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Artists who step outside their studios take a leap of faith. When you determine that you are ready to create a plein air painting , you take a chance with lighting, composition, color, and time. All of these are variables that you need to contend with to get your outdoor painting right. Artist Robin...
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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 scale of the Arctic ( here's my video all about it ). Trying to figure out where to plan my plein...
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Those of us in the fine art industry know that artists and art galleries have had a long-standing love/hate relationship. Artists love the fact that galleries market and sell works of art, but they hate the fact that the better galleries keep 40% or 50% of every sale. Then along came the Internet, and...
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When walking through a landscape looking for that magical spot that compels you to stop to sketch or put up your plein air easel, don't forget to look behind you (and not for muggers, but the view!). Stop regularly, turn around and consider the view in a direction other than what's been straight...
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Yes, you read that right! I've heard of extreme sports and extreme makeovers, but extreme outdoor painting ? This is a first for me. But when plein air artist Cory Trepanier told me that he had made a trek to paint the far reaches of the Canadian Arctic--a land of icebergs and permafrost and tundra...
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We enjoyed the recent plein air blog of artist Marion Boddy-Evans and agree with her sentiments. We have been outdoor painting for over forty years each (before the "plein air" phrase became ubiquitous) and have always felt that the value in painting outside on location was the total immersion...
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The light of summer is a powerful and extreme thing. Getting effects of extreme darks and stark, searing lights is not something every painter can do. There's an acuteness of vision that must come into play to see the color that resides in the light as well. When I look at the work of pastel painting...
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Some artists, you love what they draw. But with every landscape drawing of Georges Seurat, it is the way that he draws that makes all the difference. Take any of his sketches and chances are it is fairly simple in composition. There are very few elements in the drawings and usually they all add up to...
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Call it the blues, call it the doldrums, call it what you will--it seems that many of us plein-air painters go through a slump about this time of year. Even if the weather is good enough for painting outdoors, nature isn't always at her finest when we're waiting for spring to arrive. It can feel...
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Ernest Lawson (1873 - 1939) came to maturity at the dawn of the 20th century, so his work was modern and gritty and real. His are not the idyllic landscape paintings of Corot , nor are they the dazzling light shows in Monet's plein air paintings . They are tough, and yet there is an elegance and...
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Drawings of horses in the Chauvet caves. We recently watched the Werner Herzog film, Chauvet: Cave of Forgotten Dreams . Herzog made the film about the prehistoric, 30,000- to 32,000 year-old cave art discovered in 1994 in the Ardeche region of France by three speleologists, Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette...
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A photo of the plein air landscape site I chose to paint. I can still recall the first morning I saw this little bend in the river ike it was yesterday. The air was still cool and breezy, the sun was glinting off the water, the bees in their hive were humming—yes, it was everything a plein-air...
Posted to
Plein Air Blog
by
Jennifer King
on
23 Jun 2011
Filed under:
Filed under: Plein Air, painting, Landscape Painting, How to Paint, figure drawing, sketching, Landscape Drawing, Drawing Basics, How to Draw People, Art, Perspective Drawing
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Flower Garden by Clyde Aspevig, oil on canvas, 24 x 12. Content adapted from an article by Allison Malafronte. Clyde Aspevig is a landscape painter and seasoned plein air artist who prides himself on going out into his chosen environs with a feeling of belonging to nature rather than feeling apart from...
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Squall Line by John Hulsey (30 x 40, oil painting). John Hulsey and Ann Trusty created their website, The Artist’s Road , to inspire their readers and students with practical art tips and plein air painting techniques for the traveling artist. John and Ann have been blogging for us at Artist Daily...
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The water in River Reflections is quite smooth, but the colors give a sense of the play of shadow and light. All works by Jennifer King. John and Ann’s recent post about painting water en plein air was so inspiring and right on target. I love painting water elements, too, because they always make...