Brooklyn based artist David Jon Kassan was born in Arkansas and studied in Philadelphia, New York and Florence, Italy.

He has lectured, taught and given workshops at numerous universities and art centers, including the Rochester Institute of Technology, Western Illinois University, Syracuse University, National Academy School of Fine Art, the University of Alabama, the National Academy of Design and the Salmagundi Center of American Art.

On his web site you will find examples of his striking realist portrait and figurative paintings, in which he often contrasts the colors and textures of his subjects with the rough textures of age-worn urban interiors. He seems so fascinated with the latter that he actually does preparatory studies of wall sections, investigating the textures of aging plaster, exposed lath and peeling paint.

His real fascination, though, is portraiture, and specifically, the anatomy underlying the portrait and figure. There is a time-lapse video on his site of a portrait demonstration at the Salmagundi Club in New York, three hours condensed into 8 minutes (image above, lower right), in which you can see the emphasis he places on the underlying geometry of the face.

There is also a PDF booklet available for a modest fee, of An Artist’s Guide to Portrait Anatomicae, originally prepared for his students.

There is a selection of his drawings on the site. Though they are brought to a fairly high state of rendering, they are largely anatomical studies.

Kassan also has a blog, in which you can see some works in progress, studio and demonstration photos and a video showing his paintings on display at the L.A. Art Show.

His paintings show the kind of naturalistic fidelity that only comes from careful and incisive observation, combined with a solid grounding in traditional technique and anatomical study.

His palette is intentionally subdued, as are his compositions, so that the highest chroma passages are often in the warm skin tones in faces where small blood vessels run closest to the surface.

[Link courtesy of Michael Connors]

Richard Cowdrey is an Ohio based illustrator with a particular affinity for animals. He has illustrated numerous books for children and teens including the popular Bad Dog, Marley and its follow-up A Very Marley Christmas, as well as the NYT Bestselling series Guardians of Ga’hoole.

In addition to owls and dogs, other animals feature prominently in his editorial illustration, all rendered with a devoted attention to detail and texture, particularly evident in his handling of the textures of furred animals. You can see that to advantage on his web site in his gallery of illustrations for Calendars and Cards and his selection of Prints.

Cowdrey’s clients include Macmillan McGraw Hill, Workman, Harper Collins and Bantam Books, as well as other commercial and institutional clients.

In addition to his own site, there is an extensive portfolio of his work, and perhaps a wider range of his subject matter, on the Shannon Associates site, which also has larger images.

Richard Schmid, though a well known and well respected contemporary American painter, is perhaps better known as an instructor, through his widely read book and, more recently, series of instructional videos.

His web site doesn’t do much to change this, in that the images of his work, though presented well enough, are frustratingly small. At least they’re frustrating to me, in that I am particularly interested in his economical and beautifully handled brush work, which you can only really appreciate in large images.

You can still see in the reproductions his beautiful handling of color and value, his remarkable ability with “lost and found” edges, and his wonderful control of texture, light and atmosphere. When viewing work on his site, there are images in the Lithographs section in addition to Available Work and Archive Gallery.

Schmid paints alla prima; an a Italian phrase meaning “at once” or “at the first”, that defines the kind of painting done all in one session while the paint is wet, as opposed to the layers of paint used in classical painting. Most “plein air” painting (see my recent post on pochade boxes) is done alla prima.

It is also the title of Schmid’s highly regarded instructional book, Alla Prima: Everything I Know About Painting. (You will find used copies listed for unreasonably high prices on Amazon and elsewhere; it’s in print and reasonable ($50 paperback) from Schmid’s own site.)

Whether the subtitle is true, I don’t know. I suspect Schmid knows considerably more about painting than can be put in one book, but the book is valuable and he has put a great deal of information into its 200 or so pages.

This is not a painting instruction book in the sense of “here is what brush to use” and “here’s how to paint water”. Neither is it conceptual in the manner of books by Hawthorne or Henri, it’s somewhere between those two types of painting books, simultaneously high-concept and down to earth instructional.

The book is divided into chapters like “Starting”, “Values”, “Edges”, “Color and Light” and “Composition”, that are filled with both both practical techniques and food for thought about your approach and intent, with the end goal of using the natural world as your final arbiter in choosing colors, arranging compositions and conveying light and atmosphere.

