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.
The HK Holbein Watercolours brand are made in Osaka, Japan, and boast a number of special properties. I noticed in the Jackson's Art Supplies in the UK had listed them as higher quality than Daniel Smith or Winsor and Newton in their 2017 Watercolour Catalogue, so I was intrigued! I procured a Starter Set (aka Introductory Set), which contains Vermillion Hue, Carmine Lake, Viridian Hue, Permanent Yellow Deep, Burnt Sienna and Peacock Blue. I reviewed them in my recent video which you can watch here:
If you want to buy Holbein watercolours to try them for yourself, you can try the following vendors - personally, I think Jackson's have the best deals and shipping prices and they have a better range of stock as a rule: Jackson's Art Supplies UK based company with fantastic customer service and have international shipping options and a LOT of excellent discounts! Amazon UK They have a good selection and some good deals but if you want individual colours, Jackson's is probably better. Amazon USA Again, much like the UK site but a good selection of individual colours.
If you want the specific set that I tried out to see for yourself:
I've been asked by one of my punters dear lovely subscribers if I can provide links for Amazon.ca in my videos and blog posts, which I've now done on my most recent video and will do on all future videos that I produce. That now covers Amazon UK, Amazon USA and Amazon CA, which add up to 95% of my audience-base - as such, most people should be able to buy products now and support my work. Remember, I reinvest anything I make from affiliate links and Google Adsense back into my channel and website at the moment and intend to continue doing so for the time being. It doesn't cost you a penny (or cent!) more to shop via affiliate or associate links, but the vendor pays a small commission to the YouTuber or blogger or website owner and it's a great way to support peoples' work and it also saves you a lot of time if we've linked directly to the products you're looking for. If you want me to look into arts and crafts vendors for any other regions, please let me know!
I've expanded on my reviews of the BRIGHTS and NEUTRALS sets with a video over on my youtube channel - this waxes lyrical a bit more and cross references other videos by myself and other youtubers that you may find useful if you're interested in these paint sets.
So over the last week or so, I've had a lot of questions about pigments and paints and their behaviour - which is something I really don't mind - I'm more than happy to help people understand some of the whys you can do X or can't do Y of watercolour painting. This lead to me to have an idea, which I've now spun into a brand new YouTube series! Colour Chemistry is probably going to be uploaded 1-2 times a week for now, until I run low on ideas, I guess! I've kicked off with two episodes thus far, which I've embedded below: Episode 1 covers the absolute fundamental - what is colour? How does light work? What do we really mean by colour? What's wavelength and how does it relate to colour? And above all, what do we really see when looking at a paint on the page? Episode 2 uncovers the hidden secret of Opera Rose, one of my all time favourite paints - its beautiful, ethereal pink is owing to a fluorescent dye as part of the binder. In this video I explain what fluorescence is - a little bit of fundamental quantum physics, but I promise you, it's at a level anyone can follow!
