Thomas Kegler is a Western New York State painter and senior member of the Hudson River Fellowship who was the subject of a Lines and Colors post in October of this year.

In addition to the instructional materials and short videos on his website, Kegler demonstrates his painting techniques in an “instructional documentary” titled Painting en Plein Air: Resolving the Landscape.

This is an hour long video, professionally produced by Black Horse Videography that follows Kegler through a two day location session in which he paints the aged maple tree in the composition shown above, bottom.

The artist provided me with a review copy.

One of the flaws I frequently find in a number of the painting instruction videos I’ve seen is the tendency to rush, fast forward and compress time too aggressively, as though those with a desire to watch an instructional art video would somehow be bored by watching someone paint.

This is not the case here, and in fact, I was tempted at first to think that the video started too slowly. I soon realized it was in keeping with one of Kegler’s major suggestions to those painting outdoors: to slow down— look, sketch and draw and immerse yourself in nature before rushing to begin painting.

The video follows Kegler’s process from initial thumbnail sketch to prepared drawing to the stages of painting on location, throughout which the artist comments and describes his working methods as well as his philosophical approach to painting technique.

Even though there are aspects of Kegler’s process that I would personally have trouble adopting, such as the use of an armature for composition and a relatively broad palette of colors, I found the entire process informative.

I’m perhaps not the most experienced of plein air painters myself, but I was introduced to several points of technique with which I was previously unfamiliar, such as drawing a preliminary sketch on the canvas by using a rubber tipped shaper tool to pull lines out of a wet imprimatura, (also used to make marks and adjustments within the actual painting at later stages), as well as the approach of making slightly tinted grays by starting with a neutral tube gray and adding touches of color rather than mixing down to a chromatic gray from complementary colors.

Kegler also demonstrates his approach to applying an overall glaze of warm color to a landscape in its later stages using Oleogel medium, pulling the glaze away from selected passages.

The instruction is aimed at experienced painters rather than beginners, and is a good foray into a naturalistic but painterly approach to landscape

Painting en Plein Air: Resolving the Landscape is available from the artist’s website as both a digital download and a physical DVD.

There is a brief trailer on the wesbsite and YouTube, and another, preliminary trailer on Vimeo.

There is also a review on Gurney Journey.

Jason Horejs is the owner of Xanadu Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona.

In addition to running the gallery, Horejs provides art marketing advice from the point of view of a gallery owner — some of it dispensed freely through his red dot blog (named, if you didn’t catch it, for the small red dots that traditionally indicate sold paintings in galleries), and some in a book, “Starving” to Sccessful, that is available through the blog.

His latest entry on the blog is How to Ship Paintings: A Step-by-Step Guide for Artists and Galleries, in which he gives a detailed and painstaking approach to protecting paintings and other two dimensional art from the terrors of the shipping process.

In addition to packing, Horejs covers topics like carrier policies and insurance, as well as things to avoid (like packing peanuts).

From the article:

Don’t Allow Bubble Wrap to Come in Direct Contact with Your Art

When we unwrapped the painting we could see that the bubble had stuck to the varnish. Removing it left an imprint of the bubble wrap on the surface of the entire painting. From certain angles you could see the perfectly spaced imprints of the bubbles. We had to have the artwork re-varnished before we could present it to a client who had already purchased it.

The Tools Artists Use is a blog maintained by Bill Turner in which he poses a set of questions (the same set) to a number of artists — asking about their choice of drawing and painting tools, both traditional and digital, as well as supports, sketchbooks and the like.

The questions and replies are posted along with three or four examples of work by the artist, and at times, with photos of some of the tools. The chosen artists run a gamut of styles and approaches, though most tend to work in the vein of line and color fill, using pens, markers, watermedia and similar digital approaches.

Several are artists I have featured on Lines and Colors.

The posts are appended with links to the artists’ websites or blogs as well as links for the tools and materials mentioned by the artist. These lead to pages listing other posts by artists who use the same item, and links to the manufacturer or to the product on Dick Blick or Amazon.

The site was on hiatus for a couple of years, but has recently resumed with new posts.

There is a list of all interviews and a word cloud of the tools and materials. There is also an about page with info on the origin and purpose of the site.

(Images above: Lisa Hanawalt [in context], Patrick Vale, Aurélie Neyret, Yuta Onoda, Jana Bouc, Mattias Adolfsson, Gabi Campanario [with tools])

Though figure drawing classes and open studio sessions are frequently available at art schools and artist organizations in larger metropolitan areas (see my post on the Directory of Figure Drawing Sessions), it’s not always easy or convenient to find a class nearby.

