I reflected the other day on the useless, contradictory, or just wrong advice I'd been given over the years - eg, start with student quality paints until you're "used to" them, ie make things as difficult as possible for yourself... . And don't use carbon pencils, because they "flatter" your technique - so presumably, use the horrible, shiny, smudgy soft graphite pencils which were all that used to be available, because they take your technique into a corner, duff it up, and then smother it.... What surprised me, on reflection, was that much of the rotten advice came from very good artists - makes you wonder if they were trying to sabotage any competition before it had a chance to develop. Here is a sample, attributed where I can remember who said it. Adrian Hill (once a famous "tv artist"): never use more than one blue in a sky - a rule I broke only today - here, you know what he meant; laying down Prussian Blue, for example, then adding a layer of cerulean straight beneath it, is going to look discordant; but mixing and merging the two can certainly work. R O Dunlop, RA (a favourite source of strange advice): 1) never use a blue stronger than Cobalt in the sky; 2) Don't clean off the palette in oil painting (convenient advice, but, I think bad); and even, don't clean the dried out oil paint from your painting knife - let it build up into a "wodge", thus achieving flexibility at the tip: I can only imagine he used painting knives very different from today's, because leaving aside the sheer unpleasantness of handling such an implement, I fail to see the advantage of surrounding the thing with claggy oil paint. However: Dunlop was a great palette-knife painter - and I still think he's wrong. Then there is the painter on the US Handprint site, whose advice on paint is generally excellent, but has a real hatred for the Hake brush - he finds they shed like a dog, amongst other things. Well - buy a better Hake. And also the numerous painters who tell you not to "fiddle" - this is so common that it's accepted as Holy Writ; and again, you see what they mean.... especially in watercolour, getting immersed in detail can ruin a painting, kill it, fuss it to extinction. And yet ... that ever-resourceful tutor and artist Keith Fenwick adds a useful corrective; these "final touches", he says, can make a painting. And he's right - if what you're aiming for is a loose, impressionistic technique, like Alan Owen's in watercolour, or a free, blocky technique, like Rodrigo Costa's, in oil, then fiddling is the surest way to wreck your efforts. But perhaps you aren't aiming for that at all; perhaps you admire the work of both of those POL regulars, but want to paint something intricate and involved - if Richard Dadd, for example, hadn't "fiddled", his paintings wouldn't have worked.... did Constable not fiddle? Just look at his paintings of undergrowth, woods etc. But perhaps "fiddling" means adding unnecessary detail - adding detail because you really don't know what else to do in order to bring the painting to life. In which case, it's good advice after all - but I suspect it's led to the abandonment of a good many paintings that just haven't been finished, so on the whole, I'm with Keith.... Then there's the watercolour has got to be transparent school, who come over all peculiar and have to have a nice sit down if you use white; which doesn't stop them sloshing masking fluid all over their paintings as if it were going out of fashion (which I wish it would) or using cadmium colours and Naples Yellow, both of which are opaque, Naples Yellow actually containing a good proportion of white - yes, on the whole it's good advice; if you use body colour indiscriminately in watercolour, you get gouache, apart from anything else; but it gets pickled into dogma ... fostered by tutors of the "George ... George: don't do that..." persuasion. What, I wonder, is the worst advice you've been given - or the most misleading generalization you've ever read or heard?