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It feels right to talk about color and art during this time of the year, when flowers are blooming, trees are budding, and skies are (mostly) blue. After months of dull-colored scenery, everything seems to be flourishing wherever I look, which makes me want to do whatever I can to capture that beauty...
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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, artists were an integral part of any expedition. Often these artists were also trained naturalists...
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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 a way of knowing a subject. If you can draw it, then you own it. It is in your visual library and...
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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 that they are also accurate. To be sure, the technology packed into even an inexpensive camera...
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I was in Florida a few weeks ago and felt so lucky to be in such a warm, sunny place that I don't think I spent a minute indoors. I was kayaking, mountain biking, walking on the beach, and swimming in the ocean. And again and again I would look around and think, "That's a landscape painting...
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It's a brand new year and I want to start it off with a bang! And the one thing that I can't get enough of is color. The color wheel holds such simple beauty and complex mysteries, from saturated primary colors to more involved color mixes, that I don't see how I could ever feel like I've...
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While it was a lousy summer for tomatoes, something in the air made the pumpkins and winter squash particularly prolific, and we find ourselves with a workshop full of the stuff. What we are convinced is a flood of trouble may actually be a sea of opportunity. Golden Opportunity by Steve Henderson of...
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Around this time of year we are inundated with wintry scenes and beautiful snowy landscapes--on greeting cards, products, advertisements, calendars and more. But these winter landscapes aren't necessarily all created equal, and the same goes for the fine art paintings of the same subject. One of...
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Uh, I think I may have stumbled into an artist's dream! The Artist's Network Annual Holiday Sweepstakes is going on right now, offering awesome art prizes from the best painting and drawing product makers and service providers around. Rosemary & Co. brushes? Yes! Strathmore surfaces? Yes...
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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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I'm a water person. I love boating, swimming, scuba diving, and just looking at the ever-changing surface of nearby waterways. And I'm not alone. American artists--and those abroad--have been enamored with so many beautiful bodies of water over the centuries. But the watery artist who is stealing...
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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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"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. This may sound simple, but it is anything but, and it takes unrelenting practice to get good at it...
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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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I roll my eyes every time I hear about representational art and realism being "imperiled," because there are so many important representational artists painting right now. It's almost offensive how people think legitimacy comes with the passage of time. History can be a great equalizer...