There are many benefits to choosing and using artist paints that contain only one pigment, are pre-mixed and are referred to as 'hues'.  You can gain accuracy, save time and most importantly - money.

Single Pigment Artist Paints
The best results in painting come from use of colors based on just one pigment, as opposed to a mixture of multiple ingredients or pigments. A single-pigment color will mix truer and more predictably, and will give the benefit of maximum chromatic intensity possible for that pigment.

Convenience or Pre-Mixed Paints
Pre-mixed artist colors save time, labor and expense by offering shades and hues intended to anticipate the natural mixing habits of painters. Try introducing a new mixture into your palette to blend new tones or subtleties into your next work of art.

Artist Paints that are "Hues"
Colors with a familiar name followed by "hue" (Cadmium Red Hue, Cerulean Blue Hue) are mixtures intended to approximate the properties of a more costly or pure color. Generally, a color designated as hue-equivalent will have a mass-tone close to the original; however, in mixtures these alternatives perform with less vibrancy. Since the final color is composed of different amounts of two or more pigments, mixing on the palette can overwhelm the weaker component, with results substantially different from what would be expected with the genuine color.

Hue equivalents offer some advantages, if the paint is to be used more or less straight out of the tube with little or no mixing, results can be very good. As familiarity with this category of paint increases through practice, most artists find which of these economical alternative "hue" colors are best suited to their needs.

A dilemma that many an artist suffers is overworking a piece.  It can be hard to know when to stop and move on to the next piece or to scrape down and start over with the current one.

Have a plan. It makes little sense to attack your painting without some sort of process in place. Creating preliminary sketches and studies (smaller versions of the painting) will help you work through a number of the pictorial issues in advance at a much smaller scale and within a controlled number of variables.  This will make it easier for you to create the finished larger piece without spending precious time working on problems that may have been solved at a much earlier and smaller stage.

Make sure when you are working on your piece that you work the entire surface together. Don’t stop and finish one part and move on this. This will generally lead to a very unbalanced look, as certain parts will be worked more than others, thus affecting the unity of the entire image.

Another useful tip to follow is to make sure you step back from your work often. Once at least every twenty minutes or so you should step back from your work at a distance that if you are working from life that you can see both your subject and your canvas in your line of site.  If you are working from a photograph you should have the two images side by side so that you can compare. If you are working from your imagination you should step back are enough so that you can see the work visually re-contextualized. Often when working we can become so visually absorbed as a result of intense concentration that we begin to lose site of the entire image. This can lead to the overworking of a particular area.

Also, don’t be afraid to scrape down your canvas to its surface. It is best to avoid leaving large amounts of inaccurate paint (parts that are the wrong color or drawn incorrectly) left on your canvas to dry. This will only affect the underlying surface of your paint, possibly leading to instability in the chemical make up of the paint as it dries, or in the least leave the surface of your painting uneven.  

This isn’t to say that creating a weathered surface with a history of the process is inherently bad, but that it should be an aesthetic choice that one makes, and not just the result of overworking a canvas and not caring for the surface.

It also a good idea to compare your work in progress to other finished works and reproductions of other artist’s work so that you can compare your work in progress to the desired finished state you are attempting.

This information is an excerpt from Painting with Jordan Schranz, an online course offered by Sessions Online School of Fine Art.

Want to learn more? Interested in taking this online art class? Learn More and Register Here.

Looking for a way to strengthen your canvas?  If you are working in large format you should consider bracing your canvas to provide added rigidity.  It's a simple process and well worth the time and money.

Step 1:
Select a canvas cross brace measuring equal to or greater than the narrower dimension of your stretcher frame; cut to fit exactly inside the frame.

Step 2:
Attach cross brace to frame using one T-Plate at each end of cross brace, as illustrated in the image below.*

*Note: Do not glue brace to frame; never glue the joints of stretcher bar frames.

Determining which artist canvas, sometimes referred to as a 'surface', to paint on can be a challenge.  Should you paint on linen canvas or cotton canvas? What about stretched canvas vs. rolled or canvas sheets?  This quick guide will explain some general classifications as well as some things to look for when choosing your canvas.

The term canvas generally speaking is a heavy, tightly-woven fabric which can apply to any of the following materials; cotton, linen, jute and polyester. Now canvases are being made available that are combination weaves containing cotton and polyester.

