Lessons from Claire Giordano’s Adventure Art Academy

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Claire Giordano is one of my favorite online teachers (you may remember I featured her in an Palette Profile awhile back). In her Adventure Art Academy, she shares inspiring and beautiful videos of her own adventures hiking across the USA and painting on location. As a field artist, she is accustomed to working quickly in … Read more

Neon Palette II

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A few months ago, I presented the Neon Palette, a set of 14 colors that I grouped into an Art Toolkit Pocket Palette that were the brightest ones I owned. I wasn’t totally happy with that palette, feeling that it could be more balanced; it contained some redundancy, a lack of useful dark values, and at the same time a few not-so-bright brights that dragged the average down. Can I do better?

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Loved & Learned from Kolbie Blume’s Intermediate Landscape Course Module 1: Light

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After two years of painting, I am finally beginning to allow myself to think of myself as intermediate rather than a beginner, and accordingly I am working through Kolbie Blume’s Intermediate Landscapes course. (I actually started it before I did the beginner course!)

A four-module course, the first module concerned light, layers, and contrast. The paintings in this module involved planning multiple layers, making decisions about value contrast, and capturing light effects like glow, shadow, and backlighting.

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The Winter Palette

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Here in the northern hemisphere, it’s January, the bleak midwinter. After doing a summer palette and an autumn palette, it’s time to for me to do a Winter Palette!

I was initially tempted to include lots of dark, muted colors, but in gathering inspo photos, and in paying attention to my favorite real-life sights of winter, I have noticed so more bright colors than I would have expected! Sure, the trees are bare and the grass is dry, but there is color if you know where to look. Winter sunsets are explosively bold with fiery corals, pop oranges, and deep lilacs. On sunny days, winter golden hour is more intensely gold than at any other time of year. Snowy landscapes are bright with fresh, clear blues and gentle violets.

Let’s break down the colors I chose, and why I chose each one.

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Watercolor Doodling!

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I’ve always been a big doodler, usually with pencil or pen. As a student, I was always doodling in my notebook during class in order to have something to do with my hands, which allowed me to focus on what the teacher was saying. (Whenever teachers used to say “Stop drawing and pay attention!” I … Read more

Loved & Learned from Kolbie Blume’s Beginner Landscapes

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Beginner Landscapes is a mini-course offered by Kolbie Blume in the course library for members of the Artists Co-op, their monthly subscription service. After nearly two years of watercolor, the most recent of which was spent working through most of Kolbie’s other products (like their 10-Day Painting the Wilderness Challenge, 10-Day Seascapes Challenge, and Wilderness … Read more

My 2022 Sketchbook: All The Paintings of the Year

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I thought it would be helpful, as I review 2022 and move into 2023, to review the paintings I’ve done this year! This may not include everything I painted (especially practice and swatches), but these are all the paintings that I was happy enough to save to my photo roll. The stats: TOTAL: 175 Numbers … Read more

A Year of Art! 2022 Retrospective/2023 Resolutions

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2022 has been an exciting year for me as a watercolor artist, at the same time as it’s been a pretty dreary year personally, with health challenges for myself and my family members, career angst, and garden variety depression. But I think that hard times in life are when we need art the most, and … Read more

Lessons from Artist Palette Profiles

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I’ve been doing a regular feature, Artist Palette Profiles, for months now. In this feature, I look up the palette colors used by an artist I admire, and I compare my own colors to see how I could imitate them better. To be honest, I think it’s probably one of the most boring features I do for everyone who isn’t me. So why do I do it?

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