Mining for Gems
When the Big Pile of Nope in your studio gets too big and discouraging, it’s time to go mining!
Planning Your Own Watercolors
Generating and refining a concept for a painting, tools and strategies for design, planning and evaluating work-in-progress.
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…
Painless Planning for Watercolor, Part 1: Exploratory Drawing
This article is the fourth in a series about creating paintings with more emotion, power and personal meaning. Here are links to the first three: Is My Painting Done? Are You a “Photocopier”? There’s a Better Way The Lazy Way to Build Painting Confidence I know that taking the time to do some planning would…
The Lazy Way to Build Painting Confidence
This article is the third in a series. The preceding articles are: Is My Painting Done? Are You a “Photocopier”? There’s a Better Way In response to the last article, a reader made a couple of excellent points about why it’s sometimes difficult to deviate from a reference photo: lack of confidence, and the planning…
Are You a “Photocopier”? There’s a Better Way
This article is the second in a series. To read the first article, “Is My Painting Done?”, click here. In the next few articles in this series, I’ll introduce some ideas you can use to help you plan paintings that are more expressive, powerful and meaningful to you. What do I mean by being a…
Is My Painting Done?
This article is the first of a series on creating more powerful, personal and expressive paintings. When I teach watercolor classes or workshops, there is often a moment where a student comes up to me, thrusts a painting into my face and demands: Tell me what’s wrong with it. What do I need to fix?…
Jul 2019: Finding Focus When Working on Location
Some strategies I use to manage the overwhelming amount of information when painting on location, so sketching enhances my enjoyment, instead of raising my stress level. And so I have a better chance of coming back with photos and sketches that I can actually use to create satisfying, personally meaningful paintings.
Loosen Up Your Watercolor Painting—Here’s an Exercise to Try
Every time I lead a class or workshop, more than half of the participants mention the goal of “loosening up”. Here’s a skill-building exercise to help you move in that direction.
Paint Shapes, Not “Things”
Want your paintings to look unified? It helps to combine “things” into larger shapes, and then use smaller shapes to (partially) separate them. Here’s an exercise to help you practice. First, set up a still life with a couple of simple objects. Avoid anything that has a lot of pattern, texture, reflections or complicated edges—you…
What Makes a Good Painting?
That pesky inner critic! I don’t know about you, but simply telling her to sit down and shut up doesn’t work for me. Oh, I can get her to leave me alone. It just doesn’t lead to paintings I’m happy with. I need my inner critic. We all need time to explore, experiment and follow…
Go (a Little) Wild!—How to Loosen Up (Just a Bit) in Watercolor
Are you a control freak when you make art? Or does your inner child go wild? Most of us want to make art that combines structure and spontenaity, but that’s not easy! In workshops and classes at all levels, when we go around the room and talk about what we want to get out of…