Latest Posts
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Plein Air Sketching in Winter and Cold Weather
Do you think it’s too cold outside to sketch when the temperatures are low? In Germany we say: there is no bad weather, only bad clothes. And in our case – maybe bad art supplies too.Though I prefer warmer weather for plein air painting, I still want to paint on each of my vacations. Last…
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A Subtle Touch: Making Color Sing Chapter 27
I’m working my way through Jeanne Dobie’s Making Color Sing. Chapter 27 is all about midtones. If you make a 5-point value scale, with white on one and black on the other, the midtones are the shades of gray in the middle.
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Inktober 2026: How and why to do a big painting challenge
This is the fourth year I participated in one of the biggest art challenges world wide: Inktober. It aims at people who like to use ink. It takes place in October and gives a prompt list with a prompt for each day. I want to share some of my experiences with you, because such a…
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How to enhance simple paintings with fun colorful backgrounds
I love quick and simple painting sessions. Not that I don’t enjoy a complex challenge once in a while as well – but most of the time, life itself is complicated enough for me: a quick session of doing art in which I can complete a full painting in under an hour is what gives…
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Water Brush Comparison & Review
Water brushes are a convenient addition to a travel watercolor kit. Water brushes store water in the barrel, which can be released by squeezing. This means you can paint on location without needing a separate water cup. This is game-changing to me, transforming outdoor painting from finicky & difficult to quick & easy.
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Right-on-the-mark values: Making Color Sing, Chapter 26
I’m working my way through Making Color Sing by Jeanne Dobie. In chapter 26, Dobie stresses the importance of making a good value sketch/thumbnail as a foundation for a piece, and describes 5 common mistakes that arise from weak value structures.
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Winslow Homer’s Palette, Part 2: The Studio Tour!
When I visited the Winslow Homer exhibition at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston last December, I attempted to reconstruct Homer’s palette based on an artifact on display and an article discussing chromatography analysis of his paintings. Recently, I traveled to the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine, which offers seasonal tours of…
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People have argued about lightfastness for 120 years
Recently, for Reasons, I was on archive.org perusing a 1900-era monograph about watercolor with the catchy title A descriptive handbook of modern water-colour pigments : illustrated with seventy-two colour washes skilfully gradated by hand on Whatman’s drawing paper: with an introductory essay on the recent water-colour controversy, by John Scott Taylor. Wouldn’t you know it?…
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Baohong Masters Paper Review
I’ve had a sample pack of Baohong Masters paper on my to-review shelf for awhile, and of course, by the time I get around to it, they’ve jacked up their prices (at least in the U.S., likely due to tarriffs) and are no longer the great deal they used to be. Still, it’s worth checking…
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Sky yellows are warmer than I think.
I just did two versions of the same sky, and I thought the difference was instructive so I figured I’d share. Here’s the sky. This has that blue to yellow gradient that I like to practice! Here are the two versions I made. The two versions differ in two major ways: On the left, I…
