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Orange & blue is one of my favorite color combos to use in my abstract work. Color theory tells us that complementary colors mix to make neutrals, and I've had the best results with blue and orange. Red and green (or more accurately, in my experiments, viridian and a cool red) often work as well, but I've had zero luck finding a pleasing combination of purple and yellow. And I've tried! A LOT. Instead, purple and yellow just make mud, almost without fail, and the worst part is it's not even interesting mud. It's just ugly brown. Give me a lovely granulating...

Have you heard of Yupo paper? It's a tree-free, synthetic paper from Legion. Like many watercolor supplies, it's not particularly cheap, so I wanted to just dip my toes barely into the water with a tiny, 5x7 in. 10 sheet pad. I've seen it around on Instagram, but I ignored the lesson on it in the Watercolor Mastery class I took since I didn't have the supply at the time. (Honestly, I am also such a stereotype of a man--I hate to ask for directions or read instructions!) It took me a few days to work up to trying it...

Here are my suggestions for the absolute, bare minimum supplies to get started with watercolor. (These are not affiliate links--I haven't bothered to figure that system out yet, so they're just my legitimate recommendations.) Paint A Winsor & Newton Cotman set. (I have this specific one.) Even two years later it's still a great travel set, now that I've replaced a couple of the colors with ones I use more often. It also came with a tiny brush that I wouldn't recommend and that I've removed. While I also purchased a Sennelier 5 color set, and a Holbein 12 color set, I don't...

I'd heard the word before; I knew it was a color. I knew it was dark; it was often used in reference to night, or ink. Indigo. It was the first watercolor pigment I fell in love with. It was so bold, so strong on the little swatch card I was making. At the time, I was still struggling to get rich colors from my little dried out pans of watercolor, and the intensity of the color immediately grabbed me. I started collecting the color in all the brands I came across. I have it in Winsor & Newton, Daniel Smith,...