Not that Schmid is slavishly realistic, far from it. His paintings are quite poetic, but they are based firmly in direct observation of the visual world.

Occasionally you may find him waxing philosophical; and you might disagree with some of his pronouncements. For instance he asserts that there are no such thing as “neutralized” colors; and while I understand his argument, I think it’s a matter of semantics and the term is a useful one. I disagree with him in a number of areas, but bear in mind that he is a better painter than I by a couple orders of magnitude (grin).

My impression of Schmid, and his sometimes lofty tone of voice in the book, was dramatically softened when I watched one of his videos, in which his personal demeanor and tone are much more appealing.

Schmid has a series of four instructional landscape DVDs and one on portraiture. I’ve seen the second in the series, Richard Schmid Paints the Landscape: June (bottom two images, above), and I found it well done, well paced and full of useful information and techniques; particularly for those who are painting alla prima, en plen air (I’m just having fun with painting terms today).

Unlike some instructional videos, this one proceeds at a relaxed pace, in keeping with a pace appropriate for the mindset of painting, and allowing time to see a great deal of his painting process in detail. It’s truncated in places, but the jumps are artfully chosen. The shoot is well directed, dwelling where appropriate on his palette and color mixing process, with close ups of the canvas and shots of the subject that emphasize the points he makes while painting.

The DVD has two parts, the first is a complete on location painting session, from sketch to finished painting, and the second, in the studio, revisits the painting for analysis and goes beyond; into a discussion of color range and the control of edges and color transitions that alone is worthwhile as an instructional video.

Like similar art instruction videos, these are not inexpensive ($75), and the site doesn’t give you a preview video clip to let you know how you might like it (which I think would be a good selling point), though it does offer a few stills from each video.

You may want to consider spending the extra $15 to rent a copy from a service like SmartFlix before deciding, as I did (more on SmartFlix in a future post). If you find his videos valuable, though, you’ll want the ability to watch them repeatedly; and now that I’ve seen one, I would buy his others without hesitation. There is a brief excerpt from one of his videos on YouTube, unfortunately, it’s not a very good or representational segment, and the video compression distorts the image quality, so I wouldn’t judge the videos by it.

Another nice thing about his videos is that you finally get to see his brushwork close up, something that is missing even in the book.

In both his book and videos, Schmid emphasizes some fundamentals that are often glossed over, but are worth being reminded of. One in particular is “doing the charts”; a process that young art students often think is onerous busywork, but seasoned painters know is as invaluable to a painter as practicing scales is to a musician.

This is the process of painting your own color charts, in which you mix a value scale of each color, and then value scales of each color in combination with each of the other colors in your basic palette. It is a process that gives you more color mixing knowledge than a truckload of color mixing books and preprinted charts could ever begin to provide.

It is this kind of adherence to the time tested painting fundamentals, that work and have been successful for representational painters through history, that is the basis for both Schmid’s teaching and his beautifully economical and lyrically poetic paintings.

I’ve wanted to do a post on Rudolph Zallinger for some time, but I keep putting it off in the hope that more of his work will be posted on the web. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be happening. I may still be able to make some people who aren’t already familiar with him aware of his work, even if I can’t show you a great deal of it.

Zallinger was one of the pioneers of of paleontological art, perhaps second only to Charles R. Knight in that respect. Zallinger is best known for his stunning 110×16′ (33.5×4.9m) mural, The Age of Reptiles, that covers the entire east wall of the Yale Peabody Museum’s Great Hall (watermarked poster version here).

The mural depicts the evolution of life on earth over 300 million years, with different sections, separated by the visual device of foreground trees, for geologic periods. It was painted with egg tempera in the fresco secco method; meaning “dry plaster”, as opposed to the more familiar traditional method of painting with into wet plaster (buon fresco) as practiced by Michelangelo for his frescos in the Sistine Chapel.

Rudolph Franz Zallinger was born in Irkutsk, Siberia to Austrian and Polish parents. They eventually emigrated to the U.S. and settled in Seattle where Rudolph was raised. His early interest in art was encouraged; and at age 17 he started study at Yale University’s School of Fine Arts on a merit scholarship as a painting major, and was also trained in illustration. He taught at the school after graduating.

He also started dong some scientific illustration and his talents were noticed by the director of the Yale Peabody Museum, who approached him about the possibility of doing a mural on the museum’s east wall.

