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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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Especially since the mid-1800s, many artists have stressed color over other elements in painting. The Impressionists are notable examples. Monet, for instance, explored how to paint light and its effects on the colorful scenes he saw in his mind's eye. Although many think of Monet as a painter of...
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Looking at Mark Messersmith's artwork is like being sucked into a kaleidoscope. The colors are bold, varied, and everywhere. It seems odd to say this. I mean, of course, there is color everywhere--it's a painting. But what stands out about Messersmith's work is that the colors, more than...
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I was always taught that effective color mixing starts with discovering the tinting strength of each color on your palette. For me, that is the basis of understanding how to mix colors, because it tells me how they will react when combined. A Breath Away by Joseph McGurl, oil on canvas, 24 x 36. I'm...
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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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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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Perhaps the toughest skill that the artist painting outside must learn is the ability to judge values accurately, and then mix them in paint. The reason that this skill requires so much practice to get right is because our eyes and brains are constantly adjusting to the light, kind of like a video camera...
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In plein air we attempt a form of direct translation. In the studio, we may recall our observations of nature, but are freer to be inventive with color. Night Passage by Mitchell Albala, 2006, oil painting on panel, 20 x 20. It's September and the plein air painting season is drawing to a close ...
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Because learning about color complements on the color wheel is often one of the first lessons we are taught in art class, complementary color paintings--those contrasting blue and orange, yellow and violet, and red and green--are often thought of as for beginners. A painting by Leonard Rosoman that shows...
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The winners of our Self-Portrait Cover Competition are featured in the September issue of American Artist, and they share advice about how to paint the figure and how to maintain a successful painting practice. When we asked David Tanner, the winner of the competition, to give his advice, he offered...
Posted to
The Oil Painting Blog
by
Austin R. Williams
on
12 Jul 2012
Filed under:
Filed under: color, oil painting, plein air, still life, landscape painting, portrait painting, how to paint, Figure Drawing, Drawing Basics, Photo Reference, Art, Artist Daily
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The size, clarity, and portability of an iPad begs for it to be used as a digital oil painting canvas or sketchbook page, and now you can do just that. I'm consistently amazed at the apps for artists that are being released on smartphones and tablets. Developers have reached new levels of realism...
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Fantasy art guru and top-notch artist James Gurney is a font of knowledge when it comes to so many aspects of drawing and painting . Whether you are into fantasy images or tend toward more realist compositions, Gurney has techniques and methods dealing with color, light, and form that are invaluable...
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The art of still life painting is a time-honored one that has been around since at least the time of the ancient Egyptians. Still life paintings were often used to adorn the interiors of Egyptian tombs with the belief that these depictions of food and other objects would actually become real and available...
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We are big admirers of J. M. W. Turner's work in oil and watercolor, especially his magnificent, ethereal watercolor paintings . Unfortunately many of his paintings are much less vivid today than they were when he painted them. We know this from written descriptions of the paintings that were written...
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Where would painting be without the color blue? It is so easy to obtain artist paints of any hue these days that we forget that in the time of both Michelangelo and Titian, a pure, vibrant blue pigment could only be made by laboriously cooking and hand-grinding a stone of lapis lazuli into a fine powder...