How to Paint Loose Watercolor Faces: A Simple Practice Exercise
Start with patches of color, then find the faces. This watercolor exercise explores simple features, unexpected colors, and knowing when to leave things alone.
How to Shade with Watercolors: Beginner Tutorial
Shading with watercolor comes down to value, water, and timing. These simple ball-and-cube studies show how to turn flat shapes into believable forms.
Abstract Fish Painting with Collage Paper and Acrylic
A failed watercolor, some paint-covered scraps, and a little blue acrylic. Here’s how I turned studio leftovers into a loose mixed media fish painting.
Four Paintings, One Landscape: An Unexpected Discovery
Explore a creative mixed media landscape experiment using four separate paintings to build one composition. Discover the freedom of unexpected results.
Sometimes You Just Have to Flip It: A Mixed Media Banana Journey
Discover how a rejected landscape became a loose mixed media banana painting using acrylics, inks, charcoal, and unexpected colors.
Nothing Is a Reject: Three Tomato Paste Cans
Turn an old drawing into expressive mixed media art using acrylics, graphite, charcoal, and crayon in this creative journey with three tomato paste cans.
When Practice Becomes Instinct: Three Diet Coke Cans
Explore how painting progressions build creative confidence through repetition in this expressive mixed media study of three Diet Coke cans.
When a Painting Starts Controlling You
Discover how a messy mixing palette became expressive mixed media art with three ketchup bottles, and why protecting a painting can limit creativity.
Back to Familiar Territory: A Mixed Media Fish Collage
Explore a mixed media fish collage using scrap paper, acrylics, and an unconventional canvas surface. Discover new ways to paint familiar subjects.
Calm vs. Chaos: Knowing When to Stop Painting
Discover how to balance calm and chaos in mixed media painting. Learn to simplify busy compositions using collage, acrylics, and thoughtful layering.
From Dawn to Pepsi: Nothing Is a Reject
Follow a mixed media painting journey from rejected Dawn watercolors to an expressive Pepsi can using acrylics, charcoal, and creative experimentation.
Loose Sunflower Drawing: Get Familiar, Then Get Loose
Explore loose sunflower drawing with graphite, charcoal, and crayon. Learn how studying structure leads to more expressive, confident artwork.