Some plein air painters are hardy and dedicated enough to paint outdoors all year round. Others, like your humble author, are more inclined to wait until spring to emerge from the cocoon of a heated studio, brushes in hand, blinking in the glare of an unfamiliar sun.

In either case, for most of us, the warmer days are high season for painting outdoors — time to get out the pochade box and venture into the open air.

I’ve just updated my extensive article from 2008 on pochade boxes, in which I discuss the use and basic configurations of these portable outdoor artists studios, and attempt to list every commercial manufacturer as well as a variety of DIY solutions for those inclined to build their own.

I’ve added new information about Open Box M, new products from Judson’s Art Outfittters, as well as several additional DIY videos and resources, some of which lower the bar by utilizing found materials and $10 or $15 in parts.

So unleash your inner Van Gogh and take to the fields, brushes, pochade box and tripod in hand.

(Above: Open Box M, Alla Prima Pochade, Judson’s French Resistance, DIY models from Scott Ruthven and Antti Rautiola)

Taking another dip into the extensive art image resources on the Wikimedia Commons website, I’m once again finding delight in the ability to sort paintings by decade (or year) and browse a wonderful assortment of artists, subjects and styles.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, gleaning a few paintings off their generalized “1880′s paintings” page, from which you can dive into much greater detail going into individual years or artists.

Though the images are not as consistently large as, say, the Google Art Project, and the image quality is hit and miss — the extent, variety and ability to sort by various criteria make the site an art browsing treasure and a Major Time Sink.

(Images above: William Merritt Chase, Ivan Shishkin, Henryk Hector Siemiradzki, Willem de Zwart, Vincent van Gogh, Edward Burne-Jones, Jacob Maris, Giovanni Fattori, Ilya Repin, Vasily Polenov, Émile Schuffnecker, Edouard Manet)

Boston painter Robert Douglas Hunter studied with R.H. Ives Gammell, carrying forward his defense of classical academic tradition in the face of modernist orthodoxy.

Hunter’s refined, elegant still life paintings of simple objects wrapped in soft light and contemplative stillness, carry echoes of the 19th century French ateliers and even further back to Chardin and the Dutch still life masters.

I don’t know of a dedicated site for Hunter, but I can direct you to galleries that feature his work as well as the Guild of Boston Artists, of which he was president for several years.

Hunter taught at the Vesper School of Art and the Worchester Art Museum. He is the recipient of numerous awards and his work is in the collections of museums and other institutions in the northeastern US and nationwide.

Maurice Sendak, one of the premiere book illustrators of the late 20th/early 21st centuries, died today at the age of 83.

Unfortunately, I don’t know of a large repository of his work on the web.

The Rosenabch Museum and Library, a small museum here in Philadelphia, houses the preeminent collection of his works, and has a small gallery of images available online.

Two quotes from Sendak:

“I refuse to lie to children.”

“Kids books… Grownup books… That’s just marketing. Books are books.”

For more, see my previous post on Maurice Sendak.

Harry Clarke was a Irish illustrator and stained glass artist, active in the early 20th Century, in the latter part of the Golden Age of Illustration.

As an illustrator, he is known in particular for his work for Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales and Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination.

You can see the influence of earlier Golden Age greats like Edmund Dulac, Kay Nielsen and Aubrey Beardsley, but Clarke wove his influences into a unique and fascinating style. You can also see Clarke’s influence carried forward, for example in the work of contemporary comics artist and illustrator P. Craig Russell.

There is a particularly good resource of Clarke’s work on 50 Watts with excellently prepared images of his work, including his black and white Poe illustrations and a selection of detail crops from them, along with the text decorations and color plates.

There is also a wider selection of Clarke’s work, though with smaller images, on Grandma’s Graphics

[Obliquely via io9, (skip the FastCo Design link, it's poorly presented)]

[Note: some of the images (particularly the Poe color plates) should be considered NSFW and not suitable for children.]

Here in the U.S., tomorrow, Saturday, May 5, is Free Comic Book Day, a yearly opportunity for those who love comics to pick up some free promotional titles prepared by publishers large and small to promote their lines.

More importantly, it’s an opportunity for those who aren’t familiar with the current state of comic books (which may be quite different than you think), to visit a comic book specialty store in an atmosphere of open house, with proprietors ready to introduce new readers to titles that they might find of interest and answer any questions they may have.

Many stores also use the occasion to hold sales, have signing events and otherwise use the day as “Comic Book Day” as much as “Free Comic Book Day.

There is an official Free Comic Book Day website, that includes a Store Locator to find a participating comics store in your area, and page describing the comics that will be given away, including PDF previews of some titles. Not all are available at all stores; check your store to see if they are featuring Gold (more common) or Gold and Silver (more extensive) titles.

For more, see some of my previous posts, below, particularly the one from 2005, in which I talk more about why you might want to check out comic books, especially if you think they are only about superheroes.

Artist Derek Penix came from a family in which his mother and grandfather both painted, and took it up himself after high school.

He says his admiration for painters like Nicolai Fechin, John Singer Sargent and the French Impressionists has been superseded as his primary influence by his studies with contemporary painter Quang Ho.

Penix has a crisp, painterly approach with a deft play of light and shadow. I particularly enjoy his paintings of outdoor market stalls and the play of sunlight on brightly colored wooden boats.

The Boundaries of Life and Death is a very short (one minute), beautifully realized black and white animation by Saskia Kretzschmann.

It is based on a quote by Edgar Allen Poe:

“The Boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”

On Vimeo.