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 pre-mixed...

Someone asked me recently during a Q&A session, "What does it mean to express yourself through art and how do we figure out what we want to express?"

If you’ve ever taken a “Sip and Paint” class, you have seen how each person in the class creates a different painting even though everyone starts wit...

There's a lot of discussion out there about Oils vs Acrylics. Oils have been used for 600 years or more making Acrylic paints seem like a baby by comparison. Acrylic artists are vastly outnumbered by oil artists. Just head to any painting event and take a look around - we're outnumbered 10 to 1! I'm...

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 bright, ...

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 put i...

Reference photos are a seriously underrated aspect of painting. I often get asked the questions "What makes a good reference photo?"

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 ar...

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

Before I answer that question, let me take a step back. Often times artists who are just getting started with Acrylics ask me 'How do you keep your paint wet? My Acrylics dry out so easily!' It's a fabulous...

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 same ...

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 scratchy,...

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 bit more here.

M...