Pencil Sharpeners, how to sharpen and acrylic gouache

Hi there everyone, hope this blog and broadcast finds you all well? Here in the UK we are firmly in autumn now with the trees finally changing colour and yes, a bit of the rainy stuff but I refuse to be that person who claims it is always raining, it doesn’t, we live in a changeable climate and so we have to learn to get better coats and be out in it even if we get a little soggy around the edges.

Last month’s TT was fun and I think some of you found the information about picture framing particularly useful, even if it was to decide that you will now happily pay someone else to do it for you! If you missed last month, don’t worry as you can catch up with it all here.

So one of the questions I hope to tackle this month will be regarding pencil sharpeners and pencil sharpening, something I get asked about often and I hope you are ready for what I have discovered both in my day to day practice and what I found by doing a little bit of homework for you. It’s a bit involved but I hope that it will stop you from wasting any money that you may be thinking of investing. It is also worth pointing out that this is only my opinion, you may find you have different experiences and so, more than ever, I encourage you to share your findings in any of the chats that I make available to you.

I will also be talking about acrylic gouache, a new medium for me but one that is starting to creep in to my experimental work so I am right at the beginning of my discoveries at the moment, thanks to Robina for her query about this.

Keep the questions coming in and do tune in to the chat on YouTube either live or archived afterwards so you can see what the Learning to Paint community was discussing.

After the broadcast has gone live you will be able to watch it back below, do leave me a question in the comments either here or on YouTube and I will look forward to you all joining in, in the future, Ali