Mixing a specific color by hand — I want to make this particular shade of green starting from primary colors — is a super skill that artists acquire and is much harder than it looks. I watched many YouTube tutorials to learn how to do this with paints and this one by Draw Mix Paint was the best method for me. It’s still more art than science. — KK

It was always a painstaking process for me to color in between lines, and painting is too slow and methodical for my messy ways. I wish I had these Faber-Castell Watercolour Pencils when I was a kid. It’s the easiest way to watercolor paint — and the fastest! I just scribble in a little color here and there and use a water brush pen like this to transform the pigments into paint. I started with the 12 color set for around $20 and then upgraded myself to the 36 color set ($50) after I got more consistent with it. Maybe someday I’ll earn the 120-color set. — CD

I’ve been making art every day this year. I don’t care whether it is good or bad, I just enjoy doing it. One of my favorite artists, Grayson Perry, has a BBC TV series called Grayson’s Art Club, where he invites celebs and ordinary people in England to join him in making everyday art. His enthusiasm for all kinds of art, no matter its source, and his low-rent approach to creativity is a total joy and inspiration to watch. The show is warm and utterly brilliant, and makes me want to keep making more. It’s the best thing I’ve seen on making your own art. (While you can stream both seasons of this BBC4 show, you need to do it either in England or with a VPN set to England, and with your ad-blocker off.) — KK

Beeple is the artist who famously sold a digital NFT of his artwork for $69 million. While that is crazy and hard to believe, what I find more remarkable is that the art piece was a montage of 5,000 paintings he did over 5,000 days. Without fail, he created a piece of art for 5,000 consecutive days and shared it. I found this short YouTube video of Beeple talking about this daily habit, before he was rich and a celebrity, so inspirational that I began making a piece of art everyday myself. (You can see my first 60 pieces archived here, or posted on my Instagram.) — KK

Mark Rothko’s painting, Black on Maroon (1958), was defaced with a black graffiti marker in 2012. “Restoring Rothko” (on YouTube) is a 17-minute documentary that shows how the expert restoration team at the Tate Gallery in London tested solvents and cleaning methods for nine months to find the optimal cleaning strategy for removing the ink while preserving Black on Maroon’s delicate paint layers. Rachel Barker, lead restorer, spent nine more months painstakingly removing the surface ink and carefully touching up the painting’s surface with oil paints. — MF