Latest Posts
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Brand Overview: Daniel Smith
Brand Overview is a series where multiple posters give their opinions on a brand. Previously, we did Schmincke Horadam. Daniel Smith is a professional grade watercolor manufacturer from the United States. Originally founded as an art supply store in 1976 by the printmaker Dan Smith, they are now a manufacturer of watercolor, gouache, and oil…
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Keeping sky gradients straight behind mountains
When I’m painting a sunset/sunrise sky with a mountain, I have a tendency to make the sky gradients parallel the mountain ridge, even though that makes no sense. When you negative-paint mountains, it’s just a lot easier to pull the paint along the edge of the mountain than create a straight line independent of the…
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Sarah Burns’ Glazing vs Mixing Charts
Since I’ve been doing a deep dive on glazing through my explorations of Jeanne Dobie’s Making Color Sing chapters on glazing (10, 11) and Don Rankin’s Mastering Glazing Techniques (parts 1, 2, 3), I was curious about other artists’ perspectives on glazed vs mixed colors. I found this 2020 post & video by Sarah Burns…
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March Madness Week 2 Update!
On Discord we’re doing a bracket where we choose the ultimate favorite pigment. Last week, we blasted through the first 15 polls. This week we finished up round 1: between last week and this week, we’ve now voted on all 50 paints that I entered into the bracket and narrowed it down to 25.
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Brand Overview: Schmincke Horadam
Welcome to a new series! In Brand Overview, multiple contributors will provide their opinions and favorite colors from a watercolor manufacturer. Schmincke Horadam is a professional watercolor brand manufactured in Germany. They offer 139 watercolors, and additional 50 colors in their supergranulating range. On a regular basis they have limited edition colors. Their watercolors use…
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Multilayered Vision: Making Color Sing, Chapter 12
I’m working my way through Jeanne Dobie’s Making Color Sing. For our third straight chapter on glazing, Dobie talks through a complex example of putting together a scene in the glazing method and offers some other glazing ideas.
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Winter Palette 2026
Ahh, it’s already March! I have to post my latest Winter Palette before it’s irrelevant. I’ve starred the most important colors. Top row: Bottom row: Comparison to other palettes I keep feeling like my palettes are converging and getting more and more similar! This is pretty different from my last winter palette, but it’s quite…
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March Madness Week 1 Update!
This month over on Discord, we’re doing a pigment bracket to decide our favorite watercolor pigments. I included 50 entrants, chosen from Bruce MacEvoy’s Handprint Top 40 but with a few extras added. We’re just over halfway through round one, so we know at least one of the contenders that will go into each round…
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Color Spotlight: Quinacridone Pyrrolidone (PR N/A)
This quinacridone/pyrrol combo pigment is generally suggested as an alternative to genuine Alizarin Crimson. I have now tried this pigment individually as WN Permanent Carmine; it is also said to be present in WN Permanent Alizarin Crimson, though it is unlisted. (I believe it: it looks very similar.) Pigment stats for Quinacridone Pyrrolidone (PR N/A)…
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#OneWeek100People2026
I wanted to draw everyone’s attention to a fun annual challenge with very simple “rules”: draw 100 people between March 9th and March 13th. Any medium, any size, any source (life, reference, imagination), any level of complexity, with the focus being on quantity, not quality.
