You’ve heard the advice plenty of times.
Draw every day. Just paint.
It would seem to make sense – except that it’s perfectly possible to do that and not get any better at all.
Three Daffodils
Three Daffodils, oil on panel, 7 by 5 inches My last chance at daffodils! For the last few painting sessions I’ve been doing studies of daffodils. They’re fascinating to paint because of the high chroma and also the narrow value range from light to shadow. To do them well means a lot of careful control.
A Daffodil, The Four Yellows I used to Paint It and the Eight Tubes of Paint I Used to Mix Them
It’s spring in the Cotswolds and that means colour is back.
Specifically, yellows. Specifically, daffodils.
Now I know that a lot of people struggle with high chroma yellows, and the problem seems to be mostly in getting the shadows right.
It is tricky to get the shadow colours right, because you need to keep the chroma very high.
Do artists still need websites?
It’s accepted wisdom now that if you’re a business, you just have to have a website.
If you’re a professional artist, making your income from your work, or teaching (or more usually, both) then you’re a business too.
So do you need a website?
Wild Oxlips – and Painting What’s In Front of You
Every morning, I pile the kids into the car and we head off to school. Despite the chaos, I treasure this part of my day. I get to spend some time with my boys. They’re hilarious and they make me laugh, without fail, every morning.
I also get to drive through the breathtakingly beautiful countryside that we live in the heart of.
Early Spring Flowers – and Why Painting What You See Isn’t Always Enough
You’ve probably often heard people say that you should paint what you see, what you know.Well I don’t think that’s the whole story.
Let me explain: What you know can trip you up, yes. But it depends what type of knowledge we’re talking about.
There’s a kind of knowledge that actually helps us see better, paint better.
How to have a successful blog even when you think you have nothing to share
By far the most common worry I’ve heard so far from people on my Threads program is that they can’t run a blog because they don’t have anything to share.
I think you have something very compelling to share right now.
You just need to be strong enough to do it.
Why You Need to Start a Blog Today
How do they do it?
How is it that some people have managed to make the break from being:
a part-time artist who doesn’t sell their work and has a day job they hate
to being:
someone with a website that people actually visit and who makes some income from their art?
Why your website doesn’t work (and how to fix it)
You’ve set up your site. It looks great.
But nobody is visiting.
It’s like you organised a dinner party, cooked your best dish, got all dressed up…
And no-one turned up.
21 excellent questions about auctioning your paintings online – answered
It’s new, it’s exciting, more and more people are doing it. It’s nothing short of a new paradigm for artists, an entirely new business model for us.
It promises complete independence. No gallery cut. You get to choose what you paint.
What follows is just my take of course. But I’ve been doing this pretty successfully for a couple of years now, and this is what I’ve learned from the front lines.
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