Photographing your set up

If you have to take down your set-up due to this

or that reason, photograph it from exactly the

same position from which you are painting it.

AND photograph it from above as well. How things

look when only viewed from the front can be

deceiving.

This is the set-up of one of my students. It is

quite the interesting challenge to do a painting

when everything in it is in the same color family.

Well except for the orange marble!

More on Tube Tops

This is not my original idea, but it sure is a great

one. I got it from an art magazine years ago and

only wish I could acknowledge the clever artist

who shared it.

These are called 'eye hooks'. They are a great

solution for caps that have disappeared. But better

still, they are a great solution for the way the necks

of paint tubes get all loaded with paint and it is

impossible to screw on the caps because the screw

threads are full of dried paint.

You will notice that there are different sized screws.

Different brands of paint have different sized holes.

So experiment by buying several sizes. Even if the

size you have doesn't fill the hole completely, it will

keep a channel open for you to get the paint out

easily.

I have found that I almost never bought a size big

enough when I started doing this years ago.

The artist who wrote about this did this with all

his paint tubes and then hung them from something

he made so he could easily find his paints. I never

did that. Just doing this was a great help.

Paint tube tops

After an artist has been using tube paints for a while,

the caps can become more difficult to get off. This is

true for all paint mediums that come in tubes, even

watercolor. The two tried and true methods of getting

off stuck caps are plyers and then using a lit match

to soften the hardened paint around the edges of the

cap.

There is still another way to handle this, but that is a

post for another day!