My girlfriend is a painter, and from the amount of times she washes her brushes in the sink over the plates, I'm sure I've got a nice supply of cadmium stored in my fat cells. And that's just the cadmium red. I don't want to know what's in the phthalo blue (although I just looked it up for the spelling and found out it's short for phthalocyanine, and from the sound of that, I don't want to find out).

So, the gf is a mad scientist, alchemist, or both?

Spike, sounds like she's using acrylic paint - it's relatively harmless.

She's the alchemist, I'm the mad scientist. Acrylic or not, cadmium is poison. And no, she paints mostly in oils.

The old printmaking program has a couple ancient cans of cadmium red ink. The kind that was made with the real stuff. The safer replacements really don't quite match it, so sometimes, if you want the color to be *perfect*, you gotta haul the can out of the very back of the ink-case, make your peace with the potential for serious illness resulting from the exposure, and crack it.

Of course, the amount of it in the ink is small, and while very dangerous, is still far less than the amounts of other similarly-toxic things, like acetone, that you can also be exposed to exposed to in the course of prepping, printing, and cleaning up (My mentor, a lifelong printmaker, died of terminal cancer. His body was riddled with it. Before he became too sick to continue, he and several other local artists and teachers started looking into modifying the printshop, trying to come up with safer, more environmentally sound alternatives [your traditional and art- printers will have multiple barrels for containing various kinds of print-waste, which must be specially disposed of] for the various inks, solvents, and chemicals. The printmaker's environment can be just that fucking bad.).

I use only Bat's Blood for my red ink purposes.

Hey, at least your girlfriend's not painting with real Vermilion red.

Notice she *is* waving around her iPhone...

"If you've got kids who like Shr...er, McDonalds..."