Latest Posts
-
Tiny National Parks with Kolbie Blume
It’s that time again! Kolbie Blume hosted a new Youtube challenge/free tutorial series last week: Tiny National Parks! And, of course, I painted along.
-
Color Spotlight: Ultramarine Pink (PR259)
A new rare pigment! This is a low-strength, granulating pink in the Ultramarine family. The color is slightly on the purple side, between pink and lilac.
-
Class Notes: Finding My Blue with Brooke Morales
I’m taking “Watercolor Windowscapes” with Brooke Morales, a 4-part workshop where Brooke teaches what she learned over nearly three years of daily sky windowscape practice. In week 1, our homework was to “find our blue” or match a blue color/mix to skies we observe.
-
Working Bigger
More or less since I started painting, I’ve worked at about a small paper size, typically about 5 by 7 inch (13 x 18 cm). Working bigger has always seemed intimidating, but recently, I decided I wanted to take on the challenge, and I’ve begun experimenting at 11 x 14 inch (28 x 36 cm)…
-
How I find colors on my palette without a map
You know by now that I change my palettes a lot. I’d die without moveable pans. Why so much change? Well… I do make swatch cards to see how a set of paints will look together (and post them here on the blog), but they’re ephemeral. I don’t make little laminated cards to fit into…
-
Monthly Retrospective: October 2025
Although I worked on another autumn palette, I did little outdoor painting (and not too much indoor, tbh). Between work, being sick, and general low energy, I had less bandwidth for sketching and painting than I did last year, when I was staying in the country for the whole month. Still, I did some painting…
-
Autumn Palette 2025
I enjoy assembling autumn palettes the most of any season. Here is the palette I put together for plein air and sketching this fall. As I write this, we’re already mostly over the foliage season, but there were two glorious weeks!
-
Artist Palette Profiles: Jean Haines
I’ve wanted to do a palette profile of Jean Haines ever since I first heard of her in the context of her love of Schmincke Transparent Orange, from Peter Ward’s blog. Haines is an expressive, emotional painter who bold splashes of color belie her ability to paint realistic flowers and people and landscapes seemingly spontaneously…
-
Mastering Glazing Techniques with Don Rankin, part 2
I previously covered the first chapter of Don Rankin’s Mastering Glazing Techniques in Watercolor (1986). This time, I’ll work my way through the chapter titled “Working Methods.”
-
Artist Palette Profiles: Don Rankin
Don Rankin (1944-2021) wrote Mastering Glazing Techniques in Watercolor (1986), a how-to focusing on building a painting in transparent layers, which I’m reading now (see my notes on chapter 1). In addition to that, Rankin was a watercolorist and art professor whose retrospective, Back Roads and Memories (2019), depicts everyday scenes in rural Alabama. Of…