In 2007 I wrote an article about online or on disc substitutes for figure drawing sessions, Poser, Pose Maniacs and Virtual Pose.

I recently appended the article to bring it up to date, and added reference to the Figure & Gesture Drawing Tool, a website that provides figure drawing reference in the way of timed photographs.

In many of the figure drawing classes and sessions I’ve attended over the years, it’s common practice to start with shorter poses (sometimes called “croquis”, from a French word meaning “sketch”), from which gestural drawings are made, capturing the movement and gesture of the pose rather than detail. From there, classes usually move to longer poses, of different lengths for different intentions in the degree of finish the artists are trying to achieve.

In an attempt to simulate this, the Figure & Gesture Drawing Tool allows you to choose a pose interval, from 30 seconds to 10 minutes. after which the page automatically replaces the photo with another pose. You can also advance or step back manually, or use a pause button to choose your own timing. You can also choose clothed or nude models, male or female, or a mix.

There is also a choice for a “class”, that starts with shorter poses, moves to longer ones and includes breaks.

Though some of the poses are a little oddball (having been supplemented lately with turn of the century cheesecake postcards), and the photos aren’t as consistent or high quality as a dedicated commercial product like Virtual Pose might provide, some of them are quite good, and Figure & Gesture Drawing Tool is free, supported by donations to help defray the cost of bandwidth.

There is also a secondary feature, an Animal Drawing Training Tool.

Figure & Gesture Drawing Tool is provided and maintained by Kim of Piexlovely, a web design firm in Portland, Oregon.

[Addendum: I've learned of another online artist's pose resource — The Croquis Cafe, which serves up weekly videos of pose sessions consisting of one, two and five minute poses. You can also view the archives of previous sessions. The Croquis Cafe is provided by On Air Video, a video production company that features a line of arts and crafts instructional videos.]

Like the 1930′s Hollywood cliché of the civilized explorers wowing the backward and worshipful natives with the “magic” of a cigarette lighter held aloft at a dramatic moment, there has long been an assignment of magic to the ability to draw and paint realistically in our culture.

This comes from the notion that the ability to draw, and the other artistic skills that are built on that foundation, is reserved for those who have somehow been endowed at birth with “talent”, a magical cigarette lighter if ever there was one.

While not wanting to take away the special reverence that those who can draw or paint sometimes receive from the majority who “can’t draw a straight line” (since I’ve found that personally enjoyable at various points in my life, particularly as a teenager), I’m a firm believer that “talent” is a tarnished concept, and drawing is a skill, like playing a musical instrument, skiing, archery, flying a plane or performing surgery, that is acquired through hard work and diligent practice.

In fact, talent, that knack that makes acquiring a particular skill appear to come more easily, can be a hinderance as much as a help. After the initial boost, it can convince those that have it to be complacent and lazy, leaving them in a turtle and hare situation in which their hardworking counterparts quickly surpass them.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is book by Betty Edwards that embodies the idea of drawing as a teachable skill. It focuses in particular on the most fundamental problem facing adults who are learning to draw — learning to see; specifically learning to see what is actually in front of them, as opposed to what their brain is telling them they recognize and should in essence draw a symbol for, e.g. an almond shape to represent an eye, which actually has a much more complex and interesting shape.

Edward’s book has been something of a phenomenon since its release in 1979. It became a bestseller and is one of the most popular drawing instruction books of all time. In it she puts forth a course of study based on exercises that encourage a shift in perception.

She bases her rationale on the assumption that there are two fundamental modes of human perception, that one of them is much better for drawing and related tasks than the other (which is better at the kind of rational linear thinking more valued in our culture), and that these modes are physically based in the two halves of our interestingly bisected brains.

Edwards puts a lot of effort into establishing the science for this, particularly in the subsequent revised editions of the book. I think the science for this idea is in question. However, the assignment of these states to physical parts of the brain, while central to her title, is to my mind unimportant to the underlying premise — that culturing a particular mode of thinking and perception is key to acquiring the skill of drawing.

Her course utilizes a series of exercises that encourage that shift, confusing the usually dominant “left brain” or rational/linear mode into submission and allowing the “right brain” to come out and play, pencil in hand.

Many of the exercises in her course were based on long proven drawing instruction techniques, such as pure contour drawing, sighting, the use of a viewfinder and drawing negative spaces instead of positive shapes; others were novel, like drawing from upside-down images; but the book as a whole was different from other drawing instruction books when it debuted in that it was obviously and overtly aimed at those are were in the “99%”, those without the magic of “talent”.

