Watch Me Paint: World-Class Art, World-Class Instruction
If you’ve ever frosted a cake, you know how to use a palette knife. Fishing village, by Carol L. Douglas Most of what we artists use on our palettes are what are currently called “painting knives.” A palette knife, in current parlance, is flat like a putty knife. The ones with cranked necks are, according …
Continue reading “Monday Morning Art School: Palette knife painting”
by Jane Chapin I Got This, by Jane Chapin. For more information, see her website here. How to get in a national art show: Assemble all your best qualifying work in one room. Take the very best photos you can. Stare at them intently. Pick your two favorites and eliminate them. Have a drink (I’m …
Painting what you know, vs. what’s actually there. Spruces and pines on the Barnum Brook Trail, by Carol L. Douglas Yesterday I was visited by a filmmaker from Wisconsin. Patrick Walters is in Rockport for a workshop at Maine Media Workshops being taught by my pal Terri Lea Smith. I didn’t catch his name when he …
An efficient plan for fast outdoor painting in oils. Camden harbor, by Carol L. Douglas Sometimes people ask me how we manage to get so many paintings done during an event. We avoid what my friend Brad Marshall called “flailing around.” That means those times when you seem to lose your way. We’ve all done …
2024 Workshops Art and Adventure at Sea: watercolor workshop aboard Schooner American Eagle Learn to watercolor on the magical, mystical waters of Maine’s Penobscot Bay, aboard the historic schooner American Eagle. All materials, berth, meals and instruction included. September 15-19, 2024. Immersive In-Person Workshop: oil and watercolor workshop in Rockport, ME Spend a week of …
Create a drop-dead painting from a so-so scene. Wreck of the SS Ethie, by Carol L. Douglas Certain places are fascinating for something other than their pictorial value. The angle, the light, and the setting aren’t conducive to a great composition. An example of this was the wreckage of the SS Ethie in Gros Morne …
Continue reading “Monday Morning Art School: landscape from abstraction”
Now the outsider is us, alone in the dark, excluded from whatever is going on in that beautiful spot of light. Nocturne in Grey and Gold: Chelsea Snow, 1896, James McNeill Whistler, courtesy Fogg Art Museum Last week my husband was studying a beautiful nocturne by the Taos painter Oscar E. Berninghaus. The dim light …
There’s no place for subtle in online art sales. Headwaters of the Hudson, by Carol L. Douglas If you look at pastel kits online, you’ll see a bias toward high-chroma colors, even though lower-saturation chalks are the workhorses of pastel painting. In part, that’s because all mixing results in lower chroma; pigments are impure and …
The paintings that catch our eye aren’t necessarily the ones that are perfectly executed. American Eagle in Drydock, by Carol L. Douglas While I’ve had an Instagram account for a long time, I’ve only recently understood how it really works. I’m not talking about its mechanics, but the algorithms that drive it. It has the …
John Morra recently wrote an excellent essay examining the nature of plein air painting. I’m assigning it to all my students; it’s that good. Most of us have been in a competitive plein air event and seen something passed off as outdoor painting that was clearly not painted from life. How do we know this? …