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Beginner Palette Knife Painting

Paint this tree with a palette knife.

Paint a tree with a palette knife

A New Adventure

If you’ve never painted with a palette knife, it will definitely be a new adventure.

It feels different in your hand, it responds different, it moves the paint different.  Heck, everything about it is different.  And with that difference comes a new learning curve.  I had a co-worker once who always reminded me that I had an opportunity with every new thing I had to learn about a job.

So, you have an opportunity here.

Last week we learned how to put a background on for a simple landscape.  That background was created for such a painting as this.

If you haven’t watched the first video, you might want to right here.

Now that you’ve got your background painted, lets move on to actually painting the tree.

I really want to encourage you here not to be frustrated or intimated with this painting.  Yes, it’s much different than painting with a brush, but it is definitely fun and you will learn so much about loosening up on your own paintings.

One problem beginners all seem to struggle with is painting toooo tight.  You can’t paint tight with a palette knife and this will help you understand what you actually need and what you don’t need at all in a painting for it to read well.

A palette knife painting has much more texture in it.  The paint is thicker and responds differently to your touch.  Because it has so much texture it definitely looks different than a painting with a brush.

I did a tutorial a few weeks ago on painting a simple landscape where I basically painted the same tree with a brush as I did in this palette knife tutorial.

Comparison of palette knife and brush tree painting

I’m sure you see the difference in the two paintings.  I wish you could feel the difference in the two.  The one on the left has lots of texture to it and the one on the right is very smooth.

Hope you enjoyed this.  I have a free painting class on this website you can access by clicking this button.

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Thanks so much for stopping by today.  Let’s paint together real soon.