Zallinger undertook a six month crash course in prehistoric plant and animal life and comparative anatomy with scientists from Yale and Harvard, and spent a year and a half creating preliminary studies and sketches before commencing work on the mural, which took three and a half years. The museum appointed him “artist in residence” a post he held for the remainder of his life.

Life magazine commissioned Zallenger for a series of illustrations and covers depicting prehistoric life, and his work also appeared in several books, notably The World We Live In, culled from the Life magazine articles, and The Giant Golden Book of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Reptiles (which I still have my treasured copy of — look for it used, see a preview here).

One of his commissions for the magazine was later expanded into a new mural at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History as The Age of Mammals, depicting prehistoric mammals that, though they don’t get the same press, are every bit as wonderfully weird as the dinosaurs.

The past is always changing, particularly the distant past, as new information is brought to light. Knight’s active, leaping dinosaurs were replaced by Zallinger’s slow, gravity-bound behemoths, which were based on the prevailing scientific theories of the time. In them you’ll see the classic upright, tail dragging stance of tyrannosaurs, and elongated sauropods semi-submerded to support their weight, that were characteristic of mid-20th Century paleo art. It was Zallinger, in fact, who set the standards for that art, the artistic component of which has seldom, if ever, been matched.

Since then, the continued revision of our vision of the past has gone back to more lively dinosaurs with very different interpretations of anatomical reconstruction (which some modern paleo artists carry too far, indulging in fanciful depictions of 5 ton tyrannosaurs sprinting like leopards and brachiosaurs rearing on their hind legs in defiance of physics and bio mechanics).

The Yale Alumni Magazine commissioned contemporary artist Alan Male to create a virtual update of Zallinger’s mural, showing the animals in a more modern interpretation.

As anachronistic as they may seem in light of modern interpretations of dinosaurs, Zallinger’s inspired visions still have an uncommon visual power, unlike any paleontological artist before or since. They are now best appreciated as artworks, and powerfully evocative artworks. Zallinger studied traditional painting techniques and his paintings of dinosaurs look as though they are the interpretation of a Renaissance master, which I find just an amazingly great combination.

Reportedly Daniel Varney Thompson, the most authoritative translator of Cennino Cennini’s 15th-century classic The Art of Painting, on seeing The Age of Reptiles nearing completion, stated: “That wall is the most important since the 15th Century”.

Unfortunately, the Peabody Yale site is a bit confusingly organized; and, though it has information about the murals, including podcasts by contemporary scientists on the subject, and an article on the making of the mural by Zallinger himself; it is disappointing shy on images. They seem so desperately paranoid that someone will print a low-res version on a T-shirt or something, that they would apparently rather let Zallinger languish in obscurity than give the web audience a taste of how fantastic his work was.

Though I have never seen the actual murals (they’re high on my list whenever I get to Massachusetts), I have had the privilege of seeing a small (perhaps 12×50″) preparatory painting for the larger work.

I simply love the feeling in Zallinger’s work, his Renaissance flavored visions of steamy prehistoric jungles where hulking, leather skinned giants lashed at one another in slow motion fury under storm-darkened skies — wonderful stuff.

Chris Sprouse is an American comics artist whose clean elegant drawing style lies somewhere between the open line styles of European comics and the more heavily rendered styles common in American mainstream comics.

Sprouse is most noted for his work on Alan Moore’s Tom Strong, a comics series that combined some of the best elements of Lee/Kirby stories for The Fantastic Four, the early Challengers of the Unknown comics and the Doc Savage pulp novels.

The series was wonderfully fun and beautifully drawn, and Sprouse was the perfect choice to bring it to life. It was, in fact, designed around his predilections. Moore fashioned all of the titles in his ABC comics line around his co-creators strengths and drawing styles. In Sprouse’s case, that meant lots of high-tech gadgets, spaceships, and a robust family of characters. Sprouse garnered two Eisner awards for his work on the series. The image above shows one of his covers for the series in pencilled and finished form.

Unlike the tendency on the part of a lot of superhero artists to go over the top in trying to make their characters look “super”, Sprouse stays grounded in a more naturalistic portrayal of people, giving his stories an extra feeling of realism, in spite of the delightful degree of lively stylization in his drawing style. His figures, in particular, have the kind of power-under-the-surface feeling you see in athletes, as opposed to the too-musclebound-to-do-anything-but-grimace style all too common in superhero comics.

