How to paint and draw: a blog about art.

By Marion Boddy-Evans When I mix a special color and want to save it to use tomorrow or on another painting, I use heavy duty aluminum foil to make my own tube to store it. This is how I make it: 1. Wrap a piece of foil around a broom handle. (Heavy-duty grade foil works best.) […]

By Marion Boddy-Evans I have a small utility cart on wheels with three shelves (measuring 15×9″). I have tightly fitted the top section completely with blocks of Oasis (foam used for floral arrangements). Neatly insert your brushes (handle down of course) according to size and/or the brushes you use most often. You can easily fit about […]

By Marion Boddy-Evans When working wet-on-wet pull the brush along its length with the handle close to the surface. You get two strokes with a flat bristle brush, one side then the other, look at the brush for any paint it picked up and wipe it. Think of the brush hairs as if they were the fingers on […]

By Marion Boddy-Evans For painting grass, I have five different sizes/hair variations of fan brush. I add just a bit of paint to the brush (‘rocking’ the tip of the brush gently through thinned paint), then start at the bottom of the grass/reeds and push upwards with the brush held at a 90 degree angle to the […]

Abstract Painting Tip 1: I like to use the world around me to compose good abstracts. It is often hard for us as humans to come up with good shapes and compositions just “out of thin air”. So here’s my tip: make yourself a viewfinder from a piece of stiff white paper or matboard. Make the […]

From Susan Tschantz To paint a yellowish sky at the horizon with a bluer sky above without getting a green color from mixing the yellow and blue, I first underpaint the sky using yellow ocher, then I let this dry before adding any blue. I start from the top, and using wide horizontal strokes the full […]

From Carson C.T.Collins If you’re interested in exhibiting your artwork in commercial galleries, here’s some stuff I have learned over the past 30 years, for whatever it’s worth. Most galleries have a web site. Go there first. This will tell you what their submissions policies are (which, in this era of rapidly changing technology, varies greatly […]

By Marion Boddy-Evans Most of the safety issues with art materials and in your art studio ought to be common sense, but of course what is sensible to one person is over cautious or careless to another. For me, safety and art materials comes down to one rule: “Art materials weren’t made for eating.” Here are […]

By Marion Boddy-Evans Note: This is an opinion piece, a strongly expressed opinion on the topic of photorealism. In a nutshell: I don’t see the point of photorealism where what’s painted is exactly the same as what you’d see in a photo, where the artist hasn’t done anything to the composition. Too frequently it’s merely a […]