Currently Browsing: Watercolor
Thinking about Dry Brush Portraits
One of my favorite things to do is to paint with watercolor in a dry brush fashion. What does that mean? Dry brush means that there is relatively little water on your brush. You move the pigment carrying brush across the paper and the brush picks up the texture of the paper. For the best […]
Flat Brushes for Watercolor
In this brush pen portrait from 2017 I used a large two-inch wide flat brush to lay in washes. Then a 0ne-inch wide flat for details. (You can turn a flat on its edge remember.) It was great fun. Flat washes on a rounded set of surfaces. I’d been playing with flat brushes before […]
In-Context: Before Cataract Surgery
Even avid readers of the blog might not recognize when this was sketched unless it had the date on it. I know exactly when it was sketched because I can still feel how my eyes felt on this day as I searched for the lines. I have found it interesting to observe my own artistic […]
Pentel Pocket Brush Pen—New Ink Colors
Finally, at last, we’ve all wanted it for so long and now we get it—the Pentel Pocket Brush Pen can now be purchased with gray or sepia ink as well as black ink! These are Pentel’s hard-bodied pens, the fountain-pen type pen with a synthetic brush tip. (Some readers seem to be confused about which […]
Project Friday—Let’s Collage
In this post I’ll walk you through a recent collage I made. This isn’t something that I preplanned. It’s simply something that I worked on with the materials at hand, moving from one thought to the next. I’ve turned the step-by-step into a Project Friday because I hope you’ll get up from the computer, make […]
Do You Stop Or Keep Pushing?
One of the things I’m asked most frequently by students is, “When do I know I’m finished with my [painting/sketch]?” I’ve heard many people give the flip response, “When you realize that you’ve gone to far, then you know you should have stopped.” It’s actually more simple and more complex than that. First, yes, if […]
Drawing Beard Stubble
Even if you don’t enjoy sketching beards as much as I do you owe it to yourself to practice some beards. Why? Because if you enjoy sketching people, some of the people you sketch will have beards. And all those beards will be different. You’re working on your visual vocabulary. The human face has a […]
Look Around for Elastic Faces
You’ll recall that last week I wrote about starting projects. My drawing examples were all faces. If you’re looking for muses to sketch and your family won’t pose for you (or can’t because your schedules don’t align) there are lots of folks on the Sktchy App who have elastic faces. Exaggerate them on not, it […]
Stonehenge Aqua Review Part 5—A Look at the Hot Press Surface
This is part 5 of a multi-part review of Stonehenge Aqua cold press and hot press. Please see this link for the first post in the series. Hot press paper is my paper of choice, so I’m going to spend more time testing a new hot press paper than I am testing a cold press […]
Stonehenge Aqua Review Part 4—Washes on Hot and Cold Press
This is part four in a multi-part review of Stonehenge Aqua Watercolor paper. Please click here for part one and work your way through the series. When looking at papers I think it’s useful to compare things side by side. I suggest that you open each of the images in this post in a separate […]