5 key lessons in palette knife techniques.

Palette knife is great for building up a thick texture and creating a broken color effect. It is also very easy to clean a palette knife. You literally just need one wipe with a cloth or paper towel and all the paint is gone. This is a huge advantage over brushes, which require much more care.

Thin lines

You can use the palette knife to create thin, usually broken lines which can look very natural in a painting. All you need to do is load the edge of the palette knife with a thin amount of paint and then dab the edge on the canvas. Just make sure the paint is evenly spread across the edge of the knife. Also, you will usually only get one line per stroke, so you will need to keep reloading your palette knife between strokes.

Dragging one color into another

The palette knife can be fantastic for blending edges by dragging one color into another. What you are left with is a very rough and scattered edge. If you were to do this with a brush, you would get a much softer edge.

Scraping away paint to fix errors or add details

This is where the palette knife really shines. You can quickly scrape away paint from the canvas to clear an area where you went wrong.

You can also use the palette knife to scrape details into your painting. For example, you could scrape away a thin line of paint to imitate a tree branch. When doing this, you just need to be aware of what color will be exposed in the underpainting.

Multi-colored palette knife strokes

This is one of my favorite techniques. Just take a few different colors and mix them together but not that well. Then take your palette knife and create a thick stroke of broken color.

Broken color

Because the palette knife allows you to paint layer on layer without having the paint blend together, you can achieve some beautiful broken color effects which are not possible with a brush. The Russian impressionists take advantage of this in many of their paintings. The result is a vibrant display of color which almost seems to vibrate.