watercolor

Materials – choosing the right paint colors

One of the critical elements of painting is, of course, the paint. But let me help novice painters and save them some money — you don’t need nearly as much paint as you might think. What I mean by that is you don’t need a rainbow of colors packaged in tubes or pans (dried cakes

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Why paint plein air?

“Plein air” is a French term, loosely translated as “outdoor” and refers to the act of painting on location. The notoriety of plein air painting is most often attached to the development of French Impressionism in the 1870s as painters such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, and Alfred Sisley eschewed the Classical conventions

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Why watercolor?

I fell in love with watercolor the moment my high school art teacher introduced it. Our lesson was to take a pile of cardboard boxes, draw them, and paint them in watercolor, using just one color: brown. This seemingly simple lesson taught me these basic watercolor principles: Depicting values is critical You have to reserve

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