Using mostly palette knives and particular brushes, Weihs applies pigment in lush impasto layers interspersed with thin glazes that enrich colors and result in canvases that glow with mysterious light and form. The vague forms and evocative spaces in her paintings become magnets that draw audiences into the mystery of creation by way of human imagination. She is based in North Carolina and her “Wild Cliffs” is a working and teaching studio for creatives looking for mentoring or respite in the mountains.

Thin Lines

By dipping the edge of a painting knife into a pile of paint and then tapping the knife down on your canvas, you can produce very fine lines. You can make angular lines and sharp shapes too. Always good to soften some hard edges when painting. Soften by pressing or moving paint/slightly scraping paint by pressing.

Hard Edges

Dip a painting knife into some paint, then onto your canvas so the blade is at 90° to the surface. Then tilt the knife to one side, press down firmly, and pull strongly to one side. This produces a painted area with a hard edge. Exactly what shape you produce depends on how much paint you have on your knife, and how hard you pulled or scraped it across the surface. If you have gaps between the bits of paint on your knife, you'll produce gaps in the painted area (as shown by the paint adjacent to the thicker lighter edge in the photo).

Smearing to Blend

This is the "spread the butter or jam" technique of using a painting knife, and the most common approach. You load a lump of paint onto the painting knife, tap it onto your canvas, then spread it around. Or, alternatively, squeeze out paint directly onto the canvas, then spread it around. See these cropped details of paintings for these terms.

Flat Texture to Rippled to Stippled

You can spread out paint with a knife so that it's completely flat, with minimal texture. I call it skimming. Then you can add another layer fast to stipple some texture by a grabbing effect. I like The ripples and stipples it gives from the paint adhering or grabbing into the skimmed layer. I showed you Skimming to start with a pie shape non-flexible palette knife and Grabbing with the very flexible skinny knife which I call the sculpting of the paint part.

By lifting your knife from the surface you can create a little ridge of paint, which can be built up into interesting texture see (see details in photos). Long sweeps are great with flat texture. Then a build up over gives a nice effect to a shape.

Press and Lift

Texture can be created by pressing a painting knife into paint, then onto the canvas, and lifting it. The results you get will depend on whether you move the knife sideways or just lifted straight off again. Try it all to give effect to a shape.your eye will fill in The detail if its a landscape.

Scratching

Call it sgraffito when you're wanting to sound good, but as far as technique goes it's just scratching into wet paint. A knife with a sharp point will give a narrow line, but any shape of knife can be used.

Thick and Thin

By altering the pressure you're applying to the painting knife, you can move from laying down paint thickly to laying down very thin paint in a single stroke, without stopping. You'll get different results depending on whether you're using an opaque or transparent color, or a color with a strong undertone.

Double-Loading and Mixing Colors

Double-loading with color is a technique familiar to decorative painters that produce beautiful results when used with a palette knife. As the name suggests, you put two or more colors onto your knife before you apply it to your canvas.

If you use a single, straight stroke, you'll get the two colors applied adjacent to one another. If you go over the stroke numerous times, or move the knife from side to side, the colors will mix, and that is when beautiful things can happen.

Scraping

My favorite part is scraping up the paint and re-delivering it in long sweeps. Think grassy plains To sweeping clouds. It really adds dimension and interest as the scraped up paint gets mixed into a great luminosity, especially if you scrape up the same paint and re-deposit it over and over.

Shaper Tool

You can use a 1-inch color shaper tool by West to soften or create edges. It can be used to help finish out a painting by nudging the paint with a dry shaper to change it or alter the edges. For landscape work, patting lightly to feather out tops of trees into sky is effective. Merging color shapes into other color shapes by patting the color back and forth into each other is effective. Veiling a DRY area of a painting with a shaper is nice to calm down a loud area of color.

Veiling

I prefer Rembrandt's Titanium formula over any other white. Zinc white is transparent and can be useful for “veiling” over color to tone it down a notch. Veiling is a slight pass of transparent paint applied by knife, shaper or a scumbling brush over DRY paintings.

Scumbling

I use often a trim brush from Ace Hardware or Lowe’s to dry-brush on finished dry paintings. It’s called scumbling. I often leave places alone to dry and imagine to wait to do the scumbling. It sometimes will be the most effective way to finish up an area.

Other Options:

Wiggle, Layering, Dots, Circles, Squares, Light on Black or vice versa

Terminology

Grasping is touch and pressure, the lighter the grasp, the more grabbing you can get.

Contrast is dark next to light, warm next to cool colors. I talked about contrast of light and dark and in between. Another way of seeing values of light to dark as the knife moves all the mixed paint. Use this formula and mix it up as you go, A Light next to a dark or a light dark next to a dark light, etc etc:
L-D-LD-DL-D-LD-L-D- DL- L-LD to infinity. You see the nuances as you move the Knife.

Quiet passages is gained by mixing the paint on the canvas to get it blended in for buttery and smooth quiet areas.

Undulation in strokes, to get curves and patterns.

Interruption is shape changing.

Stuttering is stops and starts with gliding the knife to make marks.

Texturizing is layering over already passed paint. You can layer many, many times.

Limited Palette

"A limited palette like this forces a kind of built-in color harmony, in that almost any color applied is likely to be a combination of two or three of the same tube colors." Karen Weihs

The essential 6 tube palette colors today are by Rembrandt:

Titanium White (105)
Cadmium Lemon Yellow (207)
Naples Yellow Deep (223)
Permanent Red Medium (377)
Ultramarine Blue Deep (506)
Cold Grey (717)

Ambassador Tip and Techniques: Karen Weihs