The Spin Doctor likes spinning, crochet, knitting and weaving and drawing (charcoal, pen and ink), colouring (pen and ink, ProMarker, tinted charcoal), painting (acrylic, watercolour, gouache and very, very rarely oil), papercraft (dyes, inks, alcohol inks, die-cutting) and mixed-media. Through this website he shares projects, tips, product reviews and gives help where he can to those who need it.
So, I have a few little mini-announcements to make. I've got over 2,500 subs on YouTube now, which is beyond anything I ever expected, and this month is my one year anniversary of this iteration of my YouTube presence :) I will be doing some anniversary giveaways - watch this space. If you've not already seen it, I looked at the 35 new Schmincke colours yesterday - this (below this post) video's already been really popular and I think a lot of people are enamoured by Phthalo Sapphire (PB15:6 - the same as the Phthalo Sapphire that Winsor and Newton had in their Desert Collection) - but were struggling to find it in their area or at a good price - I've seen today that you can buy that at Jackson's as they have plenty of stock, AND they ship worldwide for reasonable prices - plus these are some killer reductions for a brand new release, right?!: Full Pan (RRP £8.00, £6.30) Half Pan (RRP £6.00, £4.24) 5mL Tube (RRP £6.00, £4.42) 15mL Tube (RRP £11.00, £8.74) I wanted to let you all know about a few NEW THINGS I'm trialling to help my audience even more! I was going to do a Spin Doctor Speaks video but I decided to write it instead - I wanted to watch TV at the same time ;) I often have the TV on in the background when painting just for not having silence, or I listen to music sometimes - I did see in the comments on one of The Frugal Crafter's videos last week that a few of you like to listen to audiobooks when you're painting, which sounds like a great idea and one I am going to be trying. I noticed Amazon USA has a deal on right now for 2 free audiobooks if you sign up for a FREE 30 day trial of Audible, which I thought would be worth sharing with you all? It seems Amazon UK has a similar deal with 1 free audiobook if you sign up for a FREE 30 day trial of Audible. The Spin Doctor's Emporium Sadly, this is only really of use to my Amazon.com-using (USA, mostly) peeps, but it will help y'all a lot! I've set up an online store with Amazon (you can see an embryonic version - totally unformatted - under "Emporium" on my navigation bar at the top of my website) which allows me to annotate products and help direct you to things that might be useful. For example, for those who follow my Surgery series of watercolour lessons, each week's supplies will have a store page to help you grab them really quick with no effort, if you need to restock your colours. I'm going to use this to help guide you through things like which colours you need in palettes for different uses - once it goes live properly, I'll make a formal announcement on YouTube. Postmortems with The Spin Doctor Yeah, yeah, it's morbid, but we all have those paintings from time to time where we just don't know why it went wrong, right? You can get professional 1:1 feedback on your paintings from some online sources for up to £30 per session (US$50), but sometimes you only need to hear "you used too much water", and then it's not worth paying it. So in this new series, you will be able to submit your paintings to me online and I will show them (without names/etc!!!) on screen and talk through my thoughts for maybe 1-2 minutes on each one, once a month and only one painting per person per month. I'm going to do it to see how it goes - but if I get 500 paintings in the first month, I'm quitting right away! The Spin Doctor's Atelier I have a thing for flowery English and I call rooms in my appartment my "front parlour", "bedchamber" and so on, because it makes me laugh - so my studio can be an "atelier", right? (Ah TELL ee ay) In this series I'll be letting you watch me create - a little like The Spin Doctor Sits, but that's more about trying other peoples' methods/ideas to see how they work for me - but this is more about original material. The Spin Doctor's Clinic This is going to be a LIVE Q&A/quick-tips-demo where you ask questions and I answer them/show you things quickly - anything can happen! It'll only be once or twice a month at most until I get a feel for how useful folk are finding it.