As such, I have long recommended Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain to anyone who says “I wish I could draw.”, as well as to artists who feel they need to rekindle their drawing fire, as the exercises can be particularly revealing to those who haven’t been in a dedicated course of study for some time.

Edwards has revised the book over several editions, including a fairly major revision titled The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, the latest version of which is the recently released 4th edition.

In this revision she has to some extent addressed my major criticism of the book, that it stops short at teaching seeing/drawing, and misses the other half of drawing — the nuances of line, tone, rendering, edges, value and other elements that elevate drawing to an art. It’s as if you found a remarkable course on how to speak a language, but that course stops short with forming coherent phrases and neglects how to speak in a natural or convincing way.

The before and after instruction drawings of students of her course, which have always been striking and a compelling argument for the strength of the book, also have a kind of flat and bland appearance, lacking those elements that we associate with sophisticated drawing.

She has added additional master drawings to this edition of the book, and places more emphasis on qualities of rendering than in previous editions, but I still recommend supplementing the use of the book with a “phase II” study of more advanced drawing concepts and more traditional drawing texts.

In the revised edition she also reorganizes the material a bit and attempts to codify the seeing/drawing shift into more a more specific subset of concepts.

She also places more emphasis on the perceptual shift involved in drawing as a key to creativity enhancement. This is actually her central theme; the book is subtitled “A course in enhancing creativity and artistic confidence”, but I find this aspect less compelling than the more specifically drawing related content. Your milage may vary.

There is a website for the book and related materials. Unfortunately it has not seen a major update in years, has a kind of stuck in the 90′s look to it, is poorly organized and does a terrible job, if at all, of explaining the book or the concepts it embodies. The site seems focused on convincing those who have already purchased the book to buy Edward’s other titles, workbooks, workshops and a pointless “portfolio” of prepackaged drawing supplies.

There is a sample chapter, but you would do better to look at the Amazon.com “Look Inside” feature for various editions (some of which have a more extensive preview than others).

Unfortunately, I am reviewing from a pre-publication uncorrected proof, and I don’t know how well it represents the final edition of the book. If the printing is the same, I have to say that the publisher has followed the recent self-destructive tendencies of the U.S. publishing industry as a whole and gone with cheaper, thinner paper and a poorer overall production quality to squeeze a few more pennies out of each copy (other reviews I’ve seen back this up).

Regardless of the sad state of American publishing, this remains a valuable book, in several of its editions, for both non-artists and artists alike — codifying the drawing-as-seeing skills that are so fundamental, and easily overlooked, in our pursuit of the magic of drawing.

For more, see my previous post on Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

Long before the relatively recent advent of the iPad and the digital painting apps for it that have ushered in a new wave of “digital plein air painting”, some artists, myself included, were painting digitally from life using laptop computers and pressure sensitive tablets.

Most of these artists had backgrounds in other types of digital art — digital comics creation in my case, but for the majority of those of which I was aware, concept art, for which digital painting has become the standard medium. Examples would include, Nicholas “sparth” Bouvier, Robh Ruppel and Nick Pugh. (Many artists work on both digital platforms, and/or also work in plein air with traditional media, such as Erik Tiemens.)

Even now, despite the prevalence of ever more sophisticated iPad painting apps and styli (Apple’s insistence on showing artists doing iPad painting with their fingers is just marketing BS, it’s possible, but pointless), there are still many advantages to working on laptop with a tablet, as clunky as the setup may seem compared to the sleeker, lighter, all-in-one device.

For one thing the digital painting software for laptop and desktop computers is much more advanced than any iPad app, having had over 15 years to mature into professional level tools.

For another, the use of pressure sensitive tablets is a distinct advantage both in terms of the more natural drawing and painting application they provide and a degree of accuracy beyond that of the relatively clunky finger-sized iPad styli. (Whether the recent introduction of the Jot Touch pressure sensitive iPad stylus will change that remains to be seen.)

Another, often overlooked advantage is the two handed approach to digital painting and drawing available on a laptop — in which the non-drawing hand is free to simultaneously work modifier keys to switch tools, make adjustments, zoom and of course, undo, all of which requires stopping and tapping on the tablet.

It’s a matter of trade-offs then, lightness and ease of portability of the tablet vs. the stronger set of tools available for the laptop/pressure sensitive tablet combination.

A case in point for the latter is the personal work of concept artist Patrick Faulwetter, who I profiled in his professional capacity yesterday, and whose set of digital plein air paintings, done on an Apple laptop with a Wacom Bamboo pressure sensitive tablet, left me impressed enough to make them the subject of a separate post.

