Written by:
Berkeley Staff

About one month from now we will begin an exciting new series of art classes and demonstrations, every first Sunday at 3pm in the store. We will kick things off on Sept. 5th with a two part class on block printing principles, lead by our awesome in-house artist, Lexi! She will guide you through the entire process, beginning with exercises in thinking, drawing, and carving images in negative space. This is a complete reversal of habit for most artists and a good thing to practice before you start carving up all of your wood blocks or linoleum. So come on out and bring your friends!

Written by:
Berkeley Staff

We are in the final weeks of our tremendous annual brush and canvas sale, so come in soon and stock up your studio! Sale ends August 15th.

Written by:
Berkeley Staff

We are very excited to welcome Golden’s Open Acrylic line of paints to our shelves! These gorgeous paints remain open for hours (or even days on the pallet), allowing for blending, shading, and glazing techniques formerly only possible with oil paints. Stored properly, your mixed colors can last for weeks!

To achieve different effects while maintaining the Open Acrylics’ incredible open time, use Golden’s Open line of mediums. To adjust the Open paints’ drying time to suit your individual needs, just mix them with varying amounts of regular acrylic paint or mediums. You can do it all with this paint!

Written by:
Berkeley Staff

Artists, a call to entry! It’s our annual art competition, and this year we’re offering $15,000 in prizes. The categories are drawing, painting, and sculpture. All you have to do is send in a scanned image of your work. There’s nothing to lose and everything to gain–enter today!! Follow this link for more information.

Written by:
Berkeley Staff

We’re having an incredible sale on ALL Utrecht brand brushes, canvases, and linens from now until August 15th! From hog bristle to kolinsky sable, from studio canvases to rolls of our finest rolls of Claessens linen–it’s all on sale at unbeatable prices. Come in today and get your studio stocked!

Written by:
Berkeley Staff

We’ve got a Fan Page on Facebook now and we want you to become a fan of Utrecht Berkeley!  If you simply type “Utrecht Berkeley” into the search bar on your Facebook page you will find us.  Because Facebook streamlines a lot of processes involved in posting updates it’s super easy for us to give you up-to-the-minute info about specials, demos, new products, etc.  A lot of our customers love to chat with our associates about each other’s work, this is a great way to keep up with them as well and have a super quick link to get to see their personal work they’ve posted.  We’ll also send out incentives to get you back into our store asap (aka, info on promotions and COUPONS!).  We’ll of course continue to post updates to this blog as well, but once you’ve become familiar with the benefits of Facebook you’ll understand why it’s so fun to reconnect with long lost folks, find new friends, and meet other artists in our community!

Written by:
Berkeley Staff

As these ancient cave paintings show, people have been spraying paint for as long as there has been art!  These sprayed hands could have been one of the first uses of a “stencil.”  They also could be a kind of a signature or “I was here.”

Written by:
Berkeley Staff

Ok, maybe not the actual bay but rather The Bay Area.  And maybe not with actual etching ink, but rather with the beautiful work it helps to produce.  I know I said that we were super excited to have the full line of Montana Gold, and we still are.  But if it’s possible, we’re even more excited to have the full color assortment of Charbonnel Etching Inks in stock!  Yes it’s true that we drink a lot of caffine and are therefore easily excitable, but that should in no way diminish how awesome it is to have these premium quality inks to offer you.  You have, after all, been asking for them and rightly so.  There are 51 lucious colors to choose from and we’re offering them in the handy 60ml/2 fl. oz. size so you can flirt with colors such as Nasturtium Yellow, Spring Green, and Solferino Violet without having to make a huge commitment.  Our commitment to you still stands though, the highest quality products at the best prices and the greatest staff on earth to assist you.

Written by:
Berkeley Staff

Woooo Hoooo!  We are so excited that we got the full 91+ color assortment in that we are running a super special deal on them right now…$7.99 ea. and buy 4 tips get the 5th tip free!  This paint is super thick so you don’t have to go back over your work a hundred times to get the full color strenth (and you also don’t have to buy as many cans).  The color saturation is intense and the finish is ultra matte.  People who try Montana are never satisfied with anything less again.  On top of that the colors they offer are so sensory satisfying like “best of times”, “flipper”, “ketchup” and “sugar melon”.  They are laquer based so the sky’s the limit for what you can paint with them.  I personally have painted shoes, clothes, an exterior door and my bike helmet on top of the more usual applications of signs and paintings on canvas.  Are you a fan of instant gratification?  Grab a can of Montana or ten and turn your world technicolor!

Written by:
Berkeley Staff

In our effort to help students gear up for their summer classes we’ve put a lot of the most common supplies on super sale.  We have a lot of figure drawers here in the East Bay that should take advantage of these great sale prices!  18×24 drawing pads, vine and willow charcoals and sketch books are just a few of the items that have great savings right now.  Printmakers should take advantage of our current sale on handmade Japanese papers!  These papers rarely go on sale and they are gorgeous, guaranteed to take your work to the next level.