Polar stratospheric clouds appear high in the sky in the polar regions in winter.
What is Art? It can be a class of objects, an act, a process, an experience, or an idea. Definitions of art have been proposed and challenged by thinkers through the ages. This video offers a smorgasbord of quotes about art. You can try them on for size, accepting or rejecting them and testing your own ideas. (Link to YouTube)
For myself, I find the most useful definition is Tolstoy's description of art-making as the communication of emotion: "To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling -- this is the activity of art." He also says: "Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them."
But sometimes artists draw or paint in private sketchbooks with no intention of communicating emotion or sharing their work with others. This kind of sketching can be from the imagination. or from observation. In that instance, art can be a form of conjuring, a kind of magic. It's an exciting experience to bring into existence an image that seems to take on its own life.
Which definition or description in the video resonates most with you? Have some of them proven unhelpful or misleading to you? Please share in the comments.
Thanks, BoingBoing
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I tried various color sketches until I arrived at the muted color scheme. I found some photos of sailing ships, treasure chests, and cannons.
In the final painting, the skeleton refuses to die. A cannon shot has broken through the railing at right. His right leg is held together with a strip of cloth, and his missing left leg is replaced with the end of an oar, whittled into a simple hinge for his knee. The original oil painting is about 9 x 15 inches, oil on panel.
It will be featured June 12 in the upcoming exhibition at the Norman Rockwell Museum called "Enchanted: A History of Fantasy Illustration."
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On Amazon: plastic model of a human skeleton
(Link to Instagram) Coming up in the next issue of International Artist Magazine is an article on Triads, the subject of my recent Gumroad video. This is my 65th consecutive article for the magazine.
Roy asked a question on my YouTube channel. He says: "I have recently discovered gouache and like the process of thick over thin. Some gouache artists warn of “dusting off” when gouache is used thinly. Do you have that problem? And if so, how do you avoid it? I have not noticed it occurring so far."
Roy, there have only been a couple of times that I've had the problem of pigment coming off. For me it happened when I used gouache thinly over a casein or acrylic underpainting where the underpainting was too thick and had a smooth surface. As with oils, thin over thick can sometimes be a problem.
Apparently the problem would have happened because there just wasn't enough roughness in the underpainting for the thin film of gouache to adhere to, and not enough chemical adhesion. Gouache is just comprised of pigment loosely held together with a binder. The glue-like binder is gum arabic (an edible sap from the acacia tree), which has a much weaker emulsion strength than acrylic or oil.
If a wash is watered down too much when you put it on, it can result in an underbound film emulsion, which is subject to rubbing off, like pastel or chalk. If you're ever afraid of that happening, you can add a small amount of acrylic matte medium to your paint, and that will strengthen the emulsion.
Even if you use gouache in the normal way, the final surface will be fragile, and it doesn't stand up to much abrasion. (It's also sensitive to hand oils.) That's also true of watercolor pencil and regular pencil, by the way, even if I seal the surface with workable fixative. I've noticed that some colored pencil strokes will rub off and transfer to a facing page. So I try not to paint on two facing pages and try not to handle my sketchbooks too roughly.
The lure of being lost in the shadows of a forest in winter is a compelling visual idea that stirs deep mythic feelings.
Shishkin studied painting in Germany, a nation that has a special word for the poetic feeling of being alone in the forest: Waldeinsamkeit.
In this winter forest painting, the visual pathway leads back to a light-filled distant clearing. On a sunny day, wet snow sticking to small branches lasts only a couple of hours before it melts away.
Shishkin was an advocate of using photo references, so he may have been aided by photographs as well as plein air studies for this one.
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Previously: Shishkin and Photography and Using Photo Reference
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The classic book on Shishkin is this Russian edition from the 1980s.
Thomas Blackshear has produced a series of instructional videos called the Illustration Master Course. I have had an opportunity to watch most of the videos in the series and can highly recommend them.
If you're not familiar with his work, Thomas Blackshear emerged in the '80s and '90s as an illustrator, creating about 30 US postage stamp designs, plus posters, art prints, and 3D figurines.
He trained in Chicago and worked for Hallmark Cards and the Godbold/Richter Studio.
At that stage of his career he was inspired by Mark English, Bernie Fuchs, Drew Struzan, and David Grove, and he either learned directly from them or figured out their techniques.
The first volumes in the series demonstrate these unusual techniques with gouache and acrylic.
In Volume 4 he demonstrates the "lifting out" technique, where you apply a gouache base layer over a pencil drawing and lift out light areas with a wet brush or Q-tip.
He has since pursued a gallery career for his original paintings, developing his own style that he calls 'Western Nouveau,' inspired by a variety of painters of the past such as Maynard Dixon and Alphonse Mucha.
Most of his gallery paintings start in acrylic and finish in oil, sometimes with special touches of gold leaf.
His videos take you through the entire process, with closeups of his palette, his brushwork, and his special techniques, which he explains at each stage in a clearly recorded voiceover.
The video occasionally cuts away to him sitting in his studio explaining the thinking behind what he's doing. His process is 100% 'old school,' using pencil, brush, tracing paper, and acetate overlays.
He often does a very detailed and complete pencil drawing and several color studies before he starts the finished painting, and the quality of his final results proves the value of solving all the problems sequentially.
Blackshear puts a lot of emphasis on getting the drawing right, no matter how much effort it takes, before proceeding into the paint. He hires models and shoots photo reference, but he freely interprets his reference to make it better.
There are six episodes so far, produced by Thaxton Studios. Each video is about an hour long, and priced at $45 for either a download or a DVD. Each is a standalone exercise and you don't have to follow them in order. I would suggest starting with whichever one that sounds closest to your interest.
You can get info about Thomas Blackshear's Illustration Master Course at this link. The videos are also available at Gumroad as digital downloads or streaming videos.
Muddy Colors did a blog post featuring his gouache 'pick-out' technique as featured in the magazine Step by Step Graphics. (Thanks, Matt Dicke and Dan Dos Santos)
Yes, I have. I went there 20 years ago with my son Frank as part of an overnight school field trip.
I loved the way each of the people who worked there presented themselves as a real person from the pages of history.
I sketched "John Billington" who was sitting in one of the small dwellings. When I asked him to sign the sketch, he marked his name with an "X". Writing was a skill that not everyone had in the early 17th century.
Plimouth Plantation reopens in the spring of 2021
Alphonse Mucha's cover for Hearst's Magazine in 1922 showed his fair-haired son Jiří.
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