In addition to doing digital paintings on location in various places around his home in California, Faulwetter takes his digital painting tools on his travels to places like China, Istanbul and Greece, as well as other areas of the U.S.

His digital location sketches are striking in their handling of color, value and atmosphere. He also takes superb advantage of one of the strengths of digital location painting — the ability to work on location in low light conditions or at night, in situations that would be prohibitively awkward with traditional painting media, capturing nuances of twilight and nighttime color and light effects that a camera would easily miss.

Faulwetter also has a wonderful eye for the value and colors contrasts of dappled sunlight and the horizontal light of early morning or late afternoon.

Among his subjects, Faulwetter demonstrates the fondness for cars, ships, planes and related tech that was part of what drew him to concept art originally. In these, as well as his portrayals of city streets, highways overpasses, rock formations, parks and harbor scenes, you can see his economy of rendering, due in part to the speed of rendering made possible by the digital tools (one of which is a palette that never runs dry and always contains every color you’ve used in your current piece in the form of the eyedropper tool).

You can see a photo of Faulwetter sketching with his laptop and Bamboo tablet in a photo from his blog (image above, bottom).

Unfortunately, his blog is in one of those widgety Blogger templates that can be viewed in half a dozen ways, all of which, though graphically nice looking, are usability disasters. I found it easiest to use the “Classic” view, even though it’s one of those script driven arrangements that keeps loading more content in one long continous scroll, within which it is impossible to bookmark and return to a specific place (does anybody actually think these are a good idea?). Anyway, the interface issues are well worth dealing with for the delightful range and variety of Faulwetter’s sketches.

Those who are less familiar with digital painting may be tempted to think there is some digital “magic” that makes digital painting easier, but other than some of the advantages I’ve mentioned (for which there are also tradeoffs such as the lack of tactile feedback, etc.), I think you’ll find that most digital painters work in an approach similar to the preferred medium of many concept artists and illustrators prior to digital tools — gouache.

Those of us who enjoy drawing and painting digitally, either with a pressure sensitive tablet and stylus on a desktop computer, or with a capacitive stylus on an iPad (sorry, Apple, fingerpainting is for kids), are often frustrated with the disconnect between the two.

Most notable is the lack of pressure sensitivity on the iPad, leaving us constantly tapping to bring up adjustment controls to change opacity or line weight.

The Jot Touch Bluetooth pressure sensitive stylus for iPad by Adonit seeks to change that, encapsulating the pressure sensitivity into the stylus itself, and communicating that information to pressure aware apps via Bluetooth.

Though I can’t yet give you a personal review, there are several appearing around the net, particularly a nicely thorough video review (bottom two images above) by concept artist and animator I-Wei Huang, AKA Crab Fu.

The functionality of the stylus is limited to support incorporated into the painting and drawing apps, but many of the major titles are on board. More details in the reviews listed below.

The Jot Touch is about $100 (Available on Amazon).

[Via BoingBoing]

Golden Artist Colors, the well known manufacturer of artists’ acrylic paints and related materials, has posted an interactive Virtual Paint Mixer on their website.

The module allows you to choose from their range of colors and assign three tube colors to the mixing tubes on the right (by dragging or selecting and clicking) and then by adjusting the distance of the tube tops from their tubes, interactively produce a mix of the chosen colors and percentages in the mixer area.

While onscreen computer simulations like this will always be less than accurate in comparison to the real color of paint (even if just due to the vagaries of computer systems and monitor calibration), the tool still strikes me as useful for playing with and thinking about colors and color combinations (in a way that doesn’t use up any paint).

You can store colors temporarily in boxes at the bottom and there is a drop-down under the swatches area that allows you to choose between their lines of colors. The color mixing swatch is accompanied by smaller swatches to to give an approximation of tints at various mixes of white.

You can also select a tab to choose an initial color from a gamut image or by numeric entry, and have the system find the closest mix by way of changing the paint color selections and percentages on the right. This feature strikes me as less useful, however, in that you would have to have a selection of all of their colors to use it.

The feature is new and Golden asks for feedback from users with the intention of making it better and more useful.

My thoughts were that the interface overall could be larger (the page could be considerably larger and still fit on an iPad screen), the select a color to be matched feature would be more useful you could limit the palette from which the colors are drawn (i.e. colors you have onhand) and, while I realize the addition of a fourth color would add considerable complexity, it would be nice to just have a fourth adjustable tube for white tints rather then the limited preset swatches.

It’s hard to say how far they might develop this, but it’s worth watching and participating with suggestions.

[Via Ben Stansfield]