People are often surprised when I tell them that I use painting knives instead of brushes. They point to some fine lines on a painting and ask if these were also painted with a knife. Yes, they were. I have some brushes somewhere in my studio but I rarely use them. For people who have never heard about knife painting I have to explain that painting knives are not like kitchen knives. They are more like miniature spatulas, usually triangular in shape. The photo on the left shows the large collection of knives that I have gathered over the years. Below that photo is one of my palette with the knives in plastic cylinders. By this arrangement I can use 10 different colors at a time, each one on a separate knife.I prefer knives because they allow me to control the colors better than I can with brushes. Years ago, when I used brushes, I wasn’t able to clean a brush between every application of paint. Â Consequently the brush continually mixed the pigments, making them muddy or desaturated. With the knife I can apply the pigments straight from the tube, wiping them between applications, so that the colors remain pure and bright. Where desaturated colors are needed, of course, I can mix the desired level of desaturation.Another reason for painting with a knife is that it allows me to sculpt the surface of the paint so that each object reflects light as it would in real life. This gives the painting a depth that I could not accomplish with a flat surface. A field of grass looks soft because individual blades scatter the reflected light. When painting grasses or pine needles I use the edge of the knife, making thin ridges of paint that give the surface a third dimension. The ridges break up the light in the same way that real grass would, giving the surface a soft appearance. Hard, flat surfaces like bark on tree trunks reflect light in patches while the cracks in between trap most of the light and thus appear dark to the viewer. When painting bark I might underpaint with dark brown, then build up the bark by laying on flat plates of paint, and finally, when the plates have dried, use a technique called “scumbling” in which I run over the dry plates with my knife to add highlights, moss, or other features. Essentially, I am painting in three or four layers. The picture on the bottom left illustrates the result of this technique. The photo was taken at an acute angle so that you can appreciate the three dimensional quality of the paint.