Solid and invaluable advice for artists or any kind, and at any stage in their life and career — but particularly when starting out, given by writer Neil Gaiman at this year’s commencement address to the graduating class of the University of the Arts here in Philadelphia.

Excellent.

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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)

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)

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!).”

In what would surely count as a dream painting excursion in the eyes of many artists, myself included, four painter/bloggers who are familiar to many, Katherine Tyrrell, Sarah Wimperis, Robyn Sincliar and Ronelle van Wyk, arranged a joint painting trip to Provence in the south of France.

With the exception of Van Wyk, who could only join them for a week, they are staying for several weeks in the department of Vaucluse, of the region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur.

Not only are they painting in the general region of France where Van Gogh and Cézanne painted, they are staying in the home of contemporary painter Julian Merrow-Smith, while he and his wife are in England.

Merrow-Smith is known for his beautiful small paintings as displayed on his blog, Postcard from Provence.

The four have a joint blog devoted to their stay, Four Go Painting In Provence, posting both information about the region and their painted an drawn interpretations of it as they create them, as well as posting work and accounts on their own individual blogs in their usual manner.

The group blog includes links to their individual projects, as well as a page on the places they’ve painted and information on art materials and equipment.

If, like me, this kind of painting trip is high on your list of “would love to do” but not in the current realm of practicality (sigh), you can enjoy vicariously through the blog(s). You can read about their experiences to date, and continue to follow them for the remaining 10 days of their stay.

(Images above: Katherine Tyrrell, Sarah Wimperis, Robyn Sincliar and Ronelle van Wyk)

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.

I just love this.

Back in December of 2004, Virginia based painter and teacher Duane Keiser originated the phenomenon that has come to be known as “painting a day“, in which painter/bloggers paint a small work and post it to a blog each day.

He painted a small painting everyday for about two years, and has since then painted his small works on a varied schedule, but has maintained a strong painting practice.

Keiser has a wonderful recent post on his blog, a short time-lapse video called Peel, in which he paints a tangerine, peels it partway, repaints it on the same panel, peels it some more, repaints it again, sections it, paints it again, reduces it to a single section and paints it again. Wonderful!

You can view the video on Keiser’s site, or on YouTube somewhat larger.

You can see the finished painting here. As of this writing, the painting is up for bid on eBay.

To me, this is not just a fun and novel painting demo, it’s also a vivid demonstration of the real rewards of a dedicated painting regimen.

The accumulated years of frequent practice grant him the skill with eye, hand and materials to not only repaint his subject multiple times on the same canvas, passing up multiple opportunities to say “finished”, but to consider an experiment like this in the first place, in which painting is the point, rather than a painting.

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The great American illustrator Howard Pyle was influential both in his own work and as a teacher whose ranks of students contained a generation of America’s finest illustrators. Artists like N.C. Wyeth, Frank Schoonover, William James Aylward, Elizabeth Shippen Green, Jessie Wilcox Smith, Violet Oakley, Maxfield Parrish, Ellen Thompson Pyle, Olive Rush, Phillip Goodwin, Stanley Arthurs, Allen Tupper True and many others passed through his classes at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia and his own school in Wilmington, Delaware.

Of them, Harvey Dunn stood out not only for his masterful paintings, but for his own contributions as a teacher, carrying forward Pyle’s teachings, along with his own learning and strongly held convictions, to a new generation of illustrators, a list that also includes many notable names. After only two years as Pyle’s student, Dunn opened his own studio in Wilmington and began to take on illustration students.

Dunn created vibrant, energetic canvases that sing with drama, emotion, adventure and excitement. Even though many of his paintings were printed as black and white illustrations, he painted them in strikingly rich color, perhaps partly to please himself and partly to honor the extremely high standards of his mentor.

His illustrations appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s Weekly, Harper’s Magazine and Scribner’s as well as in numerous books. He emphasized the emotion and feeling of the image, taking Pyle’s advice to project oneself into the scene being painted, and he became a master of dramatic composition.

Dunn is particularly renowned for his portrayals of the pioneer west and of the prairie, as exemplified by the area in South Dakota where he was born. His ouevre, however, was much broader than that. In World War I Dunn volunteered as one of the first to be an official war artist (see my posts on Art of War and They Drew Fire), traveling with a fighting unit and sending his pictures of the battlefield back to the U.S., bringing the war home in personal and emotionally powerful manner.

