All posts tagged: cool tools

Cool Tools Wet Palette

Cool Tools: Wet Palette

Published by Joe B

A tool you will hear from many different painters in our hobby is the mighty wet palette. As much as it sounds like the start of some juvenile joke, a wet palette is simple a container holding a sponge with a paper material sitting on top. The sponge is kept full of water which keeps the paper moist, and in turn keeps the paint sitting on the paper moist. The theory is that you can use the paper as your pallet and it will stay usable as long as the sponge stays wet. Using a Wet Palette Using a wet palette isn’t too different than using a normal palette in the sense you take your paint out of the pot/tube and place it on the palette. The difference is first wetting the sponge with a nice bath of water, enough to make the sponge soggy but not so much that you have free standing water in your container. The paper material is then placed on top and allowed to soak. It is often advisable to flip …

Liquitex Acrylic Paint Retarder

Cool Tools: Acrylic Paint Retarder

Published by Joe B

Following up on the importance of thinning your paints with airbrush medium, how do you keep the paints wet long enough to work on a large project? I was struggling with this on a hot summer day a few years back and posed that same question to my readers. The two solutions that were provided was a wet pallet and paint retarder. Today I use both options, the wet pallet if I’m painting at the desk or doing blending and the paint retarder when using a standard pallet on the couch. You add a drop or two to your mix and it significant increases the drying time of the paint. This keeps the paint on the pallet usable for longer stints without having to rewet the paint. I have also used it to help with wet blending – though admittedly I am still working on this skill. Since the drying time is increased, you have more time to add the additional colors and work them together. A bottle of the Liquitex brand is only $10 on Amazon …

Liquitex Airbrush Medium

Cool Tools: Airbrush Medium

Published by Joe B

One of the tips that nearly every Intro to Painting starts with is: thin your paints. It makes sense, the paint pots are fairly thick for one reason or another and painting straight onto your mini can create a thick coat, covering fine details. So what does everyone do? They add a drop or two of water, stir it in and make it work. When GW introduced the Lahmian Medium technical paint it opened a whole new world for me in terms of thinning paints, without making them watery. Adding a bit of medium would dilute the pigment a bit, but wouldn’t turn the paint into a watery, uncontrollable soupy mess. After using up my first pot of the medium I released that $4 for a little little 12ml bottle would quickly kill my painting budget. I then found a bottle of acrylic matte medium at a local painting store and thought I hit the jackpot. It only cost a few bottles of Lahmian but was way bigger. I quickly realized though that artist matte medium is …

Cool Tools Brush Soap to Restore Paint Brushes

Cool Tools: Brush Soap

Published by Joe B

I abuse my brushes. Yes, I admit it, I am a brush abuser. But fortunately, there is brush soap to save the day. There are many ways in which I abuse my brush. From using too small of a brush to accomplish my painting to letting the paint dry on the bristles. Not only does using a detail brush slow my progress,  using it to cram color into areas would be easier with a larger brush. With two little ones running around the house, it has been on more than one occasion that I didn’t fully clean the brush before chasing after them. Thankfully I found about brush soap a long time ago and has saved me way more than its cost in not having to buy as many new brushes. The Masters Brush Cleaner The most common brand of brush soap is The Masters Brush Cleaner which comes in a little plastic container. Inside is filled with a particular type of soap. The small 2.5oz container is only $5 on Amazon and will last forever. …

Using Trello For Hobby Progress

Using Trello to Organize my Painting Hobby

Published by Joe B

The Problem So I have noticed over the years that I am a hobby butterfly – much like many of you out there – especially the great Mordian7th :-) But as my life is getting busier between work, my son, grad school, and other projects I have been trying to get some organization to my progress. So I want to share how I am using Trello to organize my painting hobby and make sure I keep posts ready for this blog. I’ve tried the excellent painting charts made famous by Mordian and Admiral Drax using Excel and color charts, but it ended up being more work for me to know when something was ‘almost done,’ ‘done,’ and posted to the blog. It apparently works for them, but I needed something a bit simpler and general – as I have multiple projects going at once (as you can see in the picture above!). Using Trello to Organize my Painting Hobby For some of my other projects, I started using a tool called Trello that organizes your tasks into cards that you …