As we all start getting ready to step outside our studios and paint outdoors or create studio landscape painting based on our experiences in nature, I wanted to explain the design elements that I put together...
The patterns of nature inspire our artwork. One of the most fascinating recent discoveries is the intimate relationship between the patterns found in nature's tiniest creations to the patterns found...
The large snow storms that graced our area this winter gave us opportunities to study the unique light, colors and shadows that only snow cover provides. Painting snow presents many challenges to the plein...
We are not alone as artists in our passion for gardens. We follow in the footsteps of several rather impressive artists throughout history. Our personal gardens are designed for plein air painting and...
The last two centuries, in particular, witnessed the final great explorations of the surface of the planet by scientists, geographers, and surveyors. In those pre-photography days, and for a while after...
"Of the original phenomena, light is the most enthralling." - Leonardo da Vinci Crepuscular rays are those wonderful beams of light we see at the beginning or end of the day that appear to radiate...
Recently, we received a good question from a reader about how to paint one of our favorite landscape subjects--fog and mist. To understand how to paint light effects, it can be helpful to have a basic...
When is blue not blue? Ask any Indigo Bunting and they will tell you, "When it is black!" This is because the feathers of the diminutive Indigo Bunting are not actually blue, they are black,...
Have you ever noticed when you are plein air painting how the colors of objects look so radically different in the very low light just before dawn or twilight? Take a red rose, for instance. We know that...
With so much interest in plein air painting these days, it's easy to overlook how important drawing skills can be to the landscape painting artist. Fundamentally, drawing is both a way of seeing and...
Why go to the trouble of painting from life when our cameras can take such great pictures? Digital cameras have gotten so good at taking properly exposed, beautiful photos that they can fool us into thinking...
You’re in a beautiful plein air painting location, you whip out your camera and take photograph after photograph – it's essential to have lots of references for landscape painting, you...
Zooming in and out of the Canadian North like a hummingbird on a flower, my mouse was beginning to heat up. An armchair explorer’s best friend, Google Earth was helping me understand the massive...
We travel frequently to paint en plein air in new locations and sometimes teach workshops in those new environments as well. One of our favorite locations is northern New Mexico--the Abiquiu and Ghost...
"Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky." - Khalil Gibran Perhaps the biggest challenge for those of us who paint from life is to see and understand what is right before our eyes...
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