Boy, there is NOTHING like a holiday weekend to put me in a fantastic mood. I plucked my “little” sprout out of bed this morning and met some of my good friends out by the lake for a morning run (okay, I’m not cleared to run on the healing fracture YET but the walk was AMAZING.) Following the cardio, we had hard lunge workout led by our Ragnar Relay team leader. I was back home by 9:30 with my exercise already under my belt… what a PERFECT way to start the day.

On the art front, above is my finished vase painting. Yes, FINISHED. I have worked on that vase for what seems like an eternity, trying to get it right! And now it FINALLY feels “right.” Yippee!!!

After watering my plants down (we need RAIN!) I worked on my little bird paintings a little. I go through spells where I just get hung up on a subject. Maybe that little yellow bird that hangs around hubby’s sunflowers is my subconscious muse. Last week my brother came and took a couple of paintings of mine for his new house (yay!) and as a joke, traded an old license plate for them. So I took that old license plate and have started his Christmas present on it. Joke’s on him!

The idea for the above painting came to me as I was going into a state of delirium on the exercise bike at the gym. I plan to get a big cup of ice water, turn on my Enya playlist, go into a painting trance and try to get some work done on this one while I’m feeling inspired.

I hope you all make this a WONDERFUL day for yourself!

Renee

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RagtreePolymerClaySculpture/~3/JJP7fUbNmmM/sweet-holiday-weekend.html

arte nuevo arte vivo paintings

by David R. Darrow
8″ x 6″ (20.3cm x 15.2cm)
Oil on Belgian Linen Panel

SOLD
Collection of Derek Beasley
Lancaster, CA ? USA

About This Painting

Another pepper from my garden.

I watched this little fellow grow and plump up and turn a brilliant emerald green (if you don’t know, they turn red soon after). I felt that the young plant was too weak to hold this 6″ pepper ? it seemed all the watering and nutrients were going toward sustaining the pepper, so I pruned it off.

Now the plant is three times the size is was, has new flower buds which will bear fruit, and will be doing its pepper thing again, soon.

It’s so fascinating to see them take shape, change color, and reshape. Wouldn’t you like to be a Pepper, too?

Maybe you’d have to have grown up in the 70s to understand this one.  ?

Source: http://everydaypaintings.blogspot.com/2011/09/be-pepper.html

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Here’s the rough composition in grey as it stands right now, in its most elementary state. I’ll begin marble, foliage and wall treatments once I’ve finished the first layer of grey on the girls.

The grey work continues to expand across the canvas ? it?s beginning to feel like a proper painting now. I?m having a great time working on the piece, which is the most reminiscent of a pre-raphaelite composition that I?ve done so far, although I doubt that anyone would mistake this for a nineteenth century painting. I will push pretty hard to finish the grisaille this week, perhaps even starting on the colour work if I can. I?d like to begin a new piece as soon as possible, perhaps a flying painting of resurrection and angels next.

Source: http://gildedraven.com/2012/03/three-girls-in-the-courtyard/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=three-girls-in-the-courtyard

abstract art oil paintings fresco paintings

I love photographing light. You can get some really random and cool effects from aiming your lens at the sun. You can also create some really fun effects using filters in Photoshop. And sometimes these effects are so simple to achieve it almost feels like cheating. Lets take a look at one such effect… adding light rays to a photo.

To achieve this effect you need a good photo with a light source coming from behind a subject. I found this great photoof a girl jumping by Heather Aitken.

I chose this photo because the sun is setting in the background, and we have a good foreground subject for the light rays …

Source: http://wegraphics.net/blog/tutorials/photoshop-quick-tip-adding-and-enhancing-light-rays-in-your-photos/

arte vivo paintings rembrandt

I?m nuts over these teeny tiny clay houses! They?re made by an American artist named Laurie, who?s currently living in Holland ?  just a few steps down a cobblestone road from Rembrandt?s birthplace.

For the colored houses, Laurie uses real pigments from the Old World, ground by a windmill in Holland. She offers architecture examples from Amsterdam, Italy, Paris ? even the French countryside. I think they make the most charming collection. I want one of each!

Wouldn?t they make the cutest (tiny!) souvenir from a trip to Europe?

Chamonix-Mont-Blanc or, more commonly, Chamonix is a commune in the Haute-Savoie departement in the Rhone-Alpes region in south-eastern France. It was the site of the 1924 Winter Olympics, the first Winter Olympics. In this step-by-step Photoshop tutorial, I will show you how to create a vintage style ski poster design. We will combine stock photos, textures and brushes with blend mode techniques and filters on our way to achive the final design.
Preview
First, take a look at the image we’ll be creating.

