Pastels Tip #1 Craft or Hobby knife for Details

    

A craft or hobby knife works well for small details or erasing or making white marks (or lighter ones) with pastel -- you use it to scrape off the pastel on your painting. It also can be used for making a glare on eyes and animals' eyes.
Tip from: Audrey Twigg.


If you are using chalk, charcoal, or pastel and you make a mistake, simply roll up a piece of Blue Tac and press firmly in to the lines you wish to remove. This will lift out the medium and will avoid having to rub all over with an eraser which just makes an awful mess.
Tip from: Rosie France.

Acrylic Painting Tip #1 How to Extend the Working Time of Acrylic Paints

Acrylic Painting Tips: How to Extend the Working Time of Acrylic Paints

Helpful acrylic painting tips submitted by fellow artists.

By Marion Boddy-Evans

"I have painted with acrylics in very hot, dry climates, the best example being the Guanacaste province on the northwest coast of Costa Rica, where I lived for six years, during the dry season. Humidity near zero percent and the temperature about 33C by 09h00 every morning. The trick is to have a pump spray bottle of water close by on your mixing table and keep the area of the painting that you're working on sprayed down so that it's always damp. Otherwise, you might as well forget about it. Your acrylic paint will turn into something resembling chewing gum within five to 10 minutes."

 

Watercolor Painting TIp #1 Painting Large Areas

 Large Area to Paint??

Want to cover a large area of a watercolor painting without brush strokes, or without disturbing a previous layer of paint, or to blend colors with some degree of control? Try a small," bug sprayer!" You know, the kind you see in your local nursery or hardware store, a hand-held device normally used to apply poisonous insect killer to plants, etc.
The sprayer consists of an 8" to 12" long tube with a plunger at the end. At the base of the plunger is a small (4 to 8 oz.), screw-on container (usually glass or plastic). Drop some watercolor paint into the container, dilute with a bit of water, swish or stir the liquid around, attach the container to the tube and spray away!

Oil Painting Tip #1 Fat over Lean

The proportion of oil medium (not turps thinner) should be increased for each subsequent layer in an oil painting – known as painting 'fat over lean' – because the lower layers absorb oil from the layers on top of them. If the upper layers dry faster than the lower ones, they can crack.

Wikipedia Definition:
"Fat over lean refers to the principle in oil painting of applying paint with a higher oil to pigment ratio ('fat') over paint with a lower oil to pigment ratio ('lean') to ensure a stable paint film, since it is believed that the paint with the higher oil content remains more flexible.^[1]
Oil paint dries at different rates due to the differing siccative properties of the constituent pigment. However, everything else being equal, the higher the oil to pigment ratio, the longer the oil binder will take to oxidize, and the more flexible the paint film will be. Conversely, the lower the oil content, the faster the paint dries, and the more brittle it will be. Ignoring this practice, even in some alla prima painting, may result in a cracked and less durable paint film.^[2]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_over_lean

Drawing & Sketching Tip #1 Use Thumbnails

When preparing for your drawing piece, use thumbnail sketches and a viewfinder to get a basic idea for the layout of your piece.