Easy Landscape for Beginners

This landscape is ideal for all beginners, and for anyone wanting to move from painting flowers and leaves into the slightly more challenging field of landscape. So let’s break all the rules – of composition, color theory, and technique – and paint a luminous, evocative landscape we would all love to live in! This landscape…

Easy Abstract Winter Mood

I felt it was time to dig out my dip pen and some ink and have a scratch into an abstract background, so that’s what I’m doing in this quick study. I picked a piece of paper from my stash more or less at random. It’s a piece of Saunders Waterford paper, 100% cotton, but…

Easy Winter Landscape

Easy Winter Watercolor Landscape for Beginners – PLUS How to Paint Snowy Trees and more Here’s a fun and easy Winter Watercolor Landscape for Beginners and Improvers full of simple but effective techniques for achieving a great painting. You can find the sketch for this painting here free to download. In this video I show you…

Beginners Start Here!

Learn to paint watercolor the fun and easy way In this video I show you how to choose a colorscheme from your Kuretake paint sets, plus ways to use a brush, different types of brushes, water control and much more. Plus you are going to create a super attractive abstract piece of art that will…

Ten Minute Snowy Christmas Cards

Squeezing in painting time is often a challenge no matter how much you want to do it, and lengthy projects often fall by the wayside. I know – it happens to me too! So here are some quickies that you can do in just a few minutes, with the minimum of materials and hardly any…

Oak Leaf Fall Greetings Card

The leaves are starting to change color and fall now that autumn is here. So how about this pretty mixed media design to use for your autumn greetings cards? You can download the sketch to help you with the painting right here. Materials I recently received a pack of Etchr greetings cards with matching envelopes…

Paint a Cute Cat in a Flowerbed

Here’s a quick and easy floral with a cat which would be ideal to make into a cute greetings card. Use odds and ends of paint and a small piece of paper to create a whimsical moment in your day. This little painting is easy and effective and will banish the blues for a few…

Whimsical Houses on a Hill

This easy landscape solves all the problems that landscape paintings usually bring. With this style you don’t need to worry about realism, or perspective, or color mixing, or living up to anyone’s expectations or standards. You just paint from the imagination and from the heart. We already did a couple of 2D landscapes to introduce…

Two Fine Hens Greetings Card to paint

How about this pretty painting of two fine hens to use as the jumping off point for greetings cards? Ideal for a friend who loves or keeps chickens, and you can personalise to include all the features of the chickens of the person who is going to be thrilled to receive it! The great thing…

The Village Walk

Landscapes are daunting. No doubt about it, with all that perspective and the arrangement of the features you want to include. Then there’s scale, and tonal values, and proportions, and and and…. But there is an answer. Why not try my two-dimensional fun landscape of your village or townscape? For this painting I used a…

Home Sweet Home Greetings Card to paint

How about this little Home Sweet Home landscape to use as the jumping off point for greetings cards? Ideal for a New Home or First Home message, which you can personalise to include all the features of the home of the person who is going to be thrilled to receive it! And no need to…

Three Whimsical Hens and a Surprise

If you’ve always hesitated over painting chickens, why not give these super-easy hens a whirl? Starting with nothing more than a watermelon slice shape, you can add the details that make the chicken a hen. When you read a book or watch a video on beginning watercolor the advice given is often “do NOT use…

Embellished Butterflies – Never Give Up!

Today I’m painting a little flock of butterflies with a romantic mood, using my set of six granulating Primatek colors, and the set of six QOR Introductory Colors as well. I am painting wet in wet on a 100% cellulose paper, Etival by Clairefontaine, and I am using Sennelier Walnut ink with a dip pen…

Whimsical Watercolor Birds

Today I’m painting three whimsical birds with a vintage feel, using a few colors selected from two sets of Daniel Smith watercolor tubes – the set of six granulating Primatek colors, and the set of six Jean Haines All That Shimmers iridescent colors. I am painting wet in wet on a 100% cellulose paper, Etival…

Can’t Sleep? Paint my Sheep!!!

This is the perfect painting project for a sleepless night – a quick, easy and stress-free way of painting a sheep! You only need three colors for this painting, plus some iridescent paint or a gold pen to add a bit of embellishment if you’d like to. It’s a simple design of a stylised sheep,…

Capturing Movement and Light with Watercolor

Today we are going to try to use granulating colors in a limited palette along with a little bit of ink and iridescence to capture the essentials of some pretty dragonflies. This is a very simplified way to paint these complex creatures. For the purposes of this exercise, I have deconstructed the insects into segments…

Three Cute Cats for a Cool Card

Today’s project is a two-in-one. We’re going to practice our wet-in-wet technique, and at the same time create a cute greetings card we can use for anyone and for any occasion. It’s a simple design of three stylised cats, and I’m using the lovely A. Gallo paints to create this, on a piece of Arches…