Creating a Sense of Depth and Believable Shadows
Creating a sense of depth and believable shadows, especially on red, yellow and orange objects.
Planning Your Own Watercolors
Generating and refining a concept for a painting, tools and strategies for design, planning and evaluating work-in-progress.
Planning a watercolor, part 5: Am I working with the medium’s natural tendencies?
Save yourself some headaches by choosing subjects and creating designs that work with the medium.
Sneaking Up on a Painting
Making small adjustments can help you paint more personally meaningful paintings based on photos. (Or, what happened when I tried to execute the plan we created for the boat on the river.)
Intuitive Painting, part 1—Getting Started With Intuitive Painting
If you want to paint more intuitively, how do you decide how to begin a painting, or what to do next? How do you know when you’re done? Here are a couple of activities to start exploring pieces of a system or structure to guide creative choices when you’re painting intuitively.
Planning a Watercolor, Part 4: Adding an Element from Another Reference
How to add an element to your painting plan when it’s not in your reference photo.
Planning a Watercolor, Part 3: Making Basic Edits to Your Reference Photos
Making easy, small changes to your reference photo can make your painting more interesting and unique (and often, easier to paint, too!)
Reflections in Calm Water
Look over my shoulder as I paint the subpaintings to help me decide how I want to paint reflections on calm water.
Planning a watercolor, part 2: Using subpaintings
A subpainting is a small excerpt of the larger painting, used to solve a problem in isolation, make stylistic choices or try creative alternatives. Think “Crop, don’t shrink!” It’s also a great way to find a quick and easy postcard idea inside a more complex image.
Planning a watercolor, part 1: Why I stopped doing thumbnails, value studies and color studies
Why I stopped doing traditional thumbnails, value studies and color studies to plan my watercolors.
Don’t Ask “How Can I Paint ___ in Watercolor?” Instead, Flip the Question
Try exploring different watercolor effects and “textures” and asking “What does this watercolor effect remind me of? What could I use it to suggest?”
Avoiding Overwhelm When Sketching on Location (or Working from a Photo)
To avoid overwhelm while sketching (or working from a complicated photo), collect “characters” now, arrange them to tell a story later.
Metamorphosis, a Better Way to Adjust Paintings in Progress (Art Invitation for Mar 2023)
Don’t ask “What do I need to fix?” about a painting. Here’s what to ask instead, and some tips for helping an unsatisfying painting undergo a creative metamorphosis.