Painting tip of the day: When framing your work, don't ever use dark colored matboard. A nice light colored white or cream matting will set off your work beautifully. Dark mats take away from your picture and don't make it stand out which is what you want it to do! Darker matting could be used however to make a thin border between your larger mat and your picture. Also make sure your border size is at least 3 inches. A 2-inch wide border is not big enough to offset your frame. Your frame should compliment your picture and voila you have a beautiful piece of work! Make sure you use acid free mat and backing board!

The paw print is just to the left of the tip of the tail. This painting was done with many glazes especially on the water. Many times if I don't get the color right the first time I can keep glazing in order to get the intensity I'm looking for.

Can you find the wet paw print on the deck?

Alizarin crimson and hooker's green deep are the colors I used for the background. Fooled you...it's not black! Complementary colors mixed together make great darks. What's good about it is the colors are richer plus if I add alizarin or hooker's green deep separately somewhere else throughout the painting it unifies it. Tip of the day!

Bowl of Oranges - Can you believe this is watercolor?

This is one of my favorites.....I guess I like it because the dark background brings out the oranges so well. Yummy!


Do you want to know how I made this dark background?