You Must Be An Artist If...

1. You were more concerned about the color of your car than the fuel consumption.
2. The highlights in your hair are from your palette and not Clairol.
3. You are having lunch with the girls and the fragrance you wear is eau d’linseed oil.
4. The only piece of new furniture you have in your home is a $2000 easel.
5. You butter your toast with your fingers, just to feel its texture.
6. You think about taking a picture to a show.
7. You talk about going to a show where the pictures don’t move.
8. You are over 50 and still have no health insurance.
9. Your family takes out a life insurance plan on you for less than $5000.
10. You know what shade of green the lichen on the trees is.
11. You can’t find a nice outfit for your date because everything has paint smears on.
12. Your date ends up with paint smears on her/him.
13. You’re late for the date because you suddenly knew exactly what that detail of your latest painting needed and just had to fix it while it was fresh in your mind.
14. You chose to buy that new Russian Sable Number Six Round instead of a Big Mac, a Large Fry, a Milkshake, Desert, and five gallons of gas.
15. Your favorite home repair store refuses to work with you to repaint your den, because you rename all of their paint swatches and you get upset that they don’t carry the exact nuance of raw umber you had in mind.
16. You purchase a ton of books, and most are blank inside.
17. When viewing a sunset, you think in terms of cadmium yellow (light hue), salmon and gold, a tinted teal mixed with gold for the water….”
18. Strangers save your ‘regular’ spot at the park, perfect for observing children and pigeons.
19. There are Prussian blue fingerprints on your phone.
20. You stay awake late at night wondering how to render on canvas the dimly lit shapes and the shadows in your room.
21. When you go out, you are always stopping and gazing at the world around you.
22. You travel far to sketch a place of scenic beauty.
23. You clean your brushes in your coffee.
24. You carry pencils instead of pens.
25. You have watercolor swatches on cardboard in your pocket.
26. You explain your deplorably bad housekeeping by saying, “it’s a work-in-progress…”
27. You do judge a book by its cover.
28. You watch the latest kids’ digital animation movies and drool over the effects as much as the story.
29. You bought paint instead of food!
30. You paint more than you talk.
31. You draw your letters instead of write them.
32. You like to get plastered and paint the town red.
33. You’re in love … with your studio.
34. You know that art does not match your sofa.
35. If dust bunnies are part of your mixed media.
36. You buy expensive brushes, and have nothing to do your hair with.
37. You get a feeling of calmness from holding and stroking the bristles of your clean paintbrushes.
38. When going on a quick errand in your painting cloths you’re finding people rave over the ‘fashion statement’ you didn’t even realize you were making.
39. You know the difference between beige, ecru, cream, off-white, and eggshell.
40. You know more than 28 colors.
41. You get excited about football season because it means your significant other will finally be sitting still on the sofa long enough for you to paint him.
42. At the gym you take note of the instense facial expressions of the heavy lifters.
43. You never look at a person’s face as a whole. You break it up into shadows and lines and shapes, and think how they would look on a canvas.
44. When others are needing to be with the in crowd, you feel lost in the crowd.
45. You long to be alone with your thoughts while others are lonely without much thought.

Some of these are gems. I want to know your favorites! Let me know, or discuss them over at our art forum.