Step 1
Open up Adobe Photoshop and create a document with your desired poster dimensions. Fill background with white color. Remember to use a high DPI (between 150-300 dpi) and CMYK …

Source: http://wegraphics.net/blog/tutorials/how-to-design-a-vintage-style-ski-poster-in-photoshop/

illustration painting veduta art deco

The walkovers that exist at beaches are there for a reason. Use them to get to the beach instead of walking across sensitive dunes, which will help reduce erosion. Dunes protect land against storm waves from the sea, and harbor specialized plants and animals. However, human activity and population expansion threaten their existence.

Photo: Thomas Northcut / Getty Images

By The Daily Green Staff

The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed new safe-swimming guidelines that would weaken protections for people swimming at public beaches or otherwise coming into contact with water. According to groups critical of the standards, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and Riverkeeper, the new standards would consider water as safe for swimming even if as many as 1 in 28 people get sick from coming into contact with it. This level of acceptable risk is weaker than the current standard, which many states have yet to adopt.

The new standard is also too weak to protect the very young, very old or the ill, critics say. And the testing requirements are so weak that blatantly unsafe water wouldn’t always trigger beach closures because the offending tests could be averaged with those taken on days when the water was clean.

The NRDC further points out that the proposed EPA budget for state grants for water testing and notification, is zero, a cut of nearly $10 million. Already, only 55% of public beaches test water quality and only 44% test weekly. Riverkeeper has pointed out, on the Hudson River and elsewhere, people routinely swim in areas that are not public beaches. Riverkeeper’s tests in the Hudson River and its tributaries show that water is unsafe for swimming (based on the current EPA guideline) more than 20% of the time.

The EPA proposal may make the water appear safer, but actual water quality would decrease.

Related: Before Swimming at Public Beaches, Ask These Questions

Source: http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/safe-swimmig-standard-1203?src=rss

portrait artists modern artists surrealism art

Hello, Friends! Are you ready for the weekend? We are headed on a little roadtrip to Stonehenge! We toyed with the idea of going last month, but realized we were still waiting on a few visa-related documents and shouldn?t leave the country. Happily, the visa stuff is all current now, so we can come and go again with ease. Thank goodness.

I?ve written down all your Stonehenge tips from the previous post, but if you have any more to add, I?d love to read them. You guys always give the best travel tips!

While I pack everyone?s overnight bags, here are a few things I?ve wanted to share with you:
- What?s the most important thing in your bag?
- Glowing jars.
- Is it hammock time yet?
- Two fun kickstarter projects ? a paper doll coloring book, and modular dollhouses.
- Very French Gangsters.
- I reloaded this like 20 times, and laughed harder every time.
- Another fun, candy-free idea for your Easter baskets.
- Are you kidding me? I am so making these.
- Ben Blair sent me this video. It?s cool with a capital C.

I also write for Babble.com. Here are this week?s posts:
- Are you wearing coral this spring? Here are 20 reasons why you might want to.
- What do you think about this swimwear? I hear Madonna and Gwyneth put their kids in these.
- Here?s a new line just for boys (and tomboys!).
- An upcycled take on Easter Eggs.
- Win cute stuff from Mimi the Sardine!

I hope you have a marvelous weekend ? and maybe squeeze in an adventure too! I?ll meet you back here on Monday. I miss you already.

kisses,
Gabrielle

P.S. ? The photo of June is from my instagram. I had an appointment this morning and she was feeling shy in the waiting room.

As a beginning illustrator and very “wet behind the ears” in 1980 when I set out at 22 to make a living right out of art school, all I knew was “fast media” ? I had only used oils in a few figure painting classes, and didn’t know the medium well. None of the instructors I had really talked much about the inherent properties of oil, drying time, block-ins, washes, etc., so Oils were a mystery to me until 2000, 20 years later, when I decided to learn them “for reals.”

Old Acrylics

Click the picture for a larger view

Acrylics dry fast, so that’s what I used when doing all my time-sensitive commercial work. I did a lot of airbrush work back then, so It was an obvious choice. Still, the darks in acrylic dry a step or 2 lighter, and the lights dry a bit darker by the time the water has “flashed off” ? so it was always a wait-and-see game, for me.

