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A collection of 40 posts

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Replay

February EDI Live Replay

Hello friends! I decided to try something new and begin sharing the EDI Live replay links here for all Light Tier members to see. I plan to keep each of these posts up for a several months at least so folks who weren't able to make it to

Monthly Guide

Free Lesson! 🌱 For the love of art supplies (Part 2)

Try this: Think of your art supplies as experiences instead of a collection of treasures The money that you spent on them was not an investment It was more like buying a festival pass or birthday cake or a train ticket They were never meant to stay with you forever

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Color magic: mixing made easy

We have been updating a bedroom into a studio space in slow motion over the past year, and this past week Danielle installed beautiful hardwood floors. There were a few places that needed wood filler, and it stood out in contrast the rest of the flooring color. Now, I don&

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Using Color, pt 3: Brit's Abstract Diagrams

I wanted to show you specifically how I apply these concepts of limited palettes, blending and mixing in my open-ended abstract diagram series. I thought it might be interesting to run through some of the pieces I've made over the years and take note of color considerations that

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Using Color, Pt 2: Blending vs Mixing

Let's talk about the difference between blending and mixing color. Here's how I'm using these terms: Blending: to create a gradient or area of mixed paint on your paper/canvas by mixing wet paint into wet paint. The goal of blending is to soften

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Sketching from photo inspo

Last month we looked at reference photos: abstracting them, taking them, and finding them. Today I wanted to show you how the photos I used as examples have made their way into my representational sketchbook practice. These sketches are one of my favorite ways to consider the world and slow

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Reference photo resources

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How to take a good reference photo

When I shared the big folder of reference photos last month, a question came up in our EDI Live class about how to take pictures that are useful for painting – so, let's dive into that today. I love using reference photos. They make painting the world, whether representationally

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For you: Spring Reference Pics

So many times I have sat down to sketch and ended up using my time searching through my phone or royalty-free photo archives (like pexels or unsplash) just looking for something to paint. There can be some value to this process – really asking ourselves what we are interested in, the

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The flowers are here

The flowers are here! So I will be out painting them, sneezing and alive. Spring sun breaks are the perfect time to get outside and paint: they don't last long, and the light is magic. I've been continuing my project of using up my sketchbooks, and

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Monthly Guide

April 2024: Use your supplies (up)

If I could offer one piece of creative practice advice it would be this: Use your supplies. Think of them as experiences – like a concert ticket or a birthday cake – not a collection of treasures. We're never meant to keep them. Plus, they don't last forever

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Materials

Drawing Sticks & Value

Last month I shared two posts about becoming acquainted with a new material, in my case: oil pastels (here and here). If the new material is any kind of drawing stick – a dry material that comes in distinct colors that are not easily mixed – it's important to get

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Collaborative decisions: commissions

This time last year I was writing to you about painting the burnt out forests of the mountain ranges near me, and I'm back at it painting the mountains again this winter. After camping with a friend in the southern Cascades earlier this year, she asked if she

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note-to-self zine

In our live class last weekend we made two types of zines, and I want to show you one of them. I didn't have a name for it last week, but now that I've sat with mine on my desk for a week I've

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Process

A stance against bombs

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Stepping around perfectionism

Earlier this month I wrote about stepping around perfectionism instead of tackling it head on. Here's one of my favorite ways to do that: Take 6 or 8 or 10 pieces of small/medium sized paper (I used watercolor paper that I tore down from a large sheet)

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Value, Part 2

Welcome to Part 2! Let's continue to play with value. Here are some ways to get started: Getting it right: actual gray 5! I tend to mix my middle gray chart darker than it should be. When we look back at this month's first post you

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Art chat

Today I have some creative miscellany for you, the kinds of things that I might go on about if we were getting coffee, chatting and showing each other our sketchbooks. So grab a cup of something nice and let's go! Painted backgrounds Earlier this month I had an

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Zorn Palette

In this month's main post I introduced one of my favorite limited palettes: the Zorn Palette, which is made of a bright warm red (often cadmium red, but I'm using pyrrol red here), yellow ochre and black. You can click here if you want to read

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Warble: the breath and the line

When I need to slow down, but actual holding-still, breathing-on-purpose meditation or relaxation is too much for me, I draw. Here are some favorites: 1) The breath line. I close my eyes, put my pen on the page and draw upward on the inhale and downward on the exhale. I

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Limited palettes

Earlier this month I shared a way to understand color as relative. Another way to explore this concept is to paint the same image with different limited palettes– in each case I'll be using a red, blue and yellow plus white. Each combination I choose will create a

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Ways to use a journal

I wrote to you earlier this month about how using a notebook helps me as an artist. In this post I'm going share a few ways I've learned to use it as a tool for processing and cultivating creative ideas. Bullet Journal Method Ever since I

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Watercolor Flowers & Fruit! 🍒

Flowers and fruit are wonderfully flexible objects to paint. There's room for a lot of variation while still allowing for recognizability, so they're some of my favorite things to sketch when I want to get a feel for new paint or paper. Here are some that

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Swatching Oils

Today's post is a quick one. I want to show you some swatching I've done recently as I've been trying out some new paints. I started on a set of large commissions last year and was several weeks of work into it when the

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Surprising myself: Painting the forest after the fire