Hi, I'm Linda.
I created a company called Paint Along.
Check us out at paintalongnyc.com.
We have really fun painting workshops in Nashville
and New York.
The palette knife is a great tool to use in
painting with acrylics.
They come in a lot of different sizes and
shapes, you can find them in your craft store.
I like this particular one, it's one of my
favorite knives, it's got a long edge and
then it has a short edge here and I can use
if for a lot of different applications.
I love to do paintings of flowers with my
palette knife because I can a lot of different
size petals with this particular one.
This one is mainly used for blending paint
so you might want to save one of these little
guys and have one of these in your tool kit
just for blending colors.
If you're planning on using the palette knife
and you're blending your colors, make sure
that you use a flat palette because you have
to be able to pick the paint up with the knife.
So, let's see, we have some other little knives
here.
This is a very small, little knife and this
one can be used for small details in landscapes
and florals and in still lifes.
What I'd like to show you a little bit about,
is how we pick up the paint with the palette
knife and how we apply it to the canvas, especially
in this case, with the tree trunk.
I'll use the green on top of the brown just
so that you can see it.
And the way that I'm going to do this, is
I'm scraping through the paint and I'm picking
the paint up on the bottom side of the knife.
I'm right handed so I use the knife this way
and I apply pressure from the right.
So the paint is on the bottom half of the
knife and as I come to the canvas, I just
scrape across and you can see how the paint
is coming off onto the canvas and the branches.
If I want to build some grass and some more
texture on the bottom of the canvas, I'm going
to put a layer of grass coming across the
bottom here.
This gives me a really, different creative
form of a landscape.
It's not just painted on, it's almost just
laid on top of the canvas.
I'm going to use the short end of the palette
knife this time to give myself some little
blades of grass coming up and I'm just going
to scrape up and those are some basic techniques
for using a palette knife.
