Yes, it’s subjective: What one judge likes in a painting another judge snubs! But there are criteria for strong paintings that appeal to a wide audience based on commonly embraced technique and design characteristics. Artist [...]
By Guest Contributor Richard McKinley Reprising an article that first appeared in Outdoor Painter, landsape artist Richard McKinley gives us 7 tips for ways to express ourselves more creatively. They are practical and doable. Seven [...]
The appeal of some paintings is undeniable. But how do we explain the attraction? Today Bob Bahr examines the work of Jennifer McChristian to help unravel why such paintings immediately grab our attention and keep us captivated. [...]
Related > Charlie Hunter is also on the faculty of next week’s PleinAir Live! Virtual art conference, March 6-8, 2024 – join us! As a painter, where are you on the scale of realistic representation [...]
Art historians use the term Tonalism to describe an American artistic movement spanning from about 1880 to approximately 1920. More generally, the term (tonalism or tonalist with a lower case “t”) describes a style of [...]
At five and a half feet wide by seven and a half feet long, Zaria Forman’s pastel paintings are hard to ignore. Within them, art, science, and beauty mingle in equal measure. For two decades, [...]
Pastel drawings and paintings glow with an intensely luminous color and rich velvety texture. This is because pastel powder is pure pigment. Many pastel lovers favor the mediums for its sensitive quality that aligns with [...]
Winner of the “Best Animals & Birds” category of the December 2023 PleinAir Salon, Biruta Hansen’s Who’s Hiding? depicts a partly camouflaged rabbit (our family calls the abundant critters “bunnies”) peeking out from a profusion [...]
Artist Terri Ford’s Canyon Dusk, a 24” x 28” pastel (above), won first place overall in the December 2023 PleinAir Salon, judged by California oil painter Camille Przewodek. Ford is an accomplished pastel painter (IAPS [...]
It is a puzzlement: the larger your painting is, the more concentrated you feel you have to work. That’s because a patch of blue sky in a 40” x 36” landscape feels a lot emptier [...]