I'm a very lucky boy, because Schmincke have VERY kindly sent me a very large number of watercolour paints to try out and review (a very large number of similar magnitude is formally known as "one f*cktonne", FYI). I've recorded a video (embedded at the end of this post) of me swatching out all 35 colours in the sampler they sent to me, but I've got ACTUAL TUBES AND PANS so I will be doing some proper paintings with them in due course to try them out which will be in Part 2 of the review later in March. I will also be doing reviews of Schmincke's other watercolours as they sent me the entire series in various formats, which will be a joy! 140 colours!!! If you're not au fait with Schmincke, they're a fantastic company with beautiful paints that lift-off onto your brush SO easily and which are very easy to control because they carefully optimise the vehicle for each and every colour - so they all behave optimally - they also physically cram the maximum amount of pigment into every paint, so you're getting a lot for your money and they really last a long time. You can see them in action in my previous review of their really cute 12-half-pan set, which has a lovely selection of colours. It's worth noting this video was the first proper outing of that Size 10 Prolene Plus travel brush I featured previously - it's SO good - nothing but praise for it and it worked great on the paints that are more stubborn to re-wet. You can buy these 35 new paints from Jackson's where they are very reasonably priced and ship worldwide - they are selling almost all of them at up to 30% off of the RRP, which represents a fantastic saving. I use Jackson's all the time and they always give prompt service and are great at customer care - I can honestly say that they're one of my favourite retailers of art materials and they always have great prices. If you want any of the original Schmincke watercolours, you can also buy those from Jackson's too. I also noticed they had some great deals on sets of Schmincke paints too - from as little as £39.60 (reduced from £59.00) - which is US$48.00 down from US$72.50. You can also get Schmincke 12-pan sets from various vendors worldwide (all prices correct at time of posting): Amazon USA: US$191.31, or US$62.74 if you don't mind a long lead time! Amazon UK: £59.76 reduced to £54.01 Amazon Canada: CDN$170.92 reduced to CND$142.96 DickBlick U$227.55 reduced to US$155.59 [NB: this is the set of FULL pans, not half pans, which means this is one KILLER deal - not only 31% off of the list-price but even cheaper than the half pan set usually is and TWICE the amount of paint!] JACKSON'S ART SUPPLIES: £63.19 reduced to £49.50. [don't forget, if you're using Amazon USA or UK, you can make major savings on shipment using Amazon Prime, which you can try for FREE for one month right now - sign up (USA) or sign up (UK)]
Coming tonight (for me anyway - Wed 15th February 2017, 2100h GMT, 1600h EST, 1500h CST, 1300h PST; Thu 16th February 2017, 0500h AWST, 0800h AEDT), is the first instalment of my review of the Schmincke Horadam 12-half-pan set - once it goes live I'll link it from this post. This set is BEAUTIFUL and has exceptional flow and wets SO easily. They are poured pans, not extruded, and look so pretty once they are all unwrapped - well, you'll see for yourself in the video I guess! Schmincke are a high-end German watercolour house and make stunning products with an exceptional range of colours. Whilst I normally prefer tube paints, I was pleased to try these in half-pans because The Frugal Crafter has recently reviewed the tube versions, so we each got to experience something a little different. This set has already migrated into my work bag with some watercolour postcards in case I catch a good sunset on my way home, so I can really road-test them before my Part 2 review in a few weeks, which will explore how they stand-up next to other brands and little tricks I've learned with them and so on. The 12-half-pan set contains the basic colours you really need for en plein air in most any location - a cool and a warm of each yellow, red, blue and green, a yellow earth, a red earth, a brown and a black - and they are: Lemon Yellow, Cadmium Yellow Light, Permanent Carmine, Cadmium Red Light, Prussian Blue, Finest Ultramarine, Phthalo Green, Permanent Green Olive, Yellow Ochre, English-Venetian Red, Sepia and Ivory Black. All are single-pigment pace the Permanent Green Olive (2 pigments) and the Sepia (3 pigments). You also get a Size 5 Round Da Vinci travel brush, which is pretty decent. If you want to buy this set, you can do so from: Amazon USA: US$191.31 Amazon UK: £59.76 £54.01 Amazon Canada: CDN$170.92 CND$142.96 DickBlick.com: U$227.55 US$155.59 [NB: this is the set of full pans, not half pans, which means this is one KILLER deal - not only 31% off of the list-price but even cheaper than the half pan set usually is and TWICE the amount of paint!] Jackson's Art Supplies: £63.19£55.00 £49.50 [as well as their normal amazing rate, they have an extra 15% off of Schmincke Horadam products right now!] If the above is a little out of your price range, they have a near-identical student set (Schmincke Akademie) with a lower pigment load, effectively, which is much more economical. I have not tried this set, but if you want me to, please leave a comment and I'll look into it, but I thought I would link in here for those who like the paints but want a more economical option: Amazon USA: US$69.99 Amazon UK: £30.86 Amazon Canada: N/A DickBlick.com: N/A Jackson's Art Supplies: N/A
has a deal on right now for 2 free audiobooks if you sign up for a FREE 30 day trial of Audible
