Nov21
Tag Archives: Tutorial
Sep27
Guest Post: Sketchbook Thursday! Indigo Buntings by Lindsay Weirich
A big thank you to Lindsay Weirich of The Frugal Crafter Blog for this wonderful watercolor tutorial. I just love looking over her shoulder while she paints. She makes it look so easy!
Hi friends! I had so much fun painting these birds in my sketchbook!
Watch the video to see the time-lapse!
Supplies:
- Renesans Watercolors: Colors used: Pthalo Blue, raw sienna, pthalo green, Sepia and stil De Grain Brown (not Van Dyke Brown, I misspoke)
- Watercolor sketchbook: This is the brand but the book I have is larger than this, about 9″x12″
- Brushes: #8 & #2 round, Filbert wash
- Cut up credit card, paper towel, 2 waterbruckets
- Swatching stamps
- Prismacolor Pencils
- This is the reference book I used for my reference photos currently around $11 used! You can see other books in the series here Used copies are always popping up so I keep an eye out for them at a good price:)
To read the rest of this article, click here.
Nov16
Guest Post: Fall Swirls by Gail Bartel

A great big thank you to artist and instructor Gail Bartel for this fabulous painting tutorial. Check out more of her artwork on her blog, that artist woman.
FALL SWIRLS
The trees are a swirl of brightly coloured leaves, or at least they were until we had some really strong winds and they all blew away.
Here is a great little fall project.
MATERIALS REQUIRED:
– nice paper for painting on
– green masking tape (painter’s tape) optional
– acrylic or liquid tempera paints
– pencil or black pencil crayon
– oil pastels
PROCEDURE:
Tape paper onto art board using masking tape. This will give us a nice white border.
Using white and blue paint your background. You want a white oval off centre and then light blue and darker blue. Have the kids paint in a circular motion.
Set aside to dry.
This one was with acrylic.
I did this one with disk tempera to compare.
Starting with brown, paint dashes around our oval.
With brown we stay away from the white oval.
We then add orange covering some of our brown dashes and work a little closer into the oval.
After orange we add yellow.
As we get into the centre with the yellow add a little white paint to mix a really light yellow.
Set aside to dry.
When the paint is dry remove the tape.
With a pencil or black pencil crayon draw your tree trunk. You want to come from the corner closest to the centre of your swirl.
You want it to look like you are looking up into the tree.
Using black oil pastel go over your tree trunk lines and fill in.
Now you could just leave it at this point but oil pastel looks better if you blend it a bit.
In my studio I would just use a paper tortillion but at school we don’t have them around so the kids use a q-tip.
If my lines are quite fine I will take the q-tip and break and use the little broken end to blend my fine branches.
Here is a comparison of acrylic vs liquid tempera.
The acrylic covers better (more opaque) so your lights are brighter. For the liquid tempera I added some dashes in pencil crayon in orange, yellow, and light yellow to help with this after the paint was dry.
Gail
May4