Three Simple Strategies for Designing Your Own Watercolors
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.
Planning Your Own Watercolors
Generating and refining a concept for a painting, tools and strategies for design, planning and evaluating work-in-progress.
Holiday Postcard Plan-Along
One approach to designing and planning a painting of your own, using a holiday postcard as an example. Come plan along with me!
How & Why to Keep a Studio Notebook
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.
Exercise, Exploration, Experiment or Artwork?
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.
Lessons from Life on Planning Watercolors
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.
The “Other How-To”
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?
How I Use the Sketchbook Pro App to Plan Paintings or Changes to Paintings
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.
My Cure for Winter Blues
Wild and garish? Sure, but I can always paint over it (or parts of it) later. For now, it has the same effect on me as opening a brand-new box of 64 Crayolas. Just what I needed to get me past the “winter blues”!
Why Paint?
Considering why you are painting, in general or this particular painting, can help you create work with more impact and get more enjoyment and satisfaction out of the process.
Mining for Gems
When the Big Pile of Nope in your studio gets too big and discouraging, it’s time to go mining!
Don’t Let Your Inner Critic Be Lazy
Make your inner critic work for you, instead of against you, by challenging lazy thinking and asking the right questions.
Painless Watercolor Planning, Part 2: Choose & Refine Your Painting Concept
This article is the fifth in a series about creating paintings with more emotion, power and personal meaning. Here are links to the first four: Is My Painting Done? Are You a “Photocopier”? There’s a Better Way The Lazy Way to Build Painting Confidence Painless Watercolor Planning, Part 1: Exploratory Drawing I’ve broken up my…