How do I get my paint to glide on my canvas

1. How do I get my paint to glide on my canvas? 0:01:29 "I prime and sand all my canvases with three layers of gesso. I use water and medium, I have good brushes, but the strokes of color don't work right for me. Maybe it's the way I load my brush. Maybe I worry about being too perfect." 0:02:08 I'm going to do a really short video that will talk about the different ways that we can load our brush depending on the kind of work that we're doing and where we are in our painting process. Early in the painting we may use a different kind of thickness in our paint than we would at the end of the painting. I'll do a really quick video that will walk through that. Without seeing you load your brush I don't know if I could answer but usually it's using more paint rather than less paint. That will be very helpful for you because when we're not using enough paint, the paint will get dry on our brush and won't glide on. 0:03:22 When Dianna Shynne (in that last lesson on color 101) put down her paint onto her palette she had a lot of paint on her brush. There were large amounts of paint to draw from. And when I look at her paintings up close I see that she puts on a lot of paint. It's beautiful, really gorgeous. She puts a lot of paint on her palette, then when she's mixing, she's grabbing a lot of paint and it's really thick and juicy. How do I soften the edges when the paint dries so quickly? 0:16:56 "I have trouble softening the edges or breaking up an edge sometimes because the paint is dried so quickly." This is the challenge of working with acrylics. "For example, if I paint a sky then put distant trees on top of the dried sky color, it is hard to make the tree line look blurred because the sky color is dry. Do you use a retarder to keep both forms workable or just make sure you have some of the sky color on your palette to work into the trees?" This is what will transform your paintings from being good to being great, when you can figure out how to make soft edges with acrylic paints. That's the biggest thing that makes people turn to oil paints and not use acrylic paints. There are a few different ways to do this.

2. 0:18:24 I don't paint in the order that you're saying. I don't normally put on the sky color first, and then put on the trees after that. I usually paint it the other way around. But it's kind of the same difference and you still need to figure out how to keep your edges soft. One idea is to put the two paints on at the same time and blend them right away. 0:19:32 If you are doing a color on top of a dried color you can use your finger to smudge that edge. That's what I do a lot at the end of a painting session. If you look at my hands you will see that my fingers are all covered with paint because I've been using my fingers to smudge the paint and create dry, soft edges. That's probably my first thought, to use your fingers. 0:21:05 It will allow you to blend a little bit because you'll be putting it on top of a wet surface. It will extend the amount of time that you can come back over with a brush. I paint opposite though. I paint the foreground to the background almost all the time. You asked, "Do you keep some of the sky color on your palette so that you can come back with that color later to fix or soften the edges?" And I would say if I was doing something in the order that you're doing it (painting the sky and then putting a tree on top) and wanting it to be soft 0:21:55 I would do exactly what you just said. I would keep a little pile of the sky color off to the side. Then after I've finished the sky I would have extra and I would put on the trees. Then I would come back and I would work together with both of those colors and I try to make those edges nice and soft. Right where they need to be. And blend it where they need to be. 0:22:28 But there are probably about four or five different ways of getting soft edges. It really depends on what your overall desired effect is. They will look slightly different. If you have a preferred method you might say, "Well this is the one that I like the most and I'm going to do this 90% of the time." Try some different methods and see which one works for you, because one of them will be your go-to method. I'm going to make a short tip video and I'll 0:23:42 Creating soft edges with acrylics is one of the distinguishing marks in my mind of someone who has mastered acrylics. It really shows the difference between just putting the paint on and actually having mastery over it. It is best when paintings have a combination of

3. nice crisp edges where we want the viewer's eye to go, and we want their eyes to be drawn to nice soft edges, where we can leave things to the imagination. How do I use palette knives? 0:44:10 Andrea says, "I've been practicing, but just don't seem to have the knack for it. I either get too much paint on my knife and it gets all goopy or not enough and it gets sticky. I would love to be able to do geometric shapes and leaves for example. I would also like to be able to do marble-like backgrounds. When I mix too much on a canvas, of course, all the colors get homogenized into one color instead of having strokes and swirls." I use a palette knife but I don't use it for the things that you're talking about. At least marble- like backgrounds. And I'm not gonna give you a pat answer, to say this is how you should do it. 0:45:14 I know an artist named Linda Wilder. She uses a palette knife quite a bit to shape things like trees. If you look on Instagram it's Linda Wilder Art. Perhaps she has some videos. I've seen some things of hers where she's using a very large palette knife and is shaping rocks and trees. It looks really cool. Can you suggest warm up or daily painting exercises? I want to paint daily, and struggle with deciding on subject matter. 0:56:17 Paint small first of all. If you are wanting to paint regularly, instead of painting a big painting every once in a while, or even working on a big painting every day, I would suggest

4. getting some really small canvases, or a pad of those paper canvases you peel off, or just getting a nice sketchbook that has thicker paper. Use that as your warm-up, and your initial push into the day. Get into the habit of grabbing something artistic everyday. Grab your paint brush, your pencil, and do a sketch. 0:58:52 We need to change our mindset that we only need to do one little thing. You can look around. I'm looking right now at my table in front of me and there's a little candle, a big candle over here, a tray that has a salt and pepper shaker here and a couple of candles. There's a basket with some stuff in it, there's a bowl of grapes up there, a lamp over here. If I was being creative enough I could find 10 things that I could either paint or sketch or draw. 0:59:37 The main thing is setting it as a goal and then creating small enough exercises for yourself so that it's not so daunting or expensive that you feel like you can't do it. If you're trying to do something on a very expensive, big canvas and you don't want to mess up or waste that canvas, that can be limiting. But if you're doing something that is in a sketch book, or something that is on something that's reasonably small and inexpensive, that's where the freedom can come. That's where using your acrylic paints can be so great because they'll dry fast. You can make changes really quickly. You can be done with it and put it away. And you don't have to worry about something being wet. And you're going to get into this habit of using that creative part of your brain and getting your whole self into it. And you're going to be growing in your skills. It's going to be more and more fun every time you do it. At some point you're going to say, "Wow. I've been doing this for two months now. I can't imagine not doing this," I hope that that is helpful Jan. and I hope that you do get into that habit because that would be super awesome.