News — supplies

With my abstract art style, I tend to go through a lot of paper. It's easy to go through 6 or 8 pieces of 5x7 paper in a warm up session for me. To keep my costs down, I'm frequently buying full sheets and tearing them down to smaller sizes, because precut and blocks of paper tend to be a bit pricier per inch than full sheets. (Yes I'm that nerd and I really did the math once! Don't tell my mother or my former math teachers either.) I'm gonna harp on this again: paper is suuuuuuper important in watercolor....

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...

It was a forehead smacking moment. It took me much longer than I really want to admit in this eternal forum of public-facing internet to realize that the letters in pigment names stood for colors. PB meant "Pigment Blue," PR was "Pigment Red," and so on. But that slow dawning of realization also meant that I will never, ever forget what those letters on my tubes of watercolor paint mean. All watercolor paint is made from powdered pigment, a binder (typically gum arabic), additives and/or preservatives, and water. You can buy the individual parts and mix your own watercolor paint if you...

If you're tired of painting on paper, watercolor ground is for you! I tried watercolor ground for the first time and filmed it for my little baby YouTube channel. It took a lot more time to prepare since you have to paint it on your surface and let it dry a few times before you can even paint on it. It behaves a lot differently that watercolor paper, but that also means there were unusual effects. It was exciting to go through the process and I totally nerded out while watching the actual paint move on the ground. Get notified...

Ultramarine Blue is in my top 10, probably top 5, favorite watercolor pigments. It's a single pigment color with awesome granulation, and I love to use it with a burnt orange or raw sienna to make interesting neutrals. It's a very "standard" color--it came with all the initial sets of paint I bought when I was starting my watercolor journey in earnest: the Winsor & Newton Cotman palette, the Holbein set, and the Sennelier. I also have it from Daniel Smith and Shinhan. In my handmade watercolor sketchbook, I have a few pages of paint comparisons since I have duplicates of many...