Even though the end of the summer is rapidly approaching for those of us who live in then northern hemisphere, the time for plein air painting is hardly over; and many, myself included, find this time of year ideal for painting outdoors.

In 2008 I wrote a rather extensive article on pochade boxes, those combinations of palette and portable easel, often with provision for carrying panels and supplies, that mount on camera tripods and have become a staple tool in the modern plein air painting revival.

In attempting to find the right pochade box for my own use, I went through a fairly exhaustive search of all of the pochade box makers and models I could find at the time, as well as researching articles on making your own pochade box.

The result has been a popular Lines and Colors post in which I listed all of the resources I could find for the various kinds of pochade boxes.

I’ve just revisited the post, adding to it two more makers of pochade boxes, Sienna and Mabef, as well as expanding on the sections on tripods and painting panels.

I’ve also included an additional resources on building your own pochade box from Jim Serrett and Fazwan Barrage.

(Images above: Sienna, Mabef, Jim Serrett, Fazwan Barrage, Open Box M, Alla Prima Pochade)

Wacom is the venerable maker of pressure sensitive tablets and styli that have been the standard for digital artists for many years. My understanding is that the name is a combination of “wa”, from a Japanese word meaning harmony, and “com” from computer, meaning a device that puts one in harmony with a computer.

They make several lines of products — their industry standard Intuos line of professional tablets, of which I have been a dedicated user in one form or another for over 15 years, their newer consumer oriented line of Bamboo tablets and touchpads and their high end Cintiq models. The latter incorporate computer displays in the tablet to allow for drawing directly on the screen.

To these lines (and their smaller items like the Bamboo stylus for iPad) they are adding a new product called Inkling, a “digital sketch pen”.

This is a ballpoint pen that incorporates some electronics and is accompanied by a small receiver box that clips onto the top of a sketchbook or drawing pad, allowing the user to draw with the familiar tool of ink on paper and simultaneously have that drawing stored electronically as a digital image for later download to a computer.

There have been other “digital pens” that perform a similar function, but this is the first to offer pressure sensitivity, that quality in traditional digital drawing tablets that allows artists to vary the line weight (and often other characteristics of a stroke) with the amount of pressure applied to the pen. It also provides the ability for artists to add “layers” to the digital file, so that different parts of the drawing can be easily separated out on the computer.

The digital image can be downloaded to a computer via USB and into the Wacom software provided. The included Sketch Manager software can transform the lines into vector paths or leave them as a bitmap. The files can then be exported into Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and other common applications used by digital artists.

This is obviously meant to accommodate quick sketches and rough drawings as opposed to the more finished work one would do directly on the computer with a tablet and graphics software, but it should be a welcome addition to the digital artist arsenal, and perhaps spread the appeal of digital drawing to those more comfortable with traditional drawing tools.

One of the barriers traditional artists face when starting to use a pressure sensitive tablet is getting used to drawing while looking at the screen instead of one’s hand, which takes a little getting used to. This is certainly a less expensive way around that than the deluxe Cintiq models.

The Inkling digital sketchpen retails for $199.00 U.S.D., and should be available in mid September.

In addition to the Wacom product page, there is an introductory video on YouTube.

(The product page link given is for the Americas; see the general Wacom site for links to other world regions.)

Artist and illustrator Glenton Mellow, who writes the Flying Trilobite blog, also co-authors a new blog for Scientific American called Symbiartic, along with scientific illustrator Kalliopi Monoyios.

The tagline for Symbiartic is “The art of science and the science of art”, and topics range freely across that nebulous and fascinating intersection.

In a recent post Mellow gives a nicely succinct overview of The Chemistry of Oil Painting, with a bit of history, discussions of the principal types of oil used and a mention of artistic concerns such as glazing and “fat over lean”.

You can find more of Glendon Mellow’s writing and artwork on The Flying Trilobite and his website.

I was provided with a review copy of PaintWorks, a new eMagazine from Interweave, the parent company of American Artist and their corresponding website Artist Daily.

The debut issue of PaintWorks is Summer 2011 and the theme of the issue is “The Essentials of Still Life Painting”.

The eMagazine itself is an application, with a version for Mac or Windows (see the note below on compatibility). I downloaded the installer for Mac (364mb). It installs as an Adobe AIR application; I assume that users without Adobe AIR will be prompted to install that initially.

The installer can be set to open the eMagazine automatically when installation is complete. A brief introductory video drops you on the “cover” (home page?) of the issue, without a clear prompt or indication of where to go from there.

