Fifty years from now, cell towers will no longer be in use. Most of them will be torn down or converted to other uses. They’ll be a rare sight. Only older people will use cell phones or iPads. 
The connection between the photo reference and the painting was made by blog reader Gene Snyder, who noticed the resemblance while photographing over 9,000 art images in the Army's art collection over the course of several years.
Lovell also made maquettes of animals and ships, which can be difficult to visualize otherwise.
I saw Loomis’s book years ago and remember black was on his palette, which suggests that he had it to control his values, which is exactly the way he worked years ago in illustration: red + black, black + green, etc."
"Keep in mind that flesh tones are essentially quite neutral. If they are overstated, figures tend to look like painted dolls.
Good design is still the most important factor, though sometimes hard to live by, especially when one is obliged to handle complexities. 
“A good general rule is that color obtains in the light. Areas lose richness as they move into shadow. Restated: shadows tend toward the complement.-------
Look for movement in color—warm to cool, light to dark. It is all around us: sky, earth, grass, walls, etc. Areas will go back in space if slight amounts of complement are added.
Use of heavy reds tend to flatten out the illusion of depth.”
Sketching a famous subject like this is an extraordinary experience, because you can see the echo of this structure in so many other buildings that it has inspired. Only by drawing it do you fully appreciate it. All the proportions and details in this architecture seem perfect, which makes it impossible to capture in a hasty drawing.
“Glance for a moment at the reproduction of Joan of Arc and some of her army. This portrays a crowd of mediaeval figures, some mounted, some afoot, rushing across a causeway. Mediaeval costumes present in themselves great possibilities for color, but in this particular picture all that was held in abeyance.
The fragment of the army, the horses, and the foreground, are all kept well within a range of close gray color values. The sky is rather gray in its effect.
But against this effect of subdued color comes a horseman bearing aloft a yellow and orange* flag—bright and dazzling in the setting sun. This is a fine use of dramatic color.
And why is it dramatic? It is dramatic because the eye of the observer had been filled for a moment with the subdued color of the foreground of the picture, and when it encounters the sudden—the “unexpected”—burst of vivid yellow and orange, it is held as if some dramatic action were taking place against the curtain of the sky.
It is not necessary, in fact, it is more often a grave mistake to write your drama all over the canvas. Save your dramatic color note and play it with all the drama that is in you.”
Rockwell painted this 11-inch-square image in 1943 with 45 deliberate errors as a response to the finicky letters he received from fans. That didn’t stop the letters from coming; Rockwell commented that he received a letter from South America noting 184 mistakes.
Above: “S's Time-Jumping Matador”
Above: “Z’s Aqua Girloo”
Billy the black goat likes to be scratched behind the horns. Lucky the white goat wants to be rubbed where his horns would have been. Peanut and Joy, the donkeys, prefer to be patted on the neck and offered a little hay.
He kept trying to lick my face with his disgusting long tongue. I stood just out of range.1. Buy paints that have ASTM ratings of II or I. Don't buy them if the rating is higher. If they don’t show ratings, or they don't list the pigment composition, assume they’re not lightfast and steer clear of them.
2. Keep art in a drawer or behind a curtain.
3. Use UV-filtered glass in picture frames.
4. Don’t hang artwork in direct sunlight unless you know it's lightfast.
5. Make a set of swatches out of the materials you use a lot and test them for yourself. Test not only the paints, pens and pigments, but also the paper, varnishes, and fixatives. Try them in all kinds of combinations so that you have an experimental control, and also you can see what happens with various interactions.
Remember that your substrate is part of the equation. Some materials, like this pulp newsprint paper, darken and increase in chroma with exposure to sunlight.
After sorting through all these sites and doing some experimentation of my own, I’ve created a table with pigment information that ranks the most familiar pigments according to lightfastness, opacity, toxicity, drying time (in oil) and tinting strength. This pigment chart will appear in a table at the end of my upcoming new book on Color and Light (October, 2010, Andrews McMeel).
Carb-Othello pastel pencils and Caran d'Ache colored pencils did very well when subjected to the same eight months of sunlight that faded the markers earlier. 
Even though watercolors can sometimes be more fugitive than oils or acrylics, these pan colors from a portable set by Schmincke hardly changed at all.
And the oils did OK, except for certain pigments. We'll look at that question tomorrow.
In this test strip made from a few older (early '80s) bottles of Dr. Martin's dyes, the violet color completely vanished. 
Highlighter markers fare very poorly. Fluorescent highlighters use relatively unstable colorants that convert invisible ultraviolet light into light that you can see. 
Regular art markers, like these Berol Prismacolor brand Markers, didn’t do well. They faded away to the palest tints. 
Here's a range of popular pens subjected to the same treatment. The blue Pilot Precise faded away to a light gray. 
Painter and teacher Richard Robinson has created a free interactive tool that lets you experiment with gamut masks. 
He was looking for a way to freeze the fluid action of dancers into stationary poses. In 1895 he took a series of photographs that he used for reference. 
But the photos gave Mr. Degas what he needed. His paintings portray dancers adjusting their shoulder straps in gestures that appear spontaneous, though they are really painstakingly posed. 
Here's a painting from one of last year's MFA students, Perry Obee "Studio Corner with a Reflected Painting" oil on paper.
Now you can see the fruits of their labors at the Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) Thesis Exhibition, featuring the paintings and illustrations of WestConn M.F.A. students. 
The issue has an astounding 154 reproductions, some black and white, but mostly full color, showing everything from Ward’s early efforts at newspaper cartooning, his preliminary studies, his finished paintings (with some full-page close-up details), and his tearsheets, from magazines like “Spicy Mystery Stories” and “Super Detective.”
"He, too, when in difficulties, had a sort of battle cry of 'Demons, demons,' with which he would dash at his canvas."
From the notes of Miss Heyneman. Link to Craig Mullins site, which has the notes as a PDF. Hopefully that link will work. Follow the buttons to "miscellaneous" and look for the button that says "Sargent Notes."
The painting is a detail of the full length portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, 1889, collection of the Tate Gallery, link for full image.
This workshop is for all ages and ability levels. If you come, you can also see the Dinotopia exhibition and the fabulous collection of Howard Pyle and Pre-Raphaelites. Below: Boris Artzybasheff.
Here’s the backstory: Whenever your Do List gets more than 10 items long, a mysterious enchantment travels into the closets and drawers of your house, bringing a “Tool Person” to life. Tool people are impish superheroes that arise from common household objects. They want to help you with your Do List, but their way of fixing things is unorthodox at best and dangerous at worst. That’s why you want to keep your Do List short. (The Tool People are hammering and sawing in my house every night.) 
When he painted the paperback cover called 'Willow Pond' in 1979 he hired a model to pose for a series of reference photographs, much like the process used by Norman Rockwell and other illustrators.
Directing the model was a lot like directing an actor, trying to get the right feeling of pensiveness. He started with her right hand by her chin….
….and eventually brought the hand down by the side of the water. When he saw a hand he liked, he marked it on the photo.
No single photo had everything he wanted, so he had to take a little from each one, and he made an effort to simplify accidental wrinkles and unimportant details.
The photo was printed in four different degrees of exposure so that he could study the variation in the extreme darks in the light photo, and the variations in the highlights in the darker photo.
In Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, I did a page of small oil studies showing Fibonacci patterns in pine cones, pineapples, and thistles. 
