I don’t know why I can’t seem to find ready made acrylic glazes for sale in Milan. It’s a mystery. Our Milanese home is literally surrounded by art shops because we are next door to an art school (convenient, huh?). And they are all excellently stocked with a fabulous selection of supplies—great papers, lovely Maimeri colours, all sorts of brushes, tools and implements. But glazes? Nope.

This became a pressing problem at the tail end of last week when I started working on a collage piece celebrating a new birth in the family (truth be told, the baby is already five months old, but I am getting to see him for the first time next weekend, so it almost feels like he is newborn to me). I really, really wanted to incorporate some special ephemera, but have them show clearly through the paint. How to do it with no glaze?

At first I thought I’d use washes. I diluted the baby blue and pastel greens I wanted to use with water. The images showed through all right, but I didn’t like the dull, flat look the wash created. I banged my head against the wall for a day, then had an Ah-ha! moment on Friday night.

It happened at three o’clock in the morning, after my daughter—who is nearly a year old, but still thinks she is a newborn when it comes to night time feeding—had woken me up for the umpteenth time.  I was tossing and turning trying to persuade sleep to come back to me, when I thought: how about mixing a tiny bit of paint with plenty of acrylic binder (which they sell by the bucketful in Milan)?

And so I did. I experimented a bit throughout the weekend, varying the amount of paint and medium I used…and you know what? It worked! Even better, because I was mixing it myself, I could adjust the shine and transparency to the different effects I wanted to achieve.

For the baby piece, I settled for a teaspoonful of binder for every small blob of paint because I wanted a highly transparent, really shiny result that would match the baby’s glossy portrait. But I also worked out some other options that I plan to use in the future.

So I am now wondering whether this is why they don’t sell ready made glazes in Milan. Do Milanese artists always mix their own?