I decided to try a small figure painting in acrylic, using washes, glazes and scumbling to achieve an atmospheric effect. It was a bit of a trip down memory lane. For starters, some of the still-good tubes of acrylic I have are older than many of the people on my mailing list. In the picture of some tubes of mine, you can see that I dated them, sometimes, so I would know when I bought them ? never thinking I would actually have them nearly 30 years later. The tube in the middle, dated 9/85 is a sure tell. But if you’re a Pasadena local, you know that the tube to the left (Modular Color) was from an old product line that was hue and value-based, sold in metal tubes, and in this case, from “Standard Brands” paint store on Orange Grove in Pasadena ? that store long ago having changed hands. (The $1.03 price tag is certainly nostalgic!) That store tag means I bought it during my school years, 1977?1980. Yikes-squared!

And it still flows.

I put the near-full “Portrait Pink” tube in the picture to show how useless therefore largely-unused it is.

But I digress…

Stage 1 ? The drawing in pencil and then brownish acrylic

I started with a canvas glued to 1/8″ luan mahogany plywood. You can’t see it here, but the canvas has been highly textured with modeling paste, knifed? and bushed?on, coated in gesso, and sanded.

Stage 2 ?  A quick, warm/neutral wash of acrylic:

Raw Umber, Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna, greatly thinned with water

Stage 3 (2.5, really)  ? I pat it and wipe it down quickly before it dries to get rid of

the drips and brush marks.

Stage 4 ? I start re-working the darks before I completely lose my drawing,

then do another 2 or 3 washes over it.

Stage 5 ? I alternate between warm and cool washes of color.

Here, a Payne’s Gray wash has been added mostly at the top. By the way, Payne’s Gray is merely a premixed Ultramarine Blue and Ivory Black ? it says so right on the label.

Stage 6 ? A Yellow Ocher wash has been added, plus some reworking

of the lost highlights using Titanium White Gesso and water.

Burnt Sienna is used in the shadows to keep them from going too dark, for now.

Stage 7 ? Creating atmosphere with more thin washes.

Yellow Ocher and Burnt Sienna both have a slight opacity to them ? they are not true transparent colors, like Ultramarine is. Therefore, they tend to lighten. This begins to create a “foggy,” more unified look to the lights and darks. This also ties the cool highlights back to the color scheme.

Stage 8 ? I wash in some local color and re-enforce the highlights.

I want a warm-to-cool graduated background, and I want something light behind the head to bring out the profile, so I start working the cool light on the wall. I also add the red of the drape on the chair, while reinforcing the satin white.

Close-up ? A bit blurry, sorry!

Stage 9 ? Oil Wash or Burnt Sienna, Ultramarine Blue and Raw Umber, Turp and Linseed Oil

What???

You may object to oil paint being used in an acrylic painting since one cannot paint with both. This is mostly true. The astute among you will know that you cannot paint acrylic over oil ? ever. But the reverse is not true. You can paint oil over (dried) acrylic. This is completely archival.

The really super-astute among you will realize that this last stage ? where I am leaving off for now ? is where I became frustrated with the way the acrylic painting was going, seeing the seemingly endless work ahead to get what I wanted, therefore I “changed horses in the middle of this stream.”

Goodbye acrylic, for now. This painting has plenty of potential, and it’s only going to be realized if I enjoy painting it, so… I did what I had to do. For now, I like oils better, and I believe I can finish this faster/sooner and with greater artistic freedom in oils.

Paint Smarter?

?Dave

Source: http://everydaypaintings.blogspot.com/2011/08/draped-in-satin-acrylic-figure.html

watercolor painting portrait painting art beat

I?m thoroughly enjoying myself in the studio working out the architecture of the new painting, making shapes for a courtyard beside the ocean somewhere on the coast of California. I want to create a setting for two girls to look at a big old book, under warm sunlight and shady leaves, in the golden sunshine of early evening. They?re sitting in a private world, but among trees and plants, with stucco and marble. I think their lives are comfortable, but they want excitement, so they?re exploring the book to learn how to work magic. Another girl will probably be watching them from the doorway on the right. In order to get some sense of really successful spatial composition I looked through Peter Trippi?s excellent monograph on Waterhouse, one of my favorite Pre-Raphaelite painters. Several of his paintings make use of leafy courtyard spaces in this kind of composition, with pretty girls reading, or listening to music.

The painting looks terrible right now with nothing but structure roughed in. I?ve not worked this way before ? usually I start with figures then invent backgrounds around them -this time I created the world first. I like this, but I had to be careful to consider the point of view so that the eyeline in the photo references would match that in the painting.

I shot reference photos of Trew for the painting ? she?ll be both of the girls ? with Aaron standing in as her friend for reference when she swapped characters. I?m very happy with the way the pictures turned out. Trew?s a natural model.

Source: http://gildedraven.com/2012/03/architecture-for-the-priestess/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=architecture-for-the-priestess

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