No! If you've been following along, you may recall that I worked in acrylics starting in the fall of 2023 and through this summer. Before last fall, I hadn't had much experience with acrylic paint, and it was a nice way to switch things up. I've since been loving oils again for the past few months. I enjoy both, but I find it tricky to switch back and forth between the two on a day-to-day basis. It takes a few days for me to adjust to the changes between the two mediums and the ways they behave. That being said, I've been in France visiting my grandma and it isn't as practical for me to travel with oils, so I'm using acrylics again and will likely continue to do so until the holiday shopping season ends to ensure that my paintings dry quickly enough to ship by Christmas. If I had to pick purely on appearance, I'd say I prefer the look of the paintings I do with oils, but that could be influenced by my slight preference for and greater level of comfort with oil painting. I always prefer the appearance of paintings I had fun doing.

I don't have a great answer to this beyond the advice that helped me a lot when I first started: Paint what you see, not what you think you see. This means don't paint something the way you imagine it to look when you picture it in your head. Instead, paint the planes, shapes, and colors you see when you look objectively at your subject matter. For instance, grass is green, but if you're looking at a meadow at sunset, it might actually appear somewhere between gold and chartreuse, and that's how you should paint it if you want it to look convincing. For a better answer to this question, search "paint what you see, not what you know" online and read as much as you can because while I live by this saying, I'm terrible at explaining it!

So far I've tried oils, acrylics, and gouache. I recently decided I want to try watercolors. I haven't messed around with them since elementary school and feel much more equipped to work with them now!


As far as non-paint mediums go, I would like to spend some time getting into handbuilding and sculpting with clay. I have tried wheel throwing and don't enjoy it. I'm a realist at heart, and would love to try to create some figurative sculptures!

I think the minimum varies for each artist and their painting style. For me, these are the things I wouldn't want to oil paint without.

1. Gamsol odorless mineral spirits. This is the only solvent I own. I use it to clean my brushes and loosen up my paint.

2. Oil paint. My palette changes depending on my painting, but my most used colors are titanium white, cadmium red light, lemon yellow (PY 175 pigment), permanent rose/quinacridone red (PV19), ultramarine blue, phthalo emerald (PG 36), and cobalt teal (pb 28, I use this one). I occasionally throw in another color like mars black, yellow ochre, or burnt sienna, but that's less standard for me.

3. An alkyd medium. Think Liquin, Galkyd, etc. My long-time favorite is Winsor & Newton Liquin impasto medium. I can't paint without an alkyd medium because the drying time is just intolerable to me without it. That said, many artists don't use it at all and instead use linseed or walnut oil (very slow drying, not something I enjoy using regularly) or only mineral spirits. If you're not familiar with working with an alkyd medium, it's pretty simple. I squirt a dollop onto my palette or into a little dish and mix a little dab into every paint color I mix up. The exact amount you should use comes down to experimentation and personal preference. These mediums affect the texture and finish of the paint, and most importantly for me, make it dry sooooo much faster. Each medium imparts different qualities to the workability of the paint and the appearance of the finished piece; the manufacturer will list all that info and usually provide instructional videos and tips for working with it.

4. A recent discovery that I now won't oil paint without is baby wipes. I don't know why they work so well, but I use them to clean sticky paint off my hands and brush handles and to wipe my palette paper down so I can start fresh with mixing instead of having to load up a new piece of palette paper with paint every time I run out of clean surface area.


Beyond that, I think the other necessary materials are the same as painting with any other medium; painting surface, gesso, brushes, etc.

I use professional-grade oil paints from Gamblin, Winsor & Newton, Maimeri, and Utrecht. I think it's best to choose professional grade whenever possible instead of student-grade paint because the pigment load truly is superior in most cases. Finding the brands with textures you prefer may involve trial and error. For instance, I have used titanium white from all the brands I mentioned above, and my favorite one is Maimeri's because it has a slightly creamier/less stiff texture than the others. That said, any professional-grade paint from a reputable brand sold by art stores will usually do the trick just fine.

