Your Studio Journal

Other artists’ work can give you clues about the qualities you want to develop in your own work. A time-honored tradition in painting is to study the work of other artists to try to puzzle out how they achieved a particular effect or quality in their work. This sometimes includes copying, but be careful about…

When you start out in watercolor, you’re carried along by the excitement of discovery and possibility. Then you hit what I call “the ick stage”, when the novelty has worn off a bit and watercolor is showing its ornery side. The same thing often happens with individual paintings. The challenge at that point is to…

Some of us have a hard time allowing ourselves to just mess around with our art materials because we feel like play is frivolous or wasteful. But messing around with the materials is often where we discover new ways of working, or how we really feel about a particular technique. Deep or creative play is…

What makes good (or great) art?  What qualities must it have? Does it need to be original (and what does that mean to you), skillful, personal, meaningful, powerful? Are there certain subjects or types of art that are more worthy of being deemed good art? Subjects or types of art that can’t be good art? …

Some people like to have everything all planned out before beginning a project, others prefer to wing it. Writers have a wonderful way of describing these two personal styles. They speak of “plotters” and “pantsers” (as in, “by the seat of your pants”).  It’s probably more of a continuum, but it’s still worth thinking about…

Maybe you’re feeling a little rebellious about some of the prompts in this course. That’s okay! Remember, you can ALWAYS ignore them and go your own way! In Module 1, you were invited to list some of the reasons you wanted to keep a studio notebook. At that point, most people are thinking primarily of…

Some days, you really want to get in the studio and work on your art, but you just don’t have the energy. Or maybe you are trying to develop a habit of working every day, or three times a week, on your art, but sometimes the effort of hauling everything out is just too much. …

Do you consider yourself a realistic painter or an abstract painter? Or maybe you think of yourself as more of an impressionist. These terms get used in many ways, and it’s not always clear what they’re supposed to mean. To avoid debate, I’m going to define them for the purposes of this module. Definitions (for…

Is there a page in your studio notebook (or an artwork lurking in your studio) that makes you feel annoyed, embarrassed or discouraged every time you look at it?  We all have this experience sometimes. Inevitably, some artworks don’t turn out well. But unlike a bad day on the golf course or a subpar piano…

Have you ever gotten frustrated sketching on location because there are just too many great possibilities . . . but none that seem manageable in the 20 minutes before you have to meet your travel companions for lunch?  So, you bail out to taking photos instead. And maybe one really awful, rushed sketch.  Then you…

It’s hard to make design choices unless you know what you want the design to accomplish. To help guide your choices, one strategy is to ask, “How would I like this painting to affect the viewer?” How will our design choices affect our viewers? The more we know about the viewer, the better we can…

Do you ever find yourself asking, “How do I paint this subject in watercolor?” It can be helpful to flip this question around, and ask instead, “What subjects, effects or styles would watercolor naturally work well for?” Or, “How can I design a painting around my favorite themes that showcases the beauty of watercolor or…