Don’t ask “What do I need to fix?” about a painting. Here’s what to ask instead, and some tips for helping an unsatisfying painting undergo a creative metamorphosis.
Here’s an exercise to help you stimulate your creativity, loosen up or find your own style.
Make your own symmetrical circular designs for mandalas or other circular paintings. All you need are a plate and a piece of office paper! This video shows you how to do it.
An exercise for exploring (and collecting) things you enjoy doing (not just seeing), as a way to expand and explore your personal style.
In this video, look over my shoulder and watch as one of my paintings evolves from initial concept sketch to the final version.
A “default” strategy for deciding on the painting sequence for a watercolor. We’ll see how it was used for two earlier examples and then apply it to the designs from our last video.
3 simple strategies you can use to start designing simple paintings of your own, even if you just picked up a brush for the first time today.
Expand your sketchbook practice beyond just making sketches. Your studio notebook is a place to brainstorm, explore, learn and develop your own creative style. Here are some ideas for getting started using a studio notebook to support all aspects of your creative development.
In planning an artwork, you often need to conduct related exercises, explorations and experiments. But it’s usually a bad idea to let them slowly morph into unplanned attempts at the artwork.
Planning an entire meal involves more than just knowing cooking techniques. Chances are, you’re all quite familiar with this sort of planning, so let’s see how it connects with planning watercolors.
Like most people, I did some rapid “pivoting” (otherwise known as “flailing”) during 2020. It’s time for me to get back to the core mission of my teaching: to help you be more successful using watercolor as an artist, that is, to use watercolor to explore your own thoughts, ideas and emotions, record your responses to the world, share your experiences with others, or express something personally meaningful. That means learning to plan your own paintings, but how?
Sketchbook Pro is a great tool for quickly planning changes to a painting in progress, and it’s free. This video introduces the small set of features I use in my planning process, so you can get started quickly without having to go through a lot of features you don’t need.
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