Wednesday 17 December 2014


The art of great partnership at Art Material Live 2014


A big mention and extra thanks for the success for my workshops with Canson at 'Art materials Live 2014' at Birmingham NEC goes to Pro Arte for their donation of their beautiful ‘Polar’ Series brushes – a really responsive painting brush, exceptionally well made with a very distinctive and classy white handle made in lots of different and useful sizes. Not only are these brushes useful for watercolour but also acrylics as well.

I use Pro Arte brushes a lot and I brought along some of my pro Arte 'Connoisseur' brushes too which are a clever blend of sable hair and synthetic Prolene which makes a wonderful watercolour brush (whilst keeping the cost down).

The SAA (Society of All artists) were very generous indeed to donate lots of their useful colourful pastels for the Canson stand and 'drop in' students to use for the Mi-Tientes 'Touch' paper trials. The SAA also were very kind to donate their wonderful high pigment content gouache and watercolour tube paints which just flow across the surface. Really professional paints which I use regularly myself and customers on the Canson stand found really great to use as well.

The SAA also kindly donated several of their wonderful ‘Big Whopper’ brushes (size 30) for students trialling the different Canson watercolour papers to use. The big Whopper is a big round brush which holds masses of water and pigment together and has a great balance when painting watercolour washes with it. With a great tip for detail and a great size to assist big mark making and expressive work the brush was just perfect for these techniques I was teaching.

A big thank you is also given to ‘Unison’ pastels who kindly donated several of their exceptional pastels to Canson for use in the mixed media workshops. Students in the mini workshops created some really great pastel paintings in a really short period of time using Unison and SAA pastels in combination.


There was a real creative buzz on the Canson stand using all these superb products on the exceptional Canson papers in all our mini workshops. 

Thanks again to Pro Arte, SAA and Unison and a special thanks to all who came to the mini workshops on the Canson stand at Art Materials Live this year. It was really great to meet you, teach you some great art skills and of course share and show you just how responsive Canson papers really are using all these professional products in combination.






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