Palette Knife Painting

Have you been wanting to try to add a bit more texture, a bit more interest in your paintings and have a bit more fun while you do it? Let's try some palette knife painting. I'm Katie Lydiard, and I'll show you how I go about palette knife painting. So there are lots of different techniques that you can experiment and play around with while you experiment on your paintings. So I have been doing palette knife painting for a little while.

Um, I started out kind of with this technique of laying down long strokes of color that kind of mixed together to get this abstract. I was going for kind of an abstract wood type experience on this canvas, and then what I would do is paint something over the top of it. It was going to be a still life that I painted over it. And you can see kind of that effect here with this little bird, this little bird, unfortunately. Um, was outside of my studio one day, but he made a beautiful little painting, and that same effect of I had that long strokes of palette knife paint underneath and then the subject on top.

You will have ridges to contend with as you paint because you are going to be using a lot of paint. A lot of thick paint to cover this canvas, though you can see in here where some of the raw canvas is showing through. I do have it toned so it's not like jarringly white underneath there, but it is definitely raw canvas compared to the ridges. You can feel and hear those ridges of paint. But it's really fun to do, and I'm gonna demo a little bit how to do that, or how I like to do that.

There's a lot of different shapes and sizes of palette knives, whatever you're comfortable with. These are my two favorites. This one is my favorite for mixing because it has a long area here that I can get all of my paint off of my palette. Palette knife, that is, um, instead of having it build up on this area. And this one is really great for cutting in and getting some nice crisp edges with.

So I'm just gonna mix up quickly some colors here. And show you how I go about palette knife painting. I'll start out with one color. We'll go this way, and you'll see that it will start to kind of run out, then go to another area. Just keep kind of repeating with a slightly different variation in the mixture.

And I let them kind of interact together. Without trying to control too much. Of what's going on. It's a bit more spontaneous of a way of painting. It's not typically how I approach painting, but it is fun just to kind of get a little messy and see what you come up with.

So of course I would cover this canvas completely. Uh, it does take some time because you are using a lot of paint, and it doesn't spread as easily because it is thick paint and you're not using a medium, um, because you don't want to use too much medium, especially on the beginning layers. So I'm just using straight paint, and so it's not going to um be able to spread as much over the entire uh canvas like I would if I were using mineral spirits on the first layer of a painting like I normally do. But another way that I like to use palette knife painting is as a bit of a textural interest on my painting. So this is a painting that's long been finished, but I feel like it needs just a little something to make it a bit more interesting.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to mix up a little color here, and I'm going to do some impasto work. Impasto is just raised, thicker paint on the painting. So get that, I kind of get that loaded up onto the palette knife. You can see a little bead of paint there. And then I'm just gonna come in here, using the short edge instead of the long edge.

I'm just going to kind of touch on the edges of these petals. Where I want to add some interest. I can also mix up a bit of green here. And fun tip is, whenever you mix a green, you'll probably be adding a little bit of red, otherwise the green tends to be really acidic. OK, and I can load up some paint on the long edge here, and I'm just going to add a little bit to my stems.

You can see that nice crisp edge there. So it's a really quick, easy way to add a little bit more interest, a little bit of, you know, variety to your paintings, and have a bit of fun along the way. Give it a try, experiment a little bit with some palette knife work and see what you can come up with.