Your choice of canvas type will depend on several determining factors. There are typically 3 grades in canvas quality, in keeping with the good - better - best philosophy.  They are:

Museum Grade - Linen or finer grade cotton duck canvas, usually with a tight weave.

Professional Grade - Quality grade cotton canvas with a medium to heavy weave. 

Value Grade - The lightest canvas in weight / thread count.

The tear strength of the fabric is critical to the longevity of an artist canvas; canvases that are higher in thread count and are woven in combination or double weave patterns will perform much better in stretching and re-stretching.

The style and size of a painting will determine the selection of fabric which best projects a particular artist approach. For example, if an artist desires a coarse textured surface then heavy linen or cotton weave would be recommended. On the other hand if a painting is highly detailed then a smooth tightly woven canvas will be best suited.

Important Note: Acrylic gesso primed canvases can accept oil or acrylic paints whereas oil primed linen canvas can only be used for oil paints.

Jordan Schranz from Sessions Online School of Fine Art offers us these tips for keeping our artist paint colors as pure as possible.

Mix Paints as Little as Possible
When you are mixing your paint, try to keep your color as pure as possible. Don't over-mix your colors.  Use too many colors together, and your painting will begin to look over-worked and muddy. Try to find the shortest distance between two points - the least number of colors to mix - in order to capture the color that you are going for.

Use Color as a Value
Each color has its own natural value. Ultramarine Blue is obviously darker than Cadmium Yellow, for example. So instead of using white and black to lighten or darken a color, you can always mix in another color that is lighter or darker. You'll obtain the same value while retaining your color intensity level. If you can lighten or darken a color by using something other than white or black, go for it, as white will only de-saturate your color (unless that is the effect you are going for).

Straight from the Tube
Don't be afraid to use a color straight from the tube. Sometimes a color straight from the tube is just what you need. Nothing will get purer in color than a color just as it is in the tube. Just make sure that the color is the right hue, value, and temperature. Van Gogh, Matisse, and Picasso all used color straight from the tube to achieve a variety of effects.

Mix on Your Palette with a Palette Knife
When you are mixing your colors, you should try to always mix on your palette using a palette knife. This will help you keep your colors clean. Mixing on the palette allows you to compare the color you are mixing next to other colors that you have already mixed as well as all of your other colors straight from the tube. This makes it easier for you to compare. Also, use the palette knife rather than your brush for mixing. This helps keep your colors pure. You will keep your pure colors from being contaminated because you dipped your brush in one color of paint and then transferred it to another.

The palette knife is useful for mixing colors evenly, where a brush can sometimes absorb colors into itself, thus, making your mixing uneven.  Using a palette knife to mix will also lengthen the life of your brushes, as you won't be pushing them aggressively into your paint during the mixing process.  See our article on Painting & Palette Knives.

This information is an excerpt from Painting with Jordan Schranz, an online course offered by Sessions Online School of Fine Art.

Want to learn more? Interested in taking this online art class? Learn More and Register Here.

If you are looking for good introductory art lessons you may want to check out Art Graphica.  It is an online resource for instructional lessons, interactive demos and videos.  They do a have a section of free art lessons including pencil drawing, oil painting and watercolor lessons. 

The tutorials include step-by-step instructions as well as images.  Most of the lessons are for specific objectives, like 'drawing trees' or 'landscape painting' rather than general subjects.  You will certainly find some tips that will help you with your artwork - particularly if you are a beginner.

Acrylic paints are extremely easy to handle - allowing great freedom for creative expression. They are fast drying - permitting "rapid" overpainting and allowing for the build up of multiple layers in one painting session. Acrylic paint thins with water and dries to a waterproof finish.

Finally, when they are dry; acrylics produce a very tough permanent paint film that is stable, waterproof and extremely flexible, without any issues of compatibility.

In addition, acrylic paints are generally less expensive than their oil counterparts making them more accessible to artists.

You spent years studying the way light falls on the human face, or learning how to sculpt the semblance of motion into motionless clay. You have poured your time, money, and dreams into your art. You may have discovered the Internet early on and understood how important it could be in showcasing and selling your work on a website. But most likely, you haven’t. Your focus has been on your work, which is where it should be.

A piece of art represents a unique expression of your time and effort. You may finish a particularly work-intensive piece and then have to do considerably more work to get a gallery show. And then, what happens if your seven-foot sculpture doesn’t sell during its one month in the spotlight? You have to Uhaul it back to your workspace and pray for a studio visit from the right person.

