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I'm renting gallery space with Kansas City Design Collective, located in the Kansas City Crossroads!  I'm displaying & selling handmade, original watercolor cards and paintings, and a few sets of card prints. All of the art at KCDC is exclusive--I don't have these works listed anywhere else at the moment. Stop by the gallery to check it out, participate in one of the events, or purchase one of the works via the KCDC website!

"Alla prima" is a term I just discovered last week. It means "at first attempt" or "all in one go" and I just love this idea! It describes my favorite way to paint and it makes it sound so much more legitimate. "Hello, I'm Jen Roberts and I paint alla prima."  It just sounds fancy that way! Wikipedia also tells me the French version of this is "au premier coup" which I like quite a bit too (possibly due to my years spent studying French in college!). Painting alla prima just fits my impatient nature. I don't want to fiddle...

Are you familiar with the saying "the ever receding goal of perfection"? I think about this concept a lot because I have a tendency to only see what I need to improve on!I have to remind myself to stop at regular intervals to look back and see my progress. I've been doing some of that in the last few weeks. I think because I cut back on my studio time some at the beginning of the month, I had more time to just sit with and review my work. I had been working consistently for many months before this, and...

I recently discovered a new artist who I'm slightly obsessed with: Gwenn Seemel. She has an incredibly distinctive style and huge backlog of blog posts for me to catch up on. I was recently going through a series of her 17 tips for loving your own art, and thinking about how to apply them to my own work.Many of the items on her list are opposites, such as suggestions 1 & 2: find other artists' work that you consider boring, and learn to appreciate other artists' work. So lately I've been trying to think really critically about my reaction to...

I've seen a lot of advice around the internet on how to overcome fear of the blank page as an artist. I can totally see how that huge, unblemished white expanse that you spent your hard earned dollars on could be intimidating. Much more often however, I experience fear of the second layer.  Putting down a beautiful first wash is easy. Watercolor's flow and mind of its own means it will do amazing things without much work from me. Deciding what to paint on top of that--without screwing the whole thing up--is hard! I often buckle under the pressure, and end up...