I'm learning a lot. I don't go into much (any) detail about the painting process itself. I'm happy being vague, because I don't generally include much description anyway, but I want to make sure the details I'm using are correct. I've gone with vague terms like "she prepared her paints" which a reader could imagine to be simply taking them out of a case, or an artist reader might imagine as thinning with linseed oil or whatever else she might do. I'm a bit of a cheater, because like @Jack Asher said, if I describe something in detail I want every little detail to be right, down to using real paint names. I generally let myself off the hook unless it's important to the plot to describe it.
@Jack Asher True, I understand a lot about painting in theory, in practice not so much. I work mainly with graphite and charcoal, and occasionally colored pencils or ink. I do prefer to use stiff bristle brushes coupled with blending stumps for better control while shading and 'texturing'. I use a 11x14 60lb. 100 sheet acid free pad for pretty much all my works, mainly due to the fact that they fit in my portfolio. I tried to teach myself water color and had a 9x12 20 sheet 110lb pad, but after learning that you have to stretch the paper and just how runny the paint is. I essentially went back to what I am more comfortable with. I can manage a little bit of stray charcoal dust. I think that it is great you can paint and I tip my hat to you for it.
Sure that might sound good to a novice, but to me I have no idea what that would mean. You don't just put every color you want to use immediately on the pallet, so she would start out with one color of paint. I imagine her arranging tubes of paint in front of her, which just seems banal. Also to answer a much earlier question, I would not move that painting to and from the house until it was done. There is no easy way to carry a wet canvas anywhere. Were it up to me, I would leave it at the clients house, somewhere where the dog hair wouldn't get on it, and come back to it every day. I wouldn't even take it home when it was finished, just tell them to hang it on the wall for a bit, and be back with a frame in a month or so.
Eh, that's okay, you could imagine what you like. She does things in quite a haphazard way and is easily distracted, so I doubt she'd have a very logical and efficient setting-up process.
Resurrecting this thread temporarily. Is there a convention to capitalise paint colours, like raw umber / Raw Umber?