A website shows your work to a collector, a gallery, or an admirer at their convenience and with no trouble to you. These can be people you reach out to or people who have never heard of you but find your site on the web. Your website is your storefront, your perpetual gallery to the world.

The only real question for you is: "What kind of website is right for me?"  There are a lot of different choices, some costly, some not, and they have different levels of functionality.

Here are 4 basic options:

1. Do-it-yourself website
2. The well-meaning friend website
3. Custom website (profesional designer)
4. Template website (ready-made website)

1. No matter how artistically and DIY-inclined you are, creating a website yourself, as a beginner, will almost certainly lead to a woefully unprofessional look. And it will take you away from your art.

2. Asking a web-savvy friend to create your site might seem like a great collaboration at first, but it can take awhile for your friend to get around to actually doing the site. Also, websites need to be updated frequently to keep them fresh for repeat visitors and higher-ranked for search engines. There may soon come a time when your friend can’t prioritize your website as much as you think they should. That can lead to frustration on your part and annoyance on theirs.

3. A custom site is the website that may (nothing guaranteed) give you the look that best reflects your work. Drawbacks are i) initial cost (can easily be $1- 2,000), and ii) you will have a tough time updating the site unless the developer has designed a control panel for you. If you depend on the developer to update the site, you will most likely be paying the developer’s hourly rate. This will cut down on your willingness to update the site and add new images. 

4. Template websites are the best option for artists who want to have a professional website, keep their friendships, and not spend a lot of money. Most providers of template websites give you a fair number of design options. Artspan, for example, has templates that allow the artist to choose colors, fonts, and font sizes. You can create different galleries for your work and you have an unlimited number of pages and images. Most importantly, these sites are easy to update and manage. They are designed for people who have very little computer expertise.

While Artspan is the oldest provider, there are quite a few other providers of artist template websites. The most prominent are Foliolink, Big Black Bag, SiteWelder, Qfolio, FineArtStudioOnline, and Foliosnap. Pricing can range up to almost $60/month, but most packages are less. Artspan pricing runs from 13.95 to 19.95 a month (10% less if paid annually). Artspan.com also stands apart from other website packages as it is, in itself, a real community of artists and a major art destination with plenty of content of interest to collectors.

Once on the Artspan site there are a number of different ways those visitors arrive at the individual member sites: searches by keyword or by drop-down categories and genres and by alphabetical, regional and category/subcategory directories. Visitors also visit the Artspan Portals which focus on specific genres (i.e. Nature Photography or Landscape Painting). These portals offer articles, events, and many different kinds of artist resources associated with the genre covered. And, of course, member images with links to the individual sites.  Interested in becoming a member of Artspan?

It is hard to bring visitors to your website and you will have to work to promote it. Many artists have mixed feelings about promoting their own work, but in today’s art market, artists need to be their own advocates and agents to the art world. There is no shame in self-promotion, especially when done with professionalism and style. Creating a personalized, templated artist portfolio website is the smart way to do it. Even smarter is to also be part of a larger community attracting the kind of traffic that no individual artist website can.

This brief article discusses the basics of the two most common artist canvas materials, cotton and linen. Like most art supplies it can be a challenge selecting canvas if you do not know what you are looking for.  What are cotton and linen canvas made from? What do thickness and weight mean? Read on...

Cotton Duck Canvas is made from the threads of the cotton plant which are spun into larger fibers, offering moderate strength.These fibers are then woven into a heavy canvas which is rated on a numerical grade system of thickness from 1 to 10, 1 being the heaviest and 10 being the lightest. Cotton is readily available and relatively inexpensive, making this canvas type the most popular for artists to use.

Linen Canvas is made from long extremely strong fibers strands originating from the flax plant. Linen is an expensive fabric to manufacture. The quality of the finished linen depends largely on the quality of the plant itself. The best flax harvests come from Belgium and France where the temperature and climate produce a superior crop. The flax fibers are found in the stalk which is picked by hand to preserve the fibers integrity.

To create excellent quality linen the flax fibers are often blended from multiple seasons to produce stability in the fabric. Good quality linen is soft and largely free of the slubs or small knots, often associated with it. Slubs are only found in lesser quality fabric. Linen is mothresistant and repels dirt, as well.

If you have more questions about artist canvas please send us an e-mail.