Poking around in the control/navigation bar at the top reveals a menu of contents, zoom control, help feature and forward and back arrows. (I think they are using an eMagazine package from Adobe, which has been providing them for a number of publications, and I assume any navigation issues are to be laid at the feet of Adobe, rather than being specific to PaintWorks.)

I found the eMagazine best enjoyed at full screen.

Following through in sequence, the structure is familiar and magazine-like, the initial page after the cover features an Editor’s Note, masthead, table of contents and link to a User’s Guide (which should have been provided on the cover page, but I’m being picky.)

The fact that it is an electronic magazine starts to become apparent with the Editor’s Note, which is a video. In it, editorial director Michael Gormley provides a brief introduction to the issue and its features, along with short clips of some of the featured artists giving their thoughts on the issue’s topic. The table of contents items are links to the sections, and a menu of them is always available as a pop-out from the left side of the interface. There is also a hidden pop-up navigation slider accessed by moving your cursor to the bottom of the interface.

The next page is an ad (clearly labeled as such in the table of contents) for American Artist’s print publication.

Next up is a 360° panorama of painter Nelson Shanks’ studio. There is an apparently unrelated section of “Tips on how to equip your own home studio” on the left, which is essentially an ad for Dick Blick artist materials. The pictures of particular brushes, paints, etc. are links. Clicking on them suddenly leaves the eMagazine, opens your web browser and takes you directly to the product pages on Blick’s online store.

I don’t so much object to the ad (though it should be labeled as such) as I do to the disconcerting jump from one application to another without warning. To me, this is simply poor interface design.

Next is the first actual article, and at this point the “next page/previous page” paradigm breaks down and you’re expected to scroll down to the article’s accompanying interactive features.

The first of these is a completely pointless bit of rollover text, a prime example of how most print publications don’t know how to use interactivity properly; but the second is a reasonably effective gallery of works from the article’s co-author, Sam Adoquei. The feature includes a “detail loupe” (my phrase, not theirs) in which you can move around the selected work to see small sections in more detail (image above).

The next article is a photographic essay on arranging and lighting a still life subject, with links to downloadable PDFs of the photos and an invitation to paint them and submit your paintings to them via Facebook.

The next section is another bit of pointless “interactivity”, with pop-up speech bubbles over photos, where simple captions would actually have been better; giving the feeling that the editors were struggling to make things “interactive” to justify the eMagazine format.

The next actual article, Draw it First, is another in which you scroll down for the article’s interactive features, in this case a nicely done step-by-step through a beautiful pencil drawing by the article’s author, Patricia Watwood. This includes the “detail loupe” feature used in the Sam Adoquei gallery (image above).

There is also a quote from another artist, Sadie Valeri (my post here), that is a link. Clicking on it again unexpectedly yanks you out of the eMagazine and into a browser, where you’re taken to an article on the Artist Daily site.

Next up is another interactive ad for one of the “Free eBooks” they’re constantly promoting with pop-ups on the Artist Daily site (they really need to get rid of those pop-ups, but I digress).

The next article, “All About Color” is another scroll-down article, thin on content and heavy on pointless rollovers.

Next is an article on Painting with Complementary Colors (image above), which consists of a series of short videos by painter Kristin Künc. These are instructive and well done, and provide more of a feeling of substance than some of the other articles.

Next is another interactive ad, this one for videos from C.W. Mundy. In this case, the video previews in the ad actually contain some useful information. The ad includes a link that again yanks you out of the eMagazine and into a browser where you are whisked to the Artist Daily online store.

Then another article in which the actual valuable information is in the form of short videos, these from artist Martha Erlebacher. Again, the videos are instructive and well done (though supplemented with another unnecessary “interactive”, with rollovers of the names of colors on her palette where simple labels would be more helpful).

The magazine rounds out with a gallery of very nice still life paintings from 16 artists, most of whom I found worth following up on (including David Ligare, who I recently featured), though this is lacking the detail magnification feature found elsewhere.

The last page is an ad for the American Artist Weekend With the Masters workshop and conference in California in September, 2011.

I’ll give American Artist and Interweave credit for jumping into the uncharted waters of digital publishing, and try to keep in mind that this is their first effort, but they don’t quite have it yet.

This is a publishing medium with exciting potential, but the editors haven’t learned how to use it to advantage.

The most valuable information is in the familiar format of instructional videos, while the instructive potential of interactive features has gone essentially untapped. Instead we’re presented with an array of unnecessary rollover text and other unhelpful “interactivity”.

