Monday Morning Art School: please learn to draw
Drawing is the cheapest and most liberating of all media. All you need is a sketchbook, a mechanical pencil, and a straight-edge.
I haven’t got room for another painting
A good painting can be the anchor for a series of rooms, for generations, in fact. Its color scheme is almost immaterial, as long as it is well-executed and exerts emotional pull.
Monday Morning Art School: swinging on anchor
“I noticed a boat just off the pier where I was sitting,” pastor Tommy Faulk told us. “As I sat there and watched, I realized there were parts of the boat I hadn’t noticed in my first look. The boat was drifting around the point where it was anchored, making every side visible.”
Stuck? 12 ways to reignite your painting progress
Feeling stuck happens to all of us at some point. Here are 12 practical suggestions to reignite your learning.
Exercise: Elements of Design
Create a composition using the elements of design Below are five images from Penobscot Bay. Your task is to create a value drawing, arranging elements from the images in a pleasing composition. Don’t try to be photorealistic. Instead, try to make an interesting value drawing by mixing and matching the elements. It’s not necessary to …
Exercise: Tea Cup Example
Ellipses When drawing round objects, we have to look for the ellipses, which are just elongated circles. Follow along with this tutorial on drawing ellipses. I used a pie plate, but you can adapt it to whatever you have available. If you’re already comfortable measuring and drawing ellipses, skip down past the tutorial to practice …
Monday Morning Art School: painting plein air fast
My top five tips to finish a plein air painting in three hours (and still make it look good).
Monday Morning Art School: how important is drawing, anyway?
Drawing is the grammar of art, and color is art’s vocabulary. As with language, we learn them both intuitively and intentionally.
Monday Morning Art School: pie crusts and pie plates for Thanksgiving
In the past, I threw in the pie crust recipe as a teaser to get people to learn how to draw ellipses. These days, pie crust is a dying art, so that might just be the most important part.
Monday Morning Art School: the power of light
In a world obsessed with rawness, you could do worse than studying the Luminists. Lumber Schooners at Evening on Penobscot Bay, 1863, Fitz Henry Lane, courtesy National Gallery of Art. The setting for this painting is, quite literally, out my back door. Luminism is a distinctly American painting movement of the middle of the 19th century. It was chiefly …
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