03 December 2006

All the Strange Hours has moved!

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I've moved this weblog to a new site. All of the old posts and comments have been imported to the new version of the weblog, so there is...
29 November 2006

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When I'm painting, I wear a painting shirt that's got lots of paint on it. I often just wipe my brush on the shirt rather than using...
26 November 2006

Light for the Artist 2

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Another quote from Ted Seth Jacobs. Geometric and Organic Shapes. There is a radical difference between shapes of things made by nature and ...
1 comment:
25 November 2006

Leyendecker

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Here's a great page of studies by the great American illustrator J. C. Leyendecker (you know, the guy who invented the modern image of S...

Light for the Artist 1

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"Light for the Artist," by Ted Seth Jacobs, is out of print. I strongly recommend that any artist who wants to work in a realist m...
22 November 2006

Tad Spurgeon

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has a lot to say about oil painting. He has a basic guide to painting, a lot of info on working with traditional oil painting materials, and...

Leaves

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I've been working on this one for a couple of weeks. I don't think it's quite successful, for two reasons. First, in the leaves ...
2 comments:

The Zone

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The zone is the place where you just draw, just paint, and all of your conscious thoughts are focused on making the art happen. The zone can...

Edges

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I'm just beginning to understand the use of edge control in painting. Edges are important in part because they are such an important par...
16 November 2006

Hilltop

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This is a photo of a hilltop in County Connemara, Ireland.

Payne's grey

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is usually a convenience mixture of a black and one or two other colors that creates a cool dark grey. I don't find paints like that use...
14 November 2006

Some more thoughts on egg tempera

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"Tempera isn't hard. It's just slow." —George Tooker I've been playing a bit more with egg tempera lately, and remembe...
08 November 2006

You say "sfumah-to," I say "sfumay-to"

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In the excellent Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery, there is a description of the painting technique Leon...

Never use a brush smaller than your head

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Once piece of oil painting conventional wisdom goes along the lines of "find a brush size you are comfortable with, then get a larger b...
07 November 2006

Egg tempera

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is a type of paint made by mixing pigment with egg yolk.* This week I've been working on an egg tempera study (several figures copied fr...
2 comments:
01 November 2006

I did a lot of complaining about bad use of chroma

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in my last post. I was grousing about artists who use high chroma colors indiscriminately. So I thought I'd provide an example of a goo...
31 October 2006

Practical color mixing 3: chroma

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This is the third post on mixing color. The first was about value and the second was about hue. Now it's time to talk about chroma. Ide...
5 comments:
24 October 2006

Jan van Eyck

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was credited by the 16th century artist and biographer Vassari as the inventor of oil painting. That's not the case, but in the early 15...
2 comments:

Getting back to drawing the figure

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Since the Summer, Kiri and I haven't been able to attend figure drawing and painting classes at the New England Realist Art Center. She ...
20 October 2006

Archival permanence

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Over time, all paintings deteriorate. Badly made paintings deteriorate quickly, sometimes within a year or two of completion. A painting mad...
15 October 2006

Le Café Marly

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One of the restaurants at the Louvre.
14 October 2006

Practical Color Mixing 2: Hue

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In the previous post in this series on color mixing, I talked about how to mix the right value. Here I’ll talk about hue. Identifying hue B...
12 October 2006

Heraldic contrast

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Traditional European heraldry (coats of arms) has a lot of rules regarding how designs can be constructed. One of the fundamental rules is t...
3 comments:
08 October 2006

Battle scenes

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are uncommon in Renaissance panel painting. Here is one exception, part of a series of three huge panels, done mostly in egg tempera, commem...
05 October 2006

Brendan

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is seven weeks old.
3 comments:
04 October 2006

Practical Color Mixing 1: Value

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OK, let's recap. In my first post on color, I concluded that the standard three-primary color wheel is not useful for learning about us...
03 October 2006

Madonna with the Child and Two Angels

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by Fra Fillipo Lippi, tempera on panel, 95 x 62 cm (37 x 24" ). This gorgeous and delicate painting was done in 1465. Lippi was an inte...
01 October 2006

A hottie

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This painting of a lovely lady is attributed to Raffaello Sanzio (Raphael). La Fornarina, oil on panel, 1518-19. The style of this painting ...

Glazing

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Among oil painters, there seems to be a common misconception that glazing is some kind of mystical technique that only a few can master. The...