Here Are a Few of My Favorite Things

We all have favorites…whether it’s kitchen utensils, household gadgets, painting frames, clothes stores, makeup, places to travel to, and pretty much every category under the sun.

In my painting life I also have my favorites.

I’ll list five and explain how I use them and why I love them so much.

My Resource Library. This is a collection of things I use ALL the time. Having things in one place saves me so much time. Not having to stop in the middle of a painting and think of what color I want to use and how to make it is so helpful. I just have to go to my Resource Binder, open it up, and I can find it quickly and easily.

A trowel. This hardware store staple is something I use often to skim across any section of my painting that I feel needs to be pushed back a little. I typically don’t put much paint on it, just a little.

Plastic wrap. This is something I use in almost every painting. What I love about it is that it can pick up paint on my palette and then when I press it on the canvas I’m always surprised by what turns out. And I love being surprised!

Restaurant trays. Yes, something as simple as large black restaurant trays are the best thing to organize your collage papers. And if you’re short on space, they are perfect because you can just stack them up one on top of another. I usually organize collage papers by color but sometimes according to the thickness of the collage paper, like when I cut up an old painting that is thicker than a piece of deli paper.

Large post-it papers. There are so many uses for these. My studio table is covered with them and when I’m finished a project I just pull them off and can quickly put new ones down. And since the used ones are covered in paint, I repurpose those by cutting or tearing them in sections and putting them in my collage trays.

So there you have it. These are five of the tools I use all the time in my painting practice.

If you would like to learn about more of my favorite tools and how and why I use them then you’ll want to go to my YouTube video HERE titled, “My 12 Favorite Painting Tools.”

I’m sure you have some of your own, so please leave me a comment below the video and let me in on what some of your favorites are.

We can all learn from each other.

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