovia, New York. Bailey’s wet-on-wet technique adds to the scene’s charm.

LEFT Merrill A. Bailey in 1964 at the age of 55.

Brooklyn Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1942 he was honored with active membership in the American Watercolor Society, a distinction that meant enough to him that he arranged for the initials “AWS” to be inscribed on his headstone. In 1950 he was commissioned to paint the cover for the March issue of Reader’s Digest, where his work was seen by millions.

Sadly, when the Macbeth Gallery closed, in 1953, it was the end of an era for the artist, who wasn’t able to secure gallery representation in New York City again. RECORDING IDEAS Early on, Bailey took an original approach to his art-making. He kept a supply of small pieces of tagboard cut to the size of postcards and used them to sketch out ideas. He kept hundreds of them on fi le as starters for potential paintings. “Th e inspiration for a sketch may have come months previously, at which time a quick shorthand in pencil recorded the mood essentials,

Bailey used small pieces of tagboard to paint “postcard sketches,” which measured 3x6 or 3½ x6½ . He drew these to remember locations that interested him and had hundreds of them on fi le.

The trees in Holiday Sport (watercolor on paper, the time of day, lighting and 16x20) act as a device, color,” Bailey said. moving the viewer’s eye throughout the painting’s Th e artist also used a circular design. When 6x9-inch watercolor sketchbook people were featured in a to record ideas. Often he’d scene, Bailey never sketch his subject in pencil and obsessed over the fi gures. on the next page paint a watercolor study to remember the colors. He enjoyed slow, meandering drives around the countryside to look for scenes to paint, especially during the winter, when he could study the structure of trees. He loved the contrast of snow against the woods and buildings—themes that regularly appear in his work.

Anna Wetherhill Olmstead, a director of the Syracuse Museum of Art, which has since become the Everson Museum of Art, said of his winter scenes: “One is impressed by the singleness of purpose and highly personal style of painting evinced by this talented young artist. ...Winter months spent in the beautiful Cazenovia countryside account for the artist’s favorite snow scenes, which he paints with a sensitive and poetic brush, but with never a trace of mawkishness or sentimentality.”

CAPTURING THE MOMENT Bailey was always after the fl eeting impression—the moment—and was never a slave to detail. Whenever

Merrill A. Bailey On Art and Art-Making

“Some of my best watercolors have been my most rapid. Most of my paintings are completed in 30 to 60 minutes.”

“Impressions carried in the mind for a long time have a wonderful way of eliminating the unessential.”

“To accomplish a work of art is of course to be inspired above and beyond any thought of technique. It just happens in the excitement of the moment and, when you fi nish, if it’s successful, you wonder how you did it.”

“I don’t believe there’s any place in the painting field where the mind has to be keener, the hand more skilled and the attack more forceful than in the first 20 minutes of a transparent watercolor. It’s during this time that important hard and soft edges are saved and lost.”

“Look at your work upside down; it reveals it in a new way.”

Bailey sketched this quaint 6x9-inch farm scene and then painted a color study on the next page. The artist decided to lessen the importance of the distant road by placing a tree over it. In the pencil sketch, the tree is farther to the right.

possible, he used the largest brush he could to cover the paper quickly. He found it essential to work fast in order to capture the ever-changing light. In this way, he used an economy of brushstrokes to create the impression of detail.

The artist was particularly successful in capturing the feeling of wind in his paintings. One of his hallmark techniques was to paint spare foliage on winter trees, using a drybrush technique, which added a sense of movement. He kept himself open to the happy accident—not really knowing what would happen on the paper until he took the leap and started to paint. His work was interpretive and his painting style continued to get looser as he matured.

Although Bailey did some oil paintings in the early 1940s that were well received, he never felt comfortable with the medium. With watercolor, his painting skills were on full display. Not surprisingly, he found inspiration in the work of other watermedia artists, such as Winslow Homer (1836–1910), Charles Burchfield (1893–1967) and Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009).

PAINTING ON LOCATION Bailey would return to locations that caught his eye, sitting in his car’s backseat to paint on location. Like many plein air enthusiasts, he maintained that photographs couldn’t replace real life observation for capturing the essence of a subject.

In his quick 6x9-inch watercolor sketches (this one done in the 1940s), Bailey tried not to get bogged down with, as he called it, the “unessential information.”

His setup included an original design: a wooden board that attached to the front seat of the car and had one leg on the back to steady it. Th e board featured a well for his water container, and he placed his brushes on a towel—all of which provided him the freedom to move about. A lit pipe and thermos of coff ee were constant companions when he painted in the winter months. During especially bitter days, he’d heat up a soapstone, wrap it in layers of newspaper and sit on it while painting. Bailey said it worked as well as the car’s heater but didn’t steam up the windows.

Th e artist frequently painted on half sheets of watercolor paper and maintained that many large-scale watercolors lacked the quality they might have had if contained in a more moderate size.

Many times, Bailey wouldn’t fi nish a painting on location. In these cases, he’d use his color notes and sketches to fi nish the work in the comfort of his studio, which was located in an old railroad-station building attached to his house.

Bailey would create a delicate pencil study and follow it up with a watercolor study in a 6x9-inch sketchbook. He worked out both composition and colors this way before painting a larger work. Toolkit

PAPER:

• Arches 140- and 300-lb. papers • Whatman 15x22-inch pads of 120lb. paper • Bailey preferred a cold-pressed watercolor paper. When dragging a semi-dry brush across the surface, only the high points of the paper’s texture receive paint. This drybrush technique, part of the artist’s signature style, is especially apparent in the foliage on his winter trees.

PALETTE:

Winsor & Newton: • Winsor green • Winsor blue • cobalt blue • cadmium yellow • cadmium lemon • cadmium yellow medium • cadmium yellow light • yellow ochre • cadmium orange • cadmium red light • cadmium red medium • alizarin crimson • Van Dyck brown • Hooker’s green dark • phthalocyanine blue • phthalocyanine green • burnt sienna • burnt umber • Payne’s gray • ivory black

BRUSHES:

• Winsor & Newton’s Series 7 • large squirrel-hair brush • oil bristle brushes • ¾ - and 2-inch flat-edged lacquer brushes

MISCELLANEOUS:

• sponges • razor blades • scrub brushes • masking tape • Millard Sheets enamel tray palette.

Bailey said he never washed it clean as some of the richest colors were from years of mixing on it.

He squirted out paint and, when it dried, would re-activate it with water. This kept him from having to stop painting in order to remove the caps of paint tubes when every second mattered in

“the heat of battle.”