Tag: artist

4 min read
Artist Review of the Month News Feed Articles palette Studio and General Watercolour Painting

Artist Review of Jackson’s Ceramic Palette

Jackson’s Ceramic Palette can be used with watercolour, inks, and dyes. Made from porcelain, it is easy to clean, will not stain, and will keep your paints wet for longer than a plastic palette which means a longer period for wet mixing. In this Artist Review of the Month, watercolour painter Virginia Pope shares how she uses the palette in her watercolour practice.     Artist Review of Jackson’s Ceramic Palette by Virginia Pope A studio piece. A thing of beauty is a joy forever. This palette certainly qualifies. The smooth bright whiteness is vital in helping you to clearly see your colours and the adjustments you make when mixing – it’s a pure and simple way of achieving your best result. This palette has weight, without being hefty and it will not move about. Plastic and metal palettes stain, so the true colour you are trying to achieve becomes a hit-and-miss affair. And as you add water to your paint it doesn’t hold together in one puddle as it does on ceramics, it gets busy, dividing into many sketchy small ones. Chasing these around to fill your brush is time-consuming and distracting, neither of these are welcomed when working …

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17 min read
art artist Artist Insights Features & Editorials News Feed Articles Oil Painting

Artist Insights: Petra Schott

In this Artist Insights film, German artist Petra Schott visits the Jackson’s Studio to discuss how she uses the unconscious in her freestyle abstract paintings, why it is sometimes necessary to ‘kill your darlings’ to move forward in your work, and her deep love of oils and oil sticks.   Artist Insights: Petra Schott     Contents 0:00 “Painting is one way to explore the unconscious” 0:38 Introduction 1:00 “My wish was to be a psychoanalyst” 1:42 “People ask me “how I could move from law to painting” 3:49 “Art school taught me how to go deeper” 4:19 “My work is always a mixture of figurative and abstract” 4:52 “You can put more emotion into abstract painting” 5:17 “My theme is my life” 6:17 “I can’t limit a painting to what my original intention was” 7:00 “Sometimes I start painting blindly with my left hand” 7:44 “I use brushes and my fingers” 8:37 “My scribbles are not always meant to be readable” 9:17 “I love painting on raw canvas” 10:09 “Kill your darlings” 11:23 “I love the finesse of Cy Twombly” 12:46 “I mostly use oil paints for their texture and saturation” 14:54 “Oil sticks give an extra touch to …

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7 min read
Expert Advice for Artists Features & Editorials Licensing News Feed Articles

Expert Advice on Licensing Your Artwork

This month we are looking into the curious world of licensing your artwork. Many of you have asked questions about what it means, why one should do it, how to go about licensing your art, and the challenges around copyright. So that’s what we’re going to cover. Above image: Yukka Flat, 2019, Charles Inge, Acrylic on canvas, 120 x 160 cm | 47.2 x 62.9 in     Expert Advice on Licensing Your Artwork What Does It Mean to License Your Artwork? Licensing your artwork means allowing a person, business, company or organisation to use your work for their product or project. This could be for a physical item like a book cover or a cushion, or an advertising campaign, either in print or online. You may also be asked if the original piece can be featured in promotional photography for marketing or TV/film. As creator of the work, you will need to grant them the license to use it and be paid for doing so. There are various ways in which you can receive payment. If it’s an advertising campaign you are likely to be offered a flat fee or ‘buy out’ for a set term of usage. For …

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8 min read
Artist Interviews Jackson's Art Prize 2025 JAP 2025 JAP Judges News Feed Articles

Meet Anne Rothenstein, Jackson’s Art Prize 2025 Guest Judge

Artist Anne Rothenstein, RWA Academician represented by Stephen Friedman, is a Guest Judge for Jackson’s Art Prize 2025. In this interview, she discusses the transformative impact of gallery representation on her career, the physical feeling that great art evokes, and why originality and obsession are key to great work.     Interview with Anne Rothenstein Josephine: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your artistic practice? Anne: I’m Anne Rothenstein and I’m a painter. I would describe myself as a conventional painter in oils, but I’m untrained, so I’ve had to teach myself how to use oil paint and that’s been a part of my whole practice. I paint on wood as I don’t like canvas and I like the grain of the wood, which often comes into the work. I come from a family of artists, but that doesn’t necessarily inform my work. I stopped painting for quite a long time and spent 10 years being an actress. So when I came back to it, I was completely out of the art world and had to start teaching myself how to paint again. It’s been extraordinary, interesting, and exciting. I’m still learning, who isn’t learning? I’m …

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8 min read
granulation holbein News Feed Articles Watercolour Watercolour Painting

Review of Holbein Artists’ Granulating Watercolours

The new Holbein Artists’ Granulating Watercolours are an exciting addition to Holbein’s continually expanding line. I tested all 24 colours, and picked out some of my favourites that I believe would make a great addition to a watercolour set.     When I first heard that Holbein was producing granulating watercolours, my interest definitely piqued! I am a fan of Holbein’s premixed colours – I use their Acryla Gouache, Irodori Gouache, and pencils regularly across my mixed media practice. Here, I will be looking at the properties of the new Holbein Artists’ Granulating Watercolour paints, how they perform, and how I might choose to use them. I had the opportunity to test the Holbein Artists’ Granulating Watercolour set of 24 x 5 ml, and was inspired by its beautifully varied and exciting colour palette. Some of these colours may even surpass my previous favourites from Schmincke.     Consistency and Performance of the Holbein Artists’ Granulating Watercolours The Holbein Artists’ Granulating Watercolours perform consistently well across every colour. There was little to no separation between the binder and pigments in the box that I tried, meaning that the ‘goop’ that you can sometimes get when you open a fresh tube …

