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I love summer because I’m always on the go. It’s the best time of year to travel, and I just can’t seem to say no to any outing or adventure that comes my way. Want to take a road trip through the Carolinas, Court? I’m there. A holiday to Chicago? Sign me up. A vacation in California’s...
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The sensitivity that is at the core of being an artist, whether a writer, designer, oil painter, or draftsman, is both a blessing and a curse. The paradox seems to be in how to maintain and nurture it while at the same time developing the necessary hardness to protect oneself from the bumps and bruises...
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When I'm hiking or walking on the beach, my attention span is really short. I flit from activity to activity, sight to sight, just trying to take it all in. That's why pastel painting is a perfect fit for me when I want to create art outdoors. I can work quickly and see results equally fast,...
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I’ve spent way too much time in murky classrooms looking at slides, slides, and more slides. I’m convinced that the entire academic field of art history would grind to a halt without projectors, carousels, and slides. But what is weird about looking at so many images is that I find myself...
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The moment the June issue of The Artist's Magazine hit the newsstands we started to receive a deluge of letters of protest and of praise. The cause of controversy was an article I’d written on the work of social realist Max Ginsburg, whose beautiful Swing graces the cover. Ginsburg’s...
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I just finished a very interesting commission. I've shared my oil painting, Pandora , on Artist Daily before. It was one of the central paintings from my 2012 exhibit at Forbes Gallery. I got a lot of positive feedback on that painting--and then got an inquiry from a collector, "Is Pandora still...
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Attitude by Patricia Hannaway, 2006, pastel sketch drawing, 21 x 12. Human figure sketching, especially learning how to sketch from a model, is one of the most rewarding ways of practicing art because it can enhance your abilities in ways that are both practical and inspirational. It's practical...
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Sounds mysterious and threatening, right? No worries! It's just that when Liz Haywood-Sullivan began to create pastel drawings, she was dismayed with the range of dark colors available. "Rich, dark pastels were hard to find," she says. "Most of the time the darks just weren't dark...
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I own up to the fact that I am drawn to the portraits artist Jenny Morgan creates because they are unconventional. Yet they capture qualities of the human face and our other human qualities in ways that read very true and lifelike. I like them because they are different, but not just because they are...
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Every year, we invite pastel artists to enter their work into our annual Pastel 100 competition, now in its 14th year. And every year, we receive thousands of pastel paintings. I am always stunned by the fantastic variety of the work and the extraordinary level of talent. We celebrate the impeccable...
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Certainly, there are pitfalls to making paintings from photos . One problem occurs when an artist thinks that a photo is magic and that he or she can turn a photo into a painting with a snap of the fingers. It isn't that easy, of course. And even if it were possible to easily reproduce photos as...
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When I say "the perfect blend," I feel a little bit like I am describing a gourmet coffee flavor, but there really is a perfect blend that exists in pastel painting. For me, the crème de la crème of pastel drawings combines a certain level of literal representation with a modern...
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If I had a time machine and could travel back to learn how to oil paint from any artist in history, I would not spare a second thought setting the clock to circa 1895, smack dab in the middle of the era when Odilon Redon was refining his fine art oil-painting and pastel-painting skills. The Cyclops by...
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Sometimes I can forget how good it feels just practicing drawing techniques. Simple things, like working on proportion and scale and line weight can feel so rewarding if you give yourself the time to really savor them when learning to draw. Mostly this is because all great drawings are built on these...
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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 the flower's petals are bright red against the green of the leaves in daylight. But, take a look...