On his return from the war, Dunn found himself unenthused about returning to editorial illustration, but his plans to continue expanding his wartime sketches into fully realized canvasses were dashed by a lack of interest from the war office, and a public apparently eager to put the war behind them.

He began a series of more personal works, some of them among his best known, of the prairie and prairie life, including The Prairie is My Garden (above, top) and a series of beautiful nudes.

Dunn continued his commercial work, but eventually moved to New Jersey, just outside of New York, where he opened a school of illustration with Charles Chapman and also began teaching in Manhattan at the Grand Central School of Art.

Like N.C. Wyeth, Dunn was a restless experimenter, always working with the application of paint and color, observing and absorbing influences from many quarters, including, to my eye, French Impressionism, German Expressionism and even Fauvism. His work can be a dramatic amalgam of the traditional and the modern.

Dunn’s work and contribution to American painting are greatly undervalued, and even in these days of increasing appreciation for classic illustration he doesn’t get the recognition he deserves.

Fortunately, a new book may help remedy that, Flesk Publications has just released a wonderful new book of Dunn’s work, Harvey Dunn: Illustrator and Painter of the Pioneer West, compiled, researched and written by Walt Reed.

Reed, for those unfamiliar with the name, is a well known author of several books on artists and illustration, the founder of Illustration House, the foremost art gallery devoted to illustration in America, and a lifelong devotee of the work and methods of Harvey Dunn. Though he couldn’t study with Dunn directly, Reed, an artist himself and faculty member of the Famous Artist Schools, studied with Dunn’s student Harold Von Schmidt.

I had known this book was in production, but I have to say that when I received a review copy from Flesk I was stunned. First of all, the book is absolutely beautiful. Flesk may have even raised the bar on their own high standards of art book production.

What really took me by surprise, however, was the depth and extent of the book. With almost 300 color plates and more than 70 additional black white illustrations, the book is a sweeping account of Dunn’s career and prolific output. The pages just pop with his intense color, dramatically three dimensional application of textural paint and striking compositions.

It displays a deep appreciation of Dunn’s approach and artistic concerns, follows his development and displays his range with exceptional reproductions, wonderfully selected and arranged.

Though the majority of the book is a monograph on Dunn and his work, there is a second aspect of the title that I didn’t expect, a look at Dunn as a teacher, including a section on his working methods, and an overview of some of his notable students, which included Harold Von Schmidt, Arthur D. Fuller, Charles Andres, Saul Tepper, James Edward Allen and the incredibly accomplished Dean Cornwell and Mead Schaeffer.

There is also a remarkable treasure in the form of an almost-facsimile reproduction of An Evening in the Classroom, a compendium of notes from Dunn’s students (who revered him) of his comments, criticisms and advice given in the course of his classes.

Reed says in his introduction that, though he was unable to study with Dunn directly, he has become a student of Dunn after the fact in assembling this book. In doing so, he has allowed us to share in that privilege.

The volume goes on to include a bibliography, a listing of Dunn’s work in museum collections, and a record of Dunn’s published work.

The book is available from Flesk Publications as both a trade hardcover for $50 and a deluxe slipcased limited edition with additional features for $125. There is a preview of some of the pages on the page for the book, but it just doesn’t do the book, or Dunn’s striking work, justice. This is unfortunate, because the book isn’t being distributed to mass market stores, so you can’t pick it up and look at it, and those not already familiar with Dunn may miss out.

The price, however, is the other thing that amazed me. An art book this extensive, authoritative and strikingly beautiful (even as a coffee table art book) in the hands of most other art book publishers would be priced over $75 or $100. I don’t know how Flesk has kept it to $50, perhaps a labor of love on their part as well, but I’m glad they did. Anyone with an appreciation for the Brandywine School, or American illustration, or for that matter, painting in general, will find it a treasure, and Dunn’s work deserves to be much more broadly known.

This is obviously more than a book on Harvey Dunn, this is a labor of love by Walt Reed, a beautiful tribute to a great American artist and a stunning volume that, if not a catalogue raisonné, is without question the definitive book on the artist and his work.