How to Find Your Art Style: 14 Rules to Guide You

You’ve heard artists talk about finding their art style, but what exactly is a signature style and how do you go about finding yours? Everyone has slightly different ideas about what an art style is. In its simplest form, it’s the recognizable way that you paint or draw — a

Featured Artists from the Community: May 2020

For this month’s roundup of artists from our community, we meet Helen Leigh-Phippard, Ken Hill, and Truc-Ha Duong. From an extraordinary streak of amazing portraits, to fitting in daily sketchbook pages between busy work and family lives, these artists bring so much diversity and vibrancy to our community. Helen Leigh-Phippard,

Painting Realistic Skin Tones with Watercolor

A Guide to Painting People with Personality Whether you’re a beginner or advanced, we’ve all been there. You decide to add a person to your watercolor piece, but you can’t quite get it right. It ends up missing something, not looking realistic or as you imagined. An oval with a

How to Judge Your Own Artwork

When peacocks are hatched, they are ugly grey balls of fluff. When you snap a Polaroid, it is grey, then murky, washed out. When a baker puts a cake in the oven, it is runny, mealy, and inedible. A great burgundy goes into the bottle as grape juice. When a

How to Be Great

You’ve probably heard of “The 10,000 hour rule”. Malcolm Gladwell popularized it in Outliers — in which he posits that it takes that long to become expert at any skill. Gladwell’s distillation of the science behind “rule” has been debunked since then. Not surprising — our own experience confirms that

How to Find Your Passion

Let me ask you a personal question: do you have a passion problem? I’m not asking about your hormonal levels but about your life’s passion. Money, responsibilities, others’ opinions aside, what do you really want to do with your remaining days? This can be a really hard question for a