The format holds great promise, but they need to hire experienced interactive designers to take advantage of the medium.

Think of what could be done with an interactive color wheel that shows artists’ colors in different views for complements, value range, chroma or mixing gamut. How about step-through demos in which the final piece can be moused over to reveal underpainting steps, videos of process and original sketches as layers in a single image? What about interactive color charts in which sliders reveal tints, shades and complementary mixes?

You could have interactive demos of how different brush angles produce different paint strokes, or painting demos in which information about the color, brush type and mixing palette are available as pop-up extensions to the main image. You could use sliders to show a work with the hues removed as a study in values, or instructional videos with integrated links to still images of the work in various stages for closer study.

There are lots of possibilities that could make the eMagazine format shine for an instructional art magazine. Rollover speech bubbles aren’t among them.

They also need to restrain the urge to link out to the web without warning. If you want to constantly link to web resources, put the primary content on a website. If you’re making a separate downloaded application, make it self-contained. Even the advertising, if there is work put into it, could be instructive and entertaining, and actually feel like valuable content. (Advertisers would expect a link out to their website via the user’s web browser, just label it as such.)

The potential is there, the editors just need to learn to use this new publishing medium for its real strengths. Hopefully, future issues will take the strong aspects of this issue, abandon the weak ones and build from there.

That being said, the editors certainly do know how to select excellent artists with valuable painting knowledge to impart, even if it’s mostly in the videos at the moment, and there is a beautiful selection of still life painting on display in the issue.

PaintWorks eMagazine, Summer 2011: The Essentials of Still Life Painting is available from the Artist Daily shop for $9.99 USD. There is a description page with a preview of the table of contents and some introductory videos.

Requirements, from Interweave: “To view this eMag, your computer needs to have these requirements: PC with Intel Core Duo or faster processor or Mac OS X v10.5 or v10.6, plus 512MB of RAM or greater available (1GB recommended). Note: Mac computers with PowerPC processors are not supported, and this version of the eMag is not compatible with the Apple iPad (but we’re working on it!).”

When I was in my late teens, earnestly trying to learn the art and craft of comic book illustration, I stumbled across a find in the dusty shelves of a used bookstore that popped my eyes open and sent me home feeling like I had struck gold.

It was a copy of Figure Drawing for All it’s Worth (also here) by Andrew Loomis, and in a way it was gold — a classic instructional art book by a master illustrator that has come to be regarded as a “must-have” by comics artists, illustrators and artists of all kinds, particularly those who must “invent” the figure — draw people in a variety of positions without model or reference.

Those artists, like myself, were lucky to have found a copy. Classic that it is, the book has been out of print for decades, leaving those who understand its worth (if you’ll excuse the expression) wondering when, if ever, the book would be republished.

Used copies in good condition have been selling in the $100 to $200 range (and higher), and though images of the book’s pages have appeared in various places on the internet, they leave much to be desired in comparison to the actual book.

Extracts of Figure Drawing for All its Worth, and its superb companion volume, Drawing the Head and Hands, were published as Drawing: Figures in Action and Drawing: The Head, respectively, from Walter Foster Books some years ago. Large in dimensions and inexpensive, they were worth picking up, but at 32 pages they were more pamphlets than books, representing a small fraction of the original books’ actual content and a poor substitute for the real thing.

So artists were left haunting used bookstores, hoping copies would show up from someone’s attic for which the bookstore owner would not know the value. Having copies of Loomis books became a bit of a status symbol in certain artists’ circles. And why, we would repeatedly ask, have these treasures not been republished?

So it was with a combination of delight and reservation that I responded to the news that Figure Drawing for All its Worth had finally been republished; the question being what kind of treatment it would receive in terms of quality of reproduction.

When I received my review copy of the new edition from Titan Books, not only was I pleased that they have been respectful of the original edition and the importance of the book, I was delighted to see that they have gone well beyond that. This is an absolutely beautiful facsimile edition, superbly reproduced with crisp, beautiful illustrations on softly textured, slightly off-white paper — looking for all the world as if you had just pulled it off the shelf in 1943.

Wow.

Not only that, they have been respectful of the wallets of starving artists everywhere, pricing the hardcover edition at only $40. A steal.

Andrew Loomis was a well respected and influential mid-20th Century illustrator (see my post on the extensive article that appeared in Illustration magazine), but he is better known today for his series of instructional books, of which Figure Drawing for All its Worth and Drawing the Head and Hands are the stars.

