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

How to Buy Art Supplies

It’s tempting to think that if we want to make art, we should, of course, begin by shopping. Full of zest, vim and vigor, we resolve to really get in the creative mode and, tail wagging, we prance off to the art supply store. We browse through walls of pens,

Art Lessons to Live By: Advice from Art Bootcamp Instructors

Whether you’re completely new to art-making or just want to refresh some basic skills, our new Art Bootcamp course can help you find (and stay on!) your creative path. We’ve compiled this list of hard-won advice from our course instructors—all professional artists with years of experience in their fields—to get