UPDATE 15th June 2016: I've made some worksheets for this technique and put them on my Downloads page to help start people off. We all struggle with a lack of inspiration for painting regularly - personally I started using painting a small botanical each evening and posting them on Twitter under #bedtimebotanical a good motivation (please feel free to join me in that!), but there's another method I also use - I call it "three jar inspiration". If you use it, please tweet it or tag it on YouTube (etc) with #3jarspaint so we can share with one another our outcomes. I came up with this for myself as a means to force myself to use a wider range of mediums and to stretch my range of what I paint/draw - it has worked really well for that! You need: * Three jars of any kind. * Paper (typing paper or scraps, 3 colours is ideal). Label the jars, if you like - the should be labelled "What" "Style" and "How" - the "How" jar is actually optional. If you only paint in one medium e.g. watercolour and you don't want to use any other media, you can stick to just two jars. In the "What" jar, put pieces of paper on which you have written a whole load of subjects for painting - these can be really specific like "The Sea", "A Banana", "Two Sheep", "A Beetle", or can be more figurative like "Playtime", "Laughter", "Deep Love", "Gaia's Might". You can use anything you like! If you like to use images for reference, you could swap this jar for a shoebox full of postcards or printed out images, for example. If you don't use reference photos - or perhaps want to start to get away from them - you can stick to using words on slips of paper and then only look up a reference photo when you really need it. In the "Style" jar, put pieces of paper on which you have written a wide variety of styles, such as "Loose", "Abstract", "Impressionist", "Tudor", "Cubist", "Decalcomania" - they don't have to be specifically painting styles - you could use - "Steampunk", "Vibrant", "Twisted", "Nightmare", "Stormy", "Dreamlike", "Utopia" - use your imagination! Or for a REAL challenge, put in some names of painters you admire! I've put in names of YouTubers I love as it helps me to try out their distinctive styles! In the optional "How" jar, put pieces of paper on which you have written the different media you have to hand - put each one in a few times, obviously. "Charcoal", "Papercraft", "Cardmaking", "Mixed Media", "Art Journal", "Oil Pastel", "Alcohol Ink", "Stamping", "Pyrography", "Oil", "Gouache", "Alkyd", "Crayon", "Chalk", "Chalk Pastel", "Acrylic"... How it works! All you do is firstly decide when you want to paint/draw etc - for me, it's 2200h, so whatever time it is, find another time maybe 12-24h before which will be the time you use the jars. For me, that's 0600h. I get up and first thing, I grab a piece of paper from each jar - that tells me what I am producing at 2200h so I have all day to think up what or how I'm going to do this - you could be doing "Wasp, Steampunk, Papercraft" one day and "Seascape, Loose, Watercolour" the next - or if you use names of artists you could end up trying to mimic Leonid Afremov's oil painting style using decoupage to create a banana - in this way it REALLY stretches you as an artist! Even if you only use two jars (or one jar and one shoebox), you are still challenged with doing watercolours (or whatever) of "sunset over Mount St Helens in Picasso style" or "tip of a ball-point pen in an art deco style" - that's a great challenge! Happy painting!
I've started interacting with people on YouTube this year, really for the first time in spite of using YouTube since it began - I wanted to share a few of my 2016 First Quarter favourites - just 5 channels will get selected every 3 months - not always obvious once I interact with a lot - just once that have touched me in some way. Shonduras - What a nice guy. I found him totally by accident just last weekend and I was won over in seconds by his energy and sense of fun. If you have time, watch his video entitled "Draw My Life..." - I watched it and it was totally not what I expected. What a genuinely lovely, pro-active and enterprising guy. His vlogs with his wife and daughter are so cute too, if you need a fix of babycuteness...! [I don't but even I'll admit Adley's very sweet] Jennifer McGuire - One of my first discoveries of 2016 actually - right around Xmas/New Year. Often I'm in too much pain to sleep so I like awake watching YouTube - somehow I ended up watching Blick Art Materials Lesson Plan videos, which I got hooked on, and then YouTube suggested I might enjoy Jennifer's videos. It was actually watching those that made me decide 2016 was the year to stop painting in secret, as I have for 20 years! Kristina Werner - I came to her via Jennifer and she made me realise I could share my paintings as cards, if nothing else, and that I was more creative than I thought. Her beautiful hand lettering is something I will never master, however! SupDaily06 - This is a totally honest, totally frank and warts-and-all vlog from a guy called Chris Thompson. He uses it often as an outlet and a means to vent, which can be hard to watch at times as you can really feel his pain. He's a nice guy though and makes a lot of effort to support LGB and trans* people and I really like that about him. He speaks a lot of common sense and I enjoy listening to him. Dave Cad - This is one of those vlogs where I have no idea how I found him. But what's not to love? He's hilariously funny, full of energy and has a big inane grin for a start! He sometimes does videos speaking in Finlandsvensk (he's English but his ladyfriend is Findlandsvensk), which are really interesting (if you speak Swedish, of course!).