One of the best things you can do when you're starting out with watercolor paints is to create a color grid. Doing this will help you learn your colors. It will allow you to determine the gradation of each color, the transparency or opacity of each color, and the staining power for each pigment.

To make your color grid, you will make a space on the page for each color in your palette. Your marks on the page will be vertical and you will write in the color name for each color above the line you will make using that color. Before you begin making strokes on the page, take a waterproof black marker and draw a long, thick line of black horizontally across the halfway point on your page. Each vertical line you draw will bisect this line. Start simply with a thick black line across the page and vertical lines marking an area for each color you will add.

Next, take a color and paint a long stroke of the color down your page. Pull the color over the black mark and continue down your paper, getting gradually lighter and lighter as you go along, until you run out of paint. Do this with each of the colors you have. Be careful as you go to keep the colors far enough apart that they will not bleed into each other. Then let all your marks dry.

Once all marks are dry, you will make a second horizontal line across the top half of your page where the color is stronger. Here you will take a clean, wet brush and rewet your color and try to scrub off a small portion of the color. This will demonstrate the staining power of each of your colors. With this simple scrubbing process, I reveal the staining power of each color.

The part where your color crosses over the black line will tell you its relative opacity or transparency. If it fades into the black and you can hardly see the color at all anymore, it is a transparent color. If, however, it coats over the black and you can still strongly identify your original color, it is an opaque color.

This information is an excerpt from Watercolor with Annika Conner, an online course offered by Sessions Online School of Fine Art.

Want to learn more? Interested in taking this online art class? Learn More and Register Here.

The most important thing you can do to maintain your art brushes is to keep them clean. The pigment particles in your paint are rock and mineral powder with sharp, jagged edges. These can be hard on your brush bristles. When left in the brush without a lubricating vehicle they saw at brush hairs, chopping them like tiny axes. This residue accumulates at the ferrule and bloats the brush to the appearance of an old broom.

Leaving brushes to soak in water or thinner will dry out the hairs, make them prone to breaking and permanently bend the ends. For late-night painting sessions followed by more work in the morning, it’s better to wrap the brush heads in aluminum foil to keep oil brushes fresh, or plastic wrap for acrylics. When a proper washing is not possible, watercolor brushes should be rinsed, blotted and laid flat to dry.

Here are some tips for washing your brushes after using oil or acrylic paints.

1. Remove excess paint and residue with a rag or heavy paper towel.

2. Rinse out all color using solvent or water, appropriate to the medium.

3. Use a safe biodegradable brush cleaning fluid such as Winsor & Newton Brush Cleaner and Restorer. Place fluid in a container like the Silicoil brush cleaning jar.

4. Brush the bristles across the coil spring in the jar. This gives the brush enough action to release the paint residue into the brush cleaning fluid. When satisfied, brush the bristles against the side of the jar and wipe with heavy paper towels.

5. Repeat step 4 until no color is visible in the brush.

6. Blot with a rag and groom hairs back to their proper shape. Dry horizontally to allow draining.

You might also want to consider purchasing a brush holder for safely storing your brushes when you are not painting with them.

Light is a crucial component to a good setup when embarking on portrait painting. Use a one-directional light source bright enough to illuminate both the model and your picture. Having multiple light sources or having too much ambient light in a room may confuse you.

Ideally, a good setup will have a single light source that emphasizes the play of light and shadow, which ultimately defines three-dimensional forms. The closer or more intense the light source, the clearer this light/dark structure becomes.

When getting started, I suggest a strong light source to make shadows more defined and easier to see. Light is another factor that can drastically change over the course of a sitting. The changing intensity and direction of light will alter the subject greatly.

Artists go to great lengths to get a good lighting situation in their studios. Traditionally, "north light" is the most desirable: the cool, diffused, indirect light emanating from the northern sky. Unlike artificial light, which tends to be limited and warm in color temperature, north light is composed of the full color spectrum. And unlike direct sunlight, which changes directionality and temperature drastically in the course of a day, north light maintains directionality and temperature.

Most of us do not have the luxury of having a northern exposure. Try to find a window that does not allow any direct sunlight, but gives off enough light to illuminate both model and picture. Artificial light is another good alternative, in that it remains constant and allows you to work any time of the day or night.

This information is an excerpt from Portrait Painting - with Palden Hamilton, an online course offered by Sessions Online School of Fine Art.

Want to learn more? Interested in taking this online art class? Learn More and Register Here.