It depends on where I'm traveling. If I'm on vacation, I'm not working. If I'm driving to my parents' house in Indiana, I load a big box with panels and everything I need so I can work in my childhood bedroom while I visit. To take things back home to Chicago, I put a paper towel over the surface of any dry paintings to protect them from scratches and then stack them back in the box I brought them in. I leave wet/tacky paintings on top and hope nothing shifts during the drive, lol. When I go to visit family in France, I use acrylic or gouache and try to keep it minimal with flat panels and only 6 or 7 paint colors in small tubes. I don't travel with oil because I can't always count on it drying fast enough to carry home in a suitcase without smearing.


Striking the right balance of working/time off is challenging for me, as a self-employed person. I try to weigh what's important, like spending time with family and relaxing, vs. how much money I want/need to make. Any time I take off is technically a lost opportunity cost, and it can be hard not to think about everything that takes me away from my studio in a negative light at times. PTO isn't a thing. If you're not at work, you're not making money. On a related topic, Instagram business gurus/art coaches will tell you that prints are passive income, and I guess they sort of are when compared to the labor that goes into creating an original piece of artwork. Yes, prints can help you earn money with less physical work, but nobody's going to buy enough of your prints to help float you financially if you're not marketing them, and marketing is not passive! It's a lot of work and takes up a lot of time. At the same time, being a full-time artist requires a huge amount of computer/administrative work that can be done from anywhere on a laptop, so there are aspects of the career that are highly flexible for travel, depending on how you manage your time.

This answer will mostly apply to intentionally staged still-life compositions. It's pretty simple at its core and a crucial step in painting your own unique still life. I strongly encourage you to get in the habit of doing this instead of painting public domain reference photos from the internet. It's so much more enjoyable to paint things that are perfectly set up to be painted how YOU want them to look than it is to paint something that someone else prepared that isn't quite right. Here's the gist of it:

1. Consider the type of lighting you enjoy. Direct sunlight? If so, coming from directly overhead outside at noon, or shining through a window in the morning? If artificial light, what temperature and intensity, and what angle do you want it to come from? The size, shape, and direction of shadows can serve as important elements of a composition; plan accordingly. I prefer natural light, so I do a lot of preparation to get a perfect composition. If you're going to have to wait till a certain time or place to create a still life with the lighting you want, set up the objects in advance so that when the light hits just right, you can focus on making smaller tweaks and not have to worry about the light changing.

2. Put your objects where you want them. The way you position them initially probably isn't how they're going to end up, so don't get too attached to an arrangement. You'll be moving them around a lot until you like how everything looks. I take pictures from all different angles of a bunch of slightly different setups. I add and remove objects as I go. I usually end up with 100+ images and delete like 90 of them.

3. Purge the photos. Delete the ones that aren't that great and then edit the cropping of your favorites until the composition feels perfectly balanced.

4. Paint the best one. Or, if you're like me, paint 5 of your faves and end up with several near-identical paintings!

Hmm, I've personally rarely done work expressly to practice color theory or value accuracy. Anything you paint is a practice in color theory and value because everything visible is composed of colors and values. It can be fun to do studies with ultra-limited or analogous color palettes to practice relative color, but I haven't done much of that. I have spent the past few years painting as much as possible, trying to make good choices in every painting, and learning from the bad decisions I've made in paintings. I recommend doing that to improve every aspect of your work. When it comes to color theory, I kind of just mix up the vibrant colors that tickle my brain at every reasonable opportunity in a given painting while simultaneously trying to practice some restraint and balance the high-chroma colors out with shades of gray. Because to me, if everything is colorful and high chroma, nothing is, relatively speaking. I need to anchor the vibrant colors I gravitate to with more muted tones to balance the overall appearance and appease my individual taste for color harmony.

Gamsol, exclusively. I use this for both thinning paints and to clean my brushes. I never wash my brushes with soap or anything, only Gamsol.