ARTICLES

It can be so overwhelming to know what colors to purchase. There are so many. You can use a very limited palette using one of each of the primaries (plus black and white). But you may want to add to that palette instead of mixing all your colors. Sometimes it's easier when colors have been...

One of our members asked, "What does it mean to express yourself through painting and how do we figure out what we want to express?"

If you’ve ever taken a “Sip and Paint” class (or my version which I call “Coffee and Canvas”) you have seen how each person in the...

One of our members visited some galleries and found that there were not many acrylic paintings.  One of the gallery owners told him that acrylics are a medium for beginner painters. He asked me, "Why are there so few acrylic painters represented in galleries?" He also asked, "Do oil...

One of our Acrylic University members asked, "What kind of light bulb do you use in your studio? I've noticed that the lighting in my paint area is not correct and I have been reading about lumens and light appearance. Do you take these into consideration?"

If the light on my canvas is too...

There's a couple of different ways you can use the paintbox. Dianna Shyne, a great acrylic artist, actually just scoops out piles into her palette from the paintbox with a palette knife. She's not really dipping her brush into her paintbox. So you could scoop paint out with a palette knife and...

Whenever I get asked this question by students I always answer, "It comes down to design." 

When I'm looking at a photograph there are a few design elements that are pretty well known. There's the design element like an "S." There is one large object on one side and a small object on...

"I reuse my paper quite a bit and how do you make sure it is clean enough to reuse?"

I can substitute different things for the sponge but I have never substituted anything for the paper. I have tried a few different things. I tried parchment paper but it didn’t work. I do reuse my paper...

I'm not a fan of working on one painting for a really, really long time. If you can start and finish five smaller paintings rather than one bigger, longer painting, you're going to learn more.

As far as doing a scene over and over again, I know that there are people like Monet who painted the...

There are different ways to use this technique but one way is to wait until the paint on your canvas is dry, put wet paint on your brush, and drag it, leaving a broken line. You can see it in this painting (above) around the leaf shapes. You can see places where the brush marks are kind of...

In our recent VLOG on YouTube you can see how I did a glaze over a painting and used Golden fluid acrylics (jump ahead to 5 minutes and 24 seconds to see how I do this) which is a great product to do glazes. Now this wasn't a step by step tutorial, so I thought I'd explain a little...