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7 min read
drawing Inside the Sketchbook News Feed Articles sketchbooks

Inside the Sketchbook of Xanthe Burdett

Xanthe Burdett is a London-based artist who works primarily as a painter, but her work, which is concerned with nature and the body, also extends to drawing and installation. Here, she shares her sketchbook practice, how she translates her drawings and composition ideas using Renaissance methods, and some of her tricks for approaching a fresh new sketchbook when you find yourself feeling precious about the blank page.     Inside the Sketchbook of Xanthe Burdett I usually have a few sketchbooks on the go at once. I’ll use them to scribble something down very roughly as a new idea for a painting arrives. Or do a series of compositional drafts when I’m working things out. I prefer smaller sketchbooks – usually A5 – that can be chucked in a bag and taken into the woods to sketch trees or to museums to draw from tapestries and paintings. I like to move pretty freely within a book, I’ll often return to older pages and layer them with new drawings and ideas.     For a few years, I made my own sketchbooks. I do a lot of community facilitation work alongside painting which meant that I had piles and piles of …

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10 min read
Jackson's Art Prize Jackson's Art Prize 2025 JAP 2025 News Feed Articles

Meet Andrew Torr, Jackson’s Art Prize 2025 Guest Judge

Andrew Torr won Jackson’s Art Prize 2024 with his oil painting Estate. Now a Guest Judge for 2025, he discusses transforming something unlovely into something beautiful, not being afraid of rejection, and how winning Jackson’s Art Prize is like winning the FA Cup.     Interview with Andrew Torr Josephine: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your artistic practice? Andrew: My name is Andrew Torr, I’m a painter and I won Jackson’s Art Prize 2024. My winning painting is a good indication of what it is that I’m interested in. I’m a figurative painter and I’m currently obsessed with housing estates, ones that you see dotted around the UK at the moment. They’re an interesting subject matter because they are quite often particularly unlovely and I’m trying to make something beautiful out of those things, which is a great challenge in a way. The process and the approach that I now have has come about after long periods of trialing and experimenting with how to present that subject matter on canvas. What I’m looking for is that sweet spot between the thing represented and the kind of music that the paint makes on the canvas, the …

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1 min read
Films Guide to News Feed Articles Pigments

A Guide to Pigments

Pigments are the building blocks of artist colours; they are chemical compounds that impart colour to paint by changing how it interacts with light. In this Guide to Pigments, we explore how pigments are made and what they are used for, some of the unique characteristics that affect the way that paint behaves, and why the Pigment Colour Index can help you get the most from your artist colours.      A Guide to Pigments Contents: 0:18 What is a Pigment? 1:13 The History of Pigments 4:26 The Difference Between Pigments and Dyes 7:17 Transparency and Opacity 10:57 Tinting Strength 13:57 Drying Time 15:21 Granulation 17:00 Lightfastness and Fugitive Pigments 19:06 Permanence 20:26 What is the Pigment Index? 26:00 Genuine Pigments vs. Hues 29:40 What is a Single Pigment Colour? 33:41 Credits     Further Reading Jackson’s Artist Pigments: Colour Information and History What is the Pigment Colour Index? Introducing Jackson’s Artist Pigment Sets A Guide to Plein Air Painting  

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8 min read
art history green pigments Impressionism News Feed Articles pigment stories Pigments

Cobalt Green: The Pigment Overlooked by the Impressionists

Cobalt Green was first introduced as an artist pigment at the beginning of the 19th century. However, it was not very popular among artists at the time, and it often continues to be overlooked in favour of brighter and less expensive green pigments. This article examines the three Cobalt Green pigments in use today and explores the unique characteristics they bring to modern artists’ palettes.     Cobalt Green: The Pigment Overlooked by the Impressionists   The History of Cobalt Green The first Cobalt Green pigment, a compound of zinc and cobalt oxides, was formulated in 1780 by Swedish chemist Sven Rinman. However, zinc oxide was being manufactured on a small scale at the time, so the pigment wasn’t introduced in commercial artists’ paints until the 1830s. As far as chemical stability was concerned, Cobalt Green ticked every box: It was extremely lightfast and permanent and suitable for both oil and water-based binding mediums. These characteristics were extremely valuable at a time when new pigments were being developed and introduced very quickly, many of them chemically unreliable.     However, Cobalt Green didn’t capture the imagination of many artists. It was very expensive, gritty, dull, lacking in tinting power, and …

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7 min read
Jackson's Art Prize Jackson's Art Prize 2025 JAP 2025 News Feed Articles

Meet Joshua Donkor, Jackson’s Art Prize 2025 Guest Judge

Artist Joshua Donkor is a Guest Judge for Jackson’s Art Prize 2025. His work uses portraiture as a tool to subvert monolithic portrayals of Black identity. In this interview, he discusses his process of creating layered portraits to capture intimate personal narratives, the exhibitions that have inspired him this past year, and why he believes it’s crucial for younger artists to get their work seen.     Interview with Joshua Donkor Josephine: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your artistic practice? Joshua: My name is Joshua Donkor, I’m predominantly an oil painter. The work I create is all about stories of immigration and diaspora. I’m interested in that space that exists between cultures, between places, and how people navigate those experiences through different generations. I try to find ways of exploring and expressing that and capturing intimate personal narratives through the paintings I create. While it’s predominantly oil paint, I also use mixed media methods. I use image transfers to incorporate artifacts, photos, and memories that the people I work with cherish very deeply, and that they feel have informed them and informed their lives in different ways. So I find ways to incorporate that to create …

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