Filling the Holes of My Life...

How many of you have experienced a puncture in a tube of oil paint? 

 You know, when despite all your precautions, one corner of a tube pokes a hole into the body of another so the next time you pick it up things get messy.

I travel a lot with paint. I drive, train, fly, and yes, now even take ferries across expansive bodies of water with large and small tubes of paint. Normally I pack everything so carefully that punctures don't happen to me. Well, at least, not as often as they should.

But halfway through my last trip to Croatia I opened up my paint box and grabbed a big ol' 150 ml tube of white and started squeezing...and immediately felt my palm filling up with a big ol' pile of paint. 

Eeeeewwww!...

First I wondered what I should do. Then I began rummaging around in my backpack. I found a scrap of t-shirt I had been using as a rag and wrapped it around the leak and spent the rest of the trip gently squeezing out color as needed, consistently applying pressure right above the hole. A few days later I after I got home I pulled out the paint box to start prepping for yet another trip. To my surprise I found the paint between the cloth and tube had dried, sealing the leak like a patch on rubber bicycle tube.

How cool is that?

I don't think I would risk flying with a patched tube due to the unpressurized baggage area of a plane, but I will be happy to use the rest of this paint in the comfort of my studio. I'll buy a replacement tube for my next flight in November to Scottsdale. 

And, in the interim, I'll start applying this other nifty trick I just figured out.

Two or three layers of duct tape – with excess material to blunt those dang corners...

TJK