Though his instruction is valuable to those studying from life as well as those who are inventing the figure, his emphasis is on constructing the figure, understanding the underlying anatomy and geometry and on perceiving the figure as form, with volume. The figure exists in, and occupies, space. Loomis gives you keys to placing figures in perspective, working with foreshortening, and getting an intuitive grasp of elements of the human body as volumetric forms.

Countless artists (myself included) credit Loomis with opening their eyes to these concepts and revolutionizing their approach to drawing the figure. Loomis has been influential on generations of illustrators and comics artists in particular, as he speaks directly to the challenges they face in constructing figures and placing them in relation to their environment in a variety of positions and views, as well as in dynamic poses showing the figure in motion.

Not only is Loomis knowledgable, insightful and good at conveying what he knows about drawing (which is considerable), his own drawings are elegant, with graceful gestures, economy of notation, fluid lines and crisp rendering.

The combination qualified him to create some of the best art instruction books ever written. Long deserving of being republished, they are as relevant now as they were when first published, if not more so. The text is as sharp and crisp as the drawings, leading you through a course of discovery and offering a solid grounding in the traditional fundamentals of drawing the human form, as well as tips from one of the notable illustrators of the 20th Century.

In short, Figure Drawing for All its Worth is a treasure.

The next best news? Titan is set to release another Loomis Classic, Drawing the Head and Hands, in October!

[Important note: the images of the book interior above are taken from internet scans of older editions and do not give an accurate representation of the superb quality of the illustrations in the new edition.]

Judsons Art Outfitters is a company that manufactures and sells plein air painting supplies, including a popular line of pochade boxes (see my 2008 post on pochade boxes).

Since 2008, they have been maintaining a blog on plein air artists both contemporary and historic, plein air techniques, plein air competitions and other events of interest to plein air painters, and of course, materials.

The blog, titled Judsons Plein Air Journal, inclides short profiles of the featured artists, along with sample images and links to their websites.

In 2010 they moved the blog from its original home on Blogger and integrated it into their main product website. The archives are now on the new site as well, though you may find them easier to browse using the right hand menu bar on the old blog.

The Art Center is a blog devoted to, as the tagline says, “Sharing Ideas and Tips from Artist to Artist”.

An offshoot of the Character Design blog, which is devoted largely to interviews with artists working in the film, gaming and illustration fields, The Art Center features tutorials, walk-throughs, how to videos and discussions of process and technique for character design, concept art, storyboarding an other aspects of related visual art.

It also includes basic tips on painting, drawing, composition and rendering in various media, including digital painting.

You’ll find a list of the contributors, all working artists in related fields, on the left side of the blog, and a list of topic and artist tags on the right. The artists list is linked to the contributor’s blogs and websites, so you can click through to see more of their art.

You’ll have to put up with poke-your-eye-out graphic design, trying to read bright green text and bright red titles on a black background (what are they thinking?), but for those working in this vein, the tips and techniques are worth the effort.

(Images above: Florian Satzinger, Rad Sechrist, Hat Lieberman, Mark McDonnell, Louie del Carmen, Leighton Hickman, Sam Nielson)

[Via Dave Gibbons on Twitter @davegibbons90]

Though the physical exhibition for which it was created is in the past (having ended in January of 2010), the Museum of Art of the Rhode Island School of Design has maintained online an interactive called The Brilliant Line: Following the Early Modern Engraver 1480-1650.

The interactive features 8 Renaissance and Baroque engravings, drawn from those in the exhibition as examples; and allows you to examine them in more detail, along with some background information on the artist and the work.

Unfortunately the interface for viewing the engravings’ details is poorly implemented, limited to a virtual loupe (with your cursor stuck in the center — hello?).

However, the “Analyze Lines” feature, accessed from a button above the images, is worth visiting. It allows you to interactively view layers of lines that have been extracted from the image and isolated by using a set of sliders that can display the layers in various combinations. It’s a fascinating way to look at how the artists have arranged their outlines, hatching and cross hatching in creating the forms and textures of the engraved image.

They have chosen fine examples of engravings for the feature, including Durer’s Madonna with the Pear (images above, top five).

Also of interest is a video, accessed from the upper right of the interface. Introduced by Emily Peters, Curator of the exhibit, in which Andrew Stein Raferty, Consulting Curator for the exhibit and Associate Professor of Printmaking at RISD, steps through the process of making an engraving, in this case based on a drawing he made after a drawing by Primaticcio (images above, bottom five).

[Via Bibliodyssey, via Bearded Roman]