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 [...]
Ginevra de’ Benci is the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in North or South America. It’s a small portrait (it was once a larger one though), painted when Leonardo was still in his early twenties [...]
Lots of people who wish they could paint say things like, "I can't even draw a straight line." The irony is, in painting you don’t even have to – you just have to be willing [...]
Today, artist Pat Fiorello gives us an insider’s view of her thoughtful creative process. It’s a step-by-step guide to how one contemporary artist goes beyond “merely reporting and describing the details” to render a captivating [...]
Passion and beauty intertwine in many ways throughout the history of Western art. At times the heart-melting effects of love take center stage, and a fleeting moment of human tenderness remains preserved for the ages [...]
By Art Namarilnam There must be as many ways to paint a landscape as artists to paint them. Here is one way (not THE way) that I use to paint a landscape with a limited [...]
Today we view some beautiful examples of “luminism” in American art. What to Know Luminism refers to a tendency in later nineteenth-century landscapes toward images of nature suffused with light suggesting a kind of Divine [...]
