Have you seen this painting of Ada Lovelace, the Victorian lady who helped invent the computer? Her eyes are kind of close together, but you get the idea. The image was created by a computer.
A: It’s a Jullian umbrella, designed to clamp onto a French easel, but I keep it on a C-stand so that it doesn’t blow over and bring my painting into the wreckage."
A: That’s an Open Box M easel, which may not be made anymore, but there are others like it, and there's a Facebook group about building your own.
A: I find it helps my speed and accuracy to have my painting set up perpendicular to my line of sight, and directly adjacent to, the same size as, and in the same light as my subject.
A: Yes, this was for a paint-out. I framed it and it was auctioned same day. I knew the owner, and after it was thoroughly dry I borrowed it back to varnish and photograph it.
A: A lot of oil painters have used premixed colors. I was thinking mainly of Frank Reilly, but using an adapted version of his practice.
It’s the 5-color palette recommended by John Stobart in his book The Pleasures of Painting Outdoors: titanium white, cad yellow light, pyrrole red, burnt sienna, and ultramarine blue. You can paint almost anything with those five colors.
In theory you could premix with water media, but the pools of color would tend to dry too fast.
Related previous posts: Painting Pumpkins
Brodie drew from life whenever he could. According to Gene Byrnes, "He avoids any mechanical means of drawing, and says that when he is asked to use a photograph for factual reference he goes to considerable pains to avoid copying it."
Books: A Complete Guide to Drawing, Illustration, Cartooning, and Painting by Gene Byrnes
Drawing Fire: A Combat Artist at War : Pacific Europe Korea Indochina Vietnam
"They owned a large collection of Regency era costume prints and fashion plates, and had clothes specially made as examples for certain costumes. Using these, family members would model for each other."
Signed copies of the Dinotopia hardback book are back in stock in our web store.
Helck was one of the instructors from the Famous Artists School, and no one could match his ability to paint cars and trucks.
Many of his exemplary preliminary drawings are included in the 112 page article. (The pictures in this post are typical of what's in the article, but not necessarily the same images.)
Peter Helck, This is My Birthright
The article starts with 18 pages of illustrated biography, followed by 90 pages of pictures, mostly reproduced from original art or vintage tearsheets.
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Learn more: Visit Illustration Magazine's website to learn more about the special issue. Read my previous post about Peter Helck and check out Peter Helck's memoirs online. More on Helck's Wikipedia page.
The Famous Artists School, which was formed more than 70 years ago, was an early pioneer of remote learning.
Some tantalizing glimpses of the correspondence course were featured in a half-hour TV program called "Operation Success." The Norman Rockwell Museum has posted the show on YouTube.
The school hired a team of professional instructors who in turn had studied with the master illustrators. It was the job of these F.A.S. instructors to read and respond to the student work and to keep their files up to date.
The voiceover says that this instructor is creating a painted criticism, based on student efforts mailed to the school from thousands of miles away.
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• Here are my previous blog posts about the Famous Artists School and its instructors.
• It's still possible to find vintage sets of the Famous Artists Course.
• The Norman Rockwell Museum produced a single book about the history of the Famous Artists School.
• The other great source of instruction about mid-20th century illustration is Creative Illustration by Andrew Loomis.
This is the view looking across E. Main from the library in Port Jefferson, New York.
I've already had one guy park in front of me, so I hold the parking space open with a traffic cone.
I love the shopfront with its big glass windows, awning, and the upstairs residence, all set against the cool grey-blue of the far building in shadow.
Telling a story purely with illustrations is a challenge not unlike making a silent movie. There can be dramatic moments of action or conflict in a wordless graphic novel. Or the images can enshrine reflective and poetic moments.
But the connective tissue of a story, such as internal thoughts, sounds, or intentions can be challenging to convey.
Wordless stories flourished in Europe and America in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, in part inspired by dramatic visuals of the silent movie era and expressionist art of the time.
In turn these works have inspired many contemporary comic artists, though the development of these wordless picture-stories is mostly independent of the pop-culture origins of modern comics.
Many of the artists used the time consuming method of woodcuts for their illustrations, which allowed artists to produce small runs of books, which have been prized by collectors ever since.
The best known member of this group was Lynd Ward (1905-1985), who produced several stories without words such as God's Man and Madman's Drum, but there were other artists who contributed to the genre such as Frans Masereel (1889-1972), Giacomo Patri (1898-1978), Erich Glas (1897-1973), and Laurence Hyde.
The works of all of those artists are featured in the new book Graphic Witness: Five Wordless Graphic Novels, selected and edited by George A. Walker, himself a woodcut artist and professor.
The large trade paperback book consists of a separate image reproduced on each page, beautifully reproduced in black and white and occasionally a red-brown on good paper.
Here's more information about Graphic Witness: Five Wordless Graphic Novels.
There are four great exhibitions going on in Albany, and they're all in one museum: The Albany Institute of History and Art.
In his lectures on art, he said: "The expression of beauty is by emotion. The person who can communicate his emotions to the souls of others is the artist."
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