G&B Blog

One of my favorite watercolor tools is the color pyramid. Painting one is an enjoyable way to quickly put a few colors through the paces - and it leaves you with both a pleasing painting and a useful reference tool.

In this post I'm going to lay out a few key points that revolutionized my understanding of color and helped lead me to the "aha!" moment of really understanding color temperature - and, most importantly, allowed me to enjoy color mixing and accomplishing it with ease.

You might be surprised at how many artists truly believe that if they have three primary colors they can mix literally ANY other color.  

It is so important for your painting practice to understand a little color theory, but it is even more important to understand how the colors in your particular palette will behave.   

By changing our language we can change the colors we see.  And by truly examining the colors around us we can learn to see past the language we've learned to describe them. In this blog post we'll explore how words influence perception and go over an exercise to help transform the colors in your palette.

One of the biggest fears I've heard about watercolors over the years is that they cannot be erased, that mistakes are irrevocable.  Hearing this never fails to send me to my soap box to passionately defend my favorite medium because it simply isn't true!

Here's a painting project idea that you can file away for a rainy day when you're at a loss as to what to paint -- or to help get you painting today.  You can make this project casual - a fun little painting exercise - or you can plan to make a formal finished painting to hang on the wall.

Before I gross you out, let's start, briefly, with why watercolor and ox gall are even a pair.  When browsing the watercolor section of the art supply shop, you've probably noticed a line of little bottles with relatively vague information on the labels.  Ox gall is usually in one of these bottles, sold as a watercolor additive.

At the beginning of this year, I went on a sketchbook odyssey of sorts.  I wanted to find the perfect match for my style and methods.  I poured over different offerings online, and visited art shops all over the country.  I touched, felt, smelled, and generally sized up every sketchbook I could find.