News — paint

I talk a lot here on my blog and Instagram about how I prefer to paint without a brush. In particular, I do a lot of painting with a palette knife. But I realised recently that I probably assume people know what the heck I'm talking about but they actually don't! Just because I do this multiple times a week doesn't mean you know what it is--and I'm bad about documenting my process after all!So I took a short video of me painting a very basic watercolor palette knife landscape and thought it might help to see the process in...

I am now 8 days through the 100 Days Project. This is a hashtag & trend I see going around social media every year--the goal is to do a small creative activity for 100 days. Ideally it would be an unbroken stretch, but life happens, so just keep going. Even though I have really disliked painting every day when I participate in July's World Watercolor Month, for some reason this had been calling to me. The project is an official thing, with a website and community and everything, and it has an official start date at the end of January. But I...

Welcome to the Late Blooming Watercolors Late Holiday Gift Guide! Christmas is just over a week away, so this gift guide will only be useful if you need to do some last minute shopping for the budding watercolorist in your life. 1. Winsor & Newton Cotman Watercolor Sketcher's Pocket Box Set This is one of the first sets of decent watercolor paint I purchased, and it's still my number 1 recommendation for those getting started with watercolor. It's considered "student" grade paint, but it's still a huge step up from the Crayola watercolors many of us used as children. It comes with a...

Do you struggle with muddy watercolors? Do you want to get brighter mixes? Understanding color bias was a major step towards solving these issues for me. As a self taught watercolor artist, I spend a ton of time on blogs and YouTube. There is so! Much! Info! on any topic you can imagine on the internet. I spent a ton of time researching watercolor supplies after the free class I took at the library. I'm such a nerd--and I secretly hoped if I researched enough and bought the exactly right supplies I would have an edge over every other beginner. Silly right?...

White watercolor paint is a freaking waste of time and space. I have some. I don't use it. Why? It doesn't work! In other painting mediums, white is used to add or restore highlights. But watercolor is transparent, so trying to put white watercolor over darker colors simply doesn't do much! You can still see the layers underneath! Thus: pointless. If you want to add opaque white as a finishing touch, you gotta go with gouache or acrylic. Or--as many watercolor snobs will tell you--you gotta keep the white of the paper for your whites. Now I'm not a tyrant--I...