All Blogs / Arts / General Visual Arts / Popular
Quang Ho Portrait Demo
The Portrait Society’s annual convention saved one of the best for the last, as Vietnamese-born, Colorado resident Quang Ho treated an audience of over 500 attendees to a dazzling two-hour head study.
(Photo by Susan Voss)
I sat off to the side with my sketchbook on my knee. Show More Summary
Eye Candy for Today: Gibson’s jurors
Studies In Expression. When Women Are Jurors, Charles Dana Gibson Beautifully confident pen and ink by a master. This large version of the image is on a Russian site called Artscroll, which features a list of additional Gibson image...
Documentary on Wooden Boats
Shaped on all Six Sides from New Canada on Vimeo. Kat Gardner directed this short documentary about building and maintaining wooden boats.
Demos, Demos
Quick post to show you the fun everyone is having with demos at the Portrait Society convention here in Atlanta earlier today.
Here is a watercolor sketch I did of Face-Off champion Jeffrey Hein painting Kate Stone on the main stage.
Four...Show More Summary
Portrait Society Convention
I'm in Atlanta, Georgia as a guest of the 15th annual convention of the Portrait Society of America.
The gathering started off yesterday with the dramatic "Face-off" event, where 15 leading alla-prima portrait painters broke into five groupings of three artists. Show More Summary
Casein Experiment
I did this little painting a couple days ago on location in Rhinecliff, New York. The setting sun turned the Hudson River into a path of golden light.
The painting is 4 x 7 inches on watercolor paper, painted almost entirely with a half inch flat brush.
The medium is casein. Show More Summary
Thomas Millie Dow
Scottish artist Thomas Millie Dow, active in the late 19th and early 20th centirues, traveled and painted subjects in The US, Franc, Morocco and Italy, as well as in the UK. I came across his painting Trees, above, top, and was fascinated by it. Unfortunately, I can’t find many examples of his work on the [...]
Tactile Drawing
(Video link) There are ten days left in a crowdfunded campaign to provide Lensen drawing kits to sight impaired kids. Lensens are simple wooden drawing tools that makes drawing lines a tactile experience. The pen unspools wool yarn onto a Velcro surface, which grips the yarn. Show More Summary
Loading Dock
Yesterday my wife and I went to the supermarket. While she did the shopping, I sat out back painting the loading dock.
Gazing at the back of the market for a half hour got me thinking about how we divide our world into frontstage and backstage, parts we're supposed to look at and other parts we're not. Show More Summary
Ming Fan
Ming Fan (or “fanming” as he is sometimes credited) is a Chinese concept artist and illustrator based in Shanghai. He specializes in environments — fantastical imaginary landscapes and cityscapes. He renders them in lavish detail, often creating compositions in which there is a primary focal point along with two or more secondary areas of interest [...]
A Man of Wealth and Taste
"The Antichrist is a Christian concept based on interpretation of passages in the New Testament. [..T]he term "antichrist" occurs five times in 1 John and 2 John, once in plural form and four times in the singular. In traditional Christian belief, Jesus the Messiah appears in his Second Coming to Earth, to face the emergence of the Antichrist figure. Show More Summary
Plein Air Painting Disasters
(YouTube link) A lot can go wrong when you paint outdoors, but wind is the biggest enemy. Artists at the second annual Plein Air Painting convention share their stories of "gamestoppers," unexpected events that bring a painting session to a dramatic halt. A few gamestoppers that have happened to me include: 1. Show More Summary
Eye Candy for Today: Corot’s oaks
Fontainebleau: Oak Trees at Bas-Bréau, Camille Corot In the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Click “Fullscreen” and use zoom controls or download arrow.
Dragon Copter
(Video link) Festo has built a working model ornithopter called a BionicOpter. Like the dragonfly it is based on, it can fly in all directions, hover in mid-air, and glide.
I have always been fascinated by the idea of dragonfly ornithopters. Show More Summary
Draw Mix Paint
Mark Carder, the well regarded painter and portraitist who I profiled in a previous post, at one point participated in and lent his name to a series of instructional painting videos known as “The Carder Method”. These sold for over $100, and were for a time heavily promoted. Carder is no longer associated with the [...]
Mark Carder
Mark Carder is a portrait painter who is known for his precise but naturalistic portraits, including commissioned portraits of two US presidents and other officials. He also paints still life, animals and landscape. His web presence is unfortunately limited to about a dozen examples of his work and a very brief bio. Carder is perhaps [...]
The Black Garden
Here’s a plein-air oil painting called “The Black Garden” by Adolph Menzel (German 1815-1905. It’s about 35x45 inches.
A careful study like this would probably be done over two or three sessions. Overcast conditions are a big help for such extended outdoor work because the subject changes less from hour to hour.
Impressionist bridges
No — it’s not the subject of a real-world exhibit somewhere, though that might be nice — just a thought that occurred to me while looking through some images of Impressionist paintings. One of the things that set the Impressionists apart was their insistence, like Courbet, of painting the real world as they say it, [...]
How Rockwell turned a detractor into a defender
My friend David Starrett met Norman Rockwell a couple of times in Los Angeles in 1949 when Rockwell was artist-in-residence at the old Otis art school. David told me this story, which he witnessed. In those days, a lot of the art teachers at Otis criticized Rockwell. Show More Summary
Eye Candy for Today: Byam Shaw figure in landscape
Boer War, 1900 – 1901 – Last Summer Things Were Greener, John Byam Liston Shaw Image from the Athenaeum. Original is in the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. The painting, in the detailed style associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, depicts the artist’s sister mourning her cousin, who was killed in the Boer War in South Africa. [...]
