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Paper towels are a much used item among artists. Some artists intentionally keep their towels at the back of the room, so when they go back for a fresh towel every few minutes, they are forced to gain some distance and perspective.

Just as paints and brushes always need to be in the same spot, your mineral spirits should always in the same place so you can dip without looking. Your mineral spirits or brush cleaner can be stored in a container hanging from your easel, or some easels have cutout holes where you can drop in a container. Smaller cups for painting mediums are best suited for your palette or the tray of your easel. I used to put the scraper down in different places, often dropped it on the ground or floor, and had to spend time searching for it before I could clean my palette.

I also find this helpful when using steel palette knives. I can place them on the magnet and always find them when I need them. Edge Pro also makes magnetic painting panels that stick instantly to their magnetic easels. Brush organization is probably the most critical of all, because brushes are your most used tools.

How many times have you needed a specific brush for a specific purpose and been unable to find it? Soon you find yourself digging through piles and jars full of brushes, looking for the right one.

Getting Ready

Though most artists keep a giant jar with a lot of brushes nearby, finding what you need quickly in that environment can be difficult. One of the best ways to be effective is to keep brushes within view, beside your painting, so you can grab exactly what you need at the moment you need it. Other painters tend to reserve separate brushes for cool colors and warm colors.

The opposite is also true.

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Though most easels have trays and most artists have a table or taboret to hold their palette, brushes, colors, and mineral spirits or water, these surfaces can easily become cluttered. And while laying out brushes makes them much easier to find than sorting through a jar, loose brushes are easily bumped and knocked off a table. Dropped brushes pick up dust or dirt or mud outdoors , and they can be damaged if they fall on the hairs.

Wet-paint-filled brushes fall on your studio floor, which then has to be cleaned, and artists have been known to go to the floor or ground and bump their heads or knock their easels over when coming up.

12 Ways Artists Can Reduce Frustration While Painting - OutdoorPainter

And of course some artists prefer to avoid bending down altogether. A new product that has surfaced in the past year seems to address many problems with brush management. The product, called an Easel Brush Clip , has two small, square cups held together by a clip, and it easily clips to the palette at eye level, next to the painting.

This allows the artist to find brushes easily.

12 Ways Artists Can Reduce Frustration While Painting

Because there are two cups, they can be used to keep warm and cool brushes apart, or used and clean brushes. Of course, the great side benefit is that brushes are a lot less likely to hit the ground! All artists eventually develop systems of their own to manage their tools. Distractions are the enemy of the painter. Lay Out Your Palette the Same Way Each Time Your palette needs to be like the keyboard of a piano, so you always go to the same spot to find what you need, until you can do it instinctively.

Lay out your colors from warm to cool, and always in the same places each time. Painting a ceiling on those days is just a recipe for disaster that you do not need to be serving to yourself. Holding your arms up like that is hard work! You think that using those big, heavy wide rollers will make the job go more quickly, but once you fill that thing up with paint, it will be so heavy that you run the risk of getting exhausted before you finish the job.

I paint full rooms with them all the time and because of how easy they are to handle, the job actually goes much more quickly than with a big roller. The humidity in those rooms can tend to keep the paint from staying dry enough and the pink tint will show up again.


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So stick with regular white paint in those rooms. Work in small sections, get really confused, and then come back and touch it up.


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    • Looking up like that can make you get turned around and you might forget where you were just working when you need to refill your roller. Just try to work in small square sections, a little at a time and do your best. Look and see if you notice any spots that really obviously need touching up and do it then.

    And you know what? Your ceiling looks amazing! Anyone who comes in your home will agree. Just enjoy the fresh clean look and know that everyone else does too! For more fun with paint, visit my painting archives! Thanks for sharing your tips, Courtenay. I have a popcorn ceiling that I want to scrape this fall, so I will be doing a few extra touch-ups and sanding before finally painting I hope! And yes, please do post on your steel roof. Wiley, 41, is known for larger-than-life riffs on Western art. In their portraits, Sherald and Wiley both upend notions of what it means to hold power, particularly as a person of color in America.

    Through his art, Wiley bestows the honor and symbols that have traditionally been reserved for the upper class upon everyday people. In Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps , his version of the French general dons camouflage, Timberland boots, a white T-shirt and a bandana. Wiley has also been commissioned to paint musicians as nobility.


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    On weekends as children, he and his twin brother would travel by bus to classes at a conservatory on the campus of California State University, Los Angeles. When Wiley was around 12, he was among a group of 50 students who traveled to Russia to study its language and art. Like Obama, Wiley grew up without his father and traveled to Nigeria to meet him later in life—a parallel between artist and subject that was not lost on either man.

    Though lesser known than Wiley, Sherald is a rising star. In she became the first woman to win the prestigious Outwin Boochever Portrait competition , beating 2, other entries.

    Obama represents an ideal, says Sherald: