Irena Roman paints bright, crisp, transparent watercolors, both as illustrations and for gallery display.

She particularly excels at the challenge of portraying the play of light across, through and around transparent or translucent objects and their often complex shadows.

You can find a selection of her work on The iSpot, though the images a bit small to appreciate her nuanced handling of the medium.

Her blog has several larger images linked to some of the images in the posts. There is also a short bio on iSpot.

Roman’s work has been featured in publications like Splash: The Best of American Watercolor, Print and Communication Arts, and on the cover of Watercolor Magic magazine.

The image above, top, was just accepted into the 2012 American Watercolor Society’s Annual International Exhibition and she has been awarded Signature Membership status.

Today is John Singer Sargent’s birthday.

A search for his work on the wonderful, recently redesigned website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art brings up over 600 images.

Yes, the iconic and astonishingly accomplished society portraits are well represented, and if you want to focus on those, you can limit your search to show only artworks on display, which sharply reduces it to 18 finished and beautiful works.

Part of the fascination for me, however, is exploring the less finished, less often seen works by Sargent in the museum’s collection, including watercolors, drawings and sketchbooks.

Sargent was prolific, and sketched and painted in watercolor for his own pleasure in addition to his more finished commissioned portraits.

The wonderful thing about browsing the Met’s website, aside from the amazing quantity and quality of their collection of Sargent, is that almost all of the images are viewable in large, sometimes wonderfully large, versions.

On each image’s detail page, click on the image or the “View fullscreen” link below it, and then zoom, or even better, use the download image arrow at bottom right to view the image larger.

This gets my Major Timesink Warning.

Enjoy.

Kiah Kiean is an architect, designer and artist. He has a loose, gestural sketching style with which he renders scenes of his native Penang, Malaysia, as well as townscapes and cityscapes from his travels.

Kiean works in ink, wash, graphite and watercolor. He posts images of his sketches on his artblog and Flicker stream and on the Urban Sketchers website, which is where I encountered his work.

Occasionally he posts photos of his sketchbooks, which show that he often works at a size a bit larger than many artists who do location sketches. At times he works on large drawing paper and at other times on large Moleskine sketchbooks open two pages wide.

Since much of his work is in a large or distinctly horizontal format, the small images above don’t show it to best advantage, as the detail crops at top, second and fifth down, demonstrate.

If your impression of the paintings of French-American naturalist, ornithologist and artist John James Audubon is based on small reproductions of some of his more subdued bird images, you may be surprised by the views afforded in this terrific online resource.

The University of Pittsburgh, which owns a rare complete edition of Audubon’s Birds of America, has digitized and made available online high resolution reproductions of the over 400 plates.

Birds of America was the culmination of Audubon’s quest to paint every known bird in North America. Though he fell short of that goal due to reaching the limits of his personal finances, he painted 435 beautifully detailed paintings, from which he created a most remarkable book.

Engravings made from his paintings were the basis for the plates, and the final pages were hand colored by assistants using Audubon’s paintings as a guide.

Audubon insisted that the birds be represented life-size, and the edition was printed on the largest mold made paper available at the time, known as “double elephant folio” size (26 x 38 inches, 66 x 96 cm). This is also why many of the larger birds are portrayed in somewhat contorted positions to fit the limits of the page, and why many of the smaller species are are shown in tableaux that fill the large spaces with multiple animals and surrounding environment.

The University of Pittsburgh’s online resource for Birds of America includes a history of the book and the digitizing project. They have also digitized his related text, Ornithological Biography and its accompanying plates as well.

The plates for Birds of America can be browsed by name or by thumbnail. You can choose thumbnail browsing options at the upper right.

The plates themselves come up in a viewing box that allows you to zoom way in on the detailed, high resolution images. What’s not obvious, and is key to enjoying the high res images, is that the zoom box has small adjustment grippers on the right and bottom edges that allow you to open the zooming window as large as your monitor will allow. In addition to the plus and minus controls, there is a triangular slider above them that allows for finer control of the zooming. Click and drag to pan.

Many of Audubon’s images involve more complex compositions and more visual drama than you might expect, particularly in cases where he has illustrated their relationship to natural predators or prey.

The details are also eye-opening. The anatomical details of talons and legs in particular will be notable for those interested in paleo art, and the backgrounds are surprisingly rich and varied, interesting in themselves as artworks.

Audubon, though he was creating a scientific treatise, was concerned with the book as a work of art. The plates were arranged for the esthetic impact on the reader rather than then being presented according to taxonomy, for which he was criticized by scientists at the time.

I don’t think that Audubon had to worry too much about his critics. After his remarkable achievement, and its enthusiastic reception worldwide, he could just flip them the bird.

[Via MetaFilter]

Bulgarian watercolorist Atanas Matsoureff has a deft command of the medium that allows him to be simultaneously exacting and free, textural and spare.

In his still life subjects, Matsoureff’s paintings have a feeling of quiet contemplation, in his landscapes, a sense of quietly observing and listening to nature, and in his figures and portraits, a striking feeling of texture and physical presence.

Matsoureff’s website is divided into sections for those subjects as well as sections for drawings and a separate gallery for book illustration.

[Via Jeffrey Hayes]

Early 20th Century painter and printmaker Hiroshi Yoshida is known in his native Japan as a Western style artist, and his work is very much in demand.

Having trained in Western style painting, he carried those influences with him when he moved into traditional Japanese woodblock printmaking, also taking inspiration in subjects from his travels in the U.S. and Europe, as well as India and other parts of the world.

Yoshida is considered one of the foremost proponents of the shin hanga (or “new prints”) style, but combined some of that style’s return to the collaborative printmaking of the ukiyo-e system, in which the artist worked with a carver and block printer, with the personal involvement more common to the sosaku hanga (“creative prints”) style emerging at the time.

His depictions of the Swiss Alps, U.S. national parks and related landmarks, as well as scenes in Japan and elsewhere, resonate with superb drawing and beautifully chosen color.

In addition to returning to favorite themes, like scenes of landscape reflected in water, sailing boats, mountains and clouds, Yoshida often would print the same block in different color schemes, producing dramatically different atmospheric and emotional effects.

(See also my previous post on Hiroshi Yoshida.)

Originally from Kyoto, Japan and now living in San Diego, California, watercolor artist Keiko Tanabe has traveled extensively and applied her eye and brush to scenes from Japan, China, France, Italy and the U.S.

Her beautifully atmospheric watercolors capture a sense of time and place, accomplished with careful control of color, suggestions of texture and insightful skill at defining soft and crisp edges. The latter skill, in particular, enlivens her renderings of street scenes and architecture, which I particularly enjoy. She also excels at portraying water and wet surfaces, often with a wonderful economy of brushwork.

The galleries on her website are divided by geographical location. She also maintains a blog and a gallery on Daily Paintworks as well as a selection of works, along with comments from collectors and other artists, on FASO.

The interactive Reykjavík Center Map, which at first glance might appear to be a Google Earth style map with computer modeled buildings in isometric perspective, is in fact a hand-illustrated image, apparently in pen and ink and watercolor.

I can’t find specific credits for the art, but one of the team who worked on the map said it took over two years and 3,000 hours to create.

Beautifully done, with wonderful little touches of detail and local texture, the map can be zoomed in on to appreciate the drawings.

Oh yes, you can also use it to find your way around the center of Iceland’s capital, along with places to eat, sites to visit and stores to buy your Sugarcubes CDs.

[Via The Map Room by way of MetaFilter]

[Addendum: Snorri Þór Tryggvason was kind enough to write (see this post's comments) and let us know that he and a group of friends are the creators of the map. They are architects and go collectively by the name of "Borgarmynd" ("City-Image"). He points out that their names are scattered throughout the map (one more fun thing to look for).]