Planning a watercolor, part 5: Am I working with the medium’s natural tendencies?
Save yourself some headaches by choosing subjects and creating designs that work with the medium.
How Do I Find Time to Paint?
My experience and thoughts about how to find time to paint.
How to Revive Dried-Up Watercolor Paint
How to revive those rock-hard tubes or the crumbly paint in that palette you haven’t used in a while.
Intuitive Painting—Building in a Starting Structure
Starting with a blank sheet of paper and just doing whatever “feels right” is way too little structure for most of us. This video gives you a step-by-step starting structure that you can improvise on top of to create a dragonfly of your own style.
Intuitive Painting, part 2—Managing the Voices in Your Head
It sounds simple to simply keep listening for the little voice of intuition, but which one? Many of us have many internal impulses warring within us. How do you know which to listen to?
Prevent buckling without stretching your paper
Working on paper that is saturated from the back is a method for preventing your paper from buckling while you work that does not involve stretching it.
Sneaking Up on a Painting
Making small adjustments can help you paint more personally meaningful paintings based on photos. (Or, what happened when I tried to execute the plan we created for the boat on the river.)
Intuitive Painting, part 1—Getting Started With Intuitive Painting
If you want to paint more intuitively, how do you decide how to begin a painting, or what to do next? How do you know when you’re done? Here are a couple of activities to start exploring pieces of a system or structure to guide creative choices when you’re painting intuitively.
Creative Style vs. Creative Voice
It can be helpful to think about style and voice as two pieces of your “creative identity” that come together to create the overall effect you want your paintings to have.
Planning a Watercolor, Part 4: Adding an Element from Another Reference
How to add an element to your painting plan when it’s not in your reference photo.
Planning a Watercolor, Part 3: Making Basic Edits to Your Reference Photos
Making easy, small changes to your reference photo can make your painting more interesting and unique (and often, easier to paint, too!)
A sketchbook for journaling + drawing that can actually take light washes
Some journals that are lovely to write in and really can take a light wash nicely—Zen Art.