Sprouse has also worked for other major comics companies on titles like Legionnaires, Supreme and Midnighter. He drew a Star Wars story for Dark Horse, Star Wars: Splinter in the Mind’s Eye, and an under-appreciated science fiction graphic story called Ocean with Warren Ellis. His most recent project was Wildstorm’s Number of the Beast, written by Scott Beatty.

As far as I can determine, Sprouse does not have a web site or blog, so I’ve dug up what resources I can find. There is an unofficial gallery of his work on Comic Art Community.

Addendum: Johnny Bacardi was kind enough to write and let us know that Sprouse does, in fact, have a blog. (Thanks!)

I’ve been reporting on the “Painting a Day” phenomenon since well before it was a phenomenon, since my initial 2005 post on Duane Keiser (left); who originated the practice in its commonly understood form of painting one small painting each day and posting it on a blog, usually also offering it for sale.

The demands of the practice frequently encourage artists to paint small still life subjects of objects close at hand, fruit, china, painting supplies and so on, but a number of painters focus more on landscape and painting en plein air, so I’ll concentrate on some of those for this round. These painters usually work a little larger than the daily painters who focus on still life, roughly 8×10″ (20×25cm) instead of 6×8″ (15×20cm).

Though Keiser largely concentrates on still life, he does paint landscape, and I like to mention him in these posts.

Here are some other daily painters who concentrate more on landscape than on still life.

John K. Harrell is a Denver based painter. His subjects include the Colorado countryside, as well as paintings from his travels in the U.S. and Europe. Harrell has a nice economy of notation, in which impressionist handling is used for areas like foliage and textured surfaces where broken color is most effective; but like the American Impressionist painters from the turn of the last century he has not locked himself into rendering everything with short strokes, allowing larger areas of color to predominate when appropriate.

While most daily painters work in oil, Harrell works in acrylic and occasionally pastel. He seems to be using thickened acrylics, though, as they have a feeling of surface texture and brush strokes. Harrell also is a participant in the Daily Impressionist Painters group blog and has a dedicated web site that features his larger and more finished work.

Christopher Greco is a daily painter who paints primarily en plein air. His loose, painterly handling of landscape subjects is particularly effective, I think, in his paintings of small creeks and streams.

He also paints landscapes with structures in them, like houses, barns, garages and storefronts, where his succinct brushwork defines their forms in a series of brief strokes. Greco makes a point of saying that he doesn’t “edit” his work, in that every painting is posted, so that we see his daily progress as he experiments and grows as a painter.

Edward B. Gordon is a painter from Germany and has been practicing the painting a day regimen for longer than most, since November of 2006, and credits Duane Keiser with his impetus to begin the practice. He posts small paintings of a variety of subjects including figures, landscapes and still life.

He has a nicely angular approach to brushwork, laying in individual brush strokes that serve to define a plane. Unfortunately, his posted images are a bit small, leaving me wishing there were lager versions in addition, though he does occasionally post detail images of some of them.

Note: he has some kind of Flash map/comment widget running in his sidebar that my copy of Safari momentarily choked on. Your milage may vary.

George Coll lives in Colorado and his daily paintings are of the mountainous landscape surrounding him. Coll treks from his two acre property out into the back country with with 2 pack llamas carrying his supplies (now that’s different). His location paintings are often in the muted tones of daylight softened by the shadows of the mountains, accented with brilliant light on distant peaks.

He also paints figures and town scenes and his blog will occasionally feature images of his larger works, done in the studio from his location sketches. Coll also has a web site that showcases his larger finished work.

Candy Barr is a painter from Vermont who frequently paints landscapes. Her paintings are sometimes very straightforward in their color palette and at other times “pushed” into brighter, almost expressionistic color.

She also has a web site on which you will find her larger pantings. Of particular interest are her “floaters“, images of nude figures floating in water.

The indefatigable archivists at the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive continue to amaze, amuse, entertain and enlighten us with great examples of Golden Age illustration that are being added to their database.

Notably, they have added to their considerable reserve of dazzlingly beautiful illustrations by Gustaf Tenggren, an underappreciated Swedish illustrator who I wrote about previously here and here. The latest article includes images from a rare 1923 edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

Tenggren’s illustrations carry some of the best pictorial elements to be found in the work of his contemporaries Arthur Rackham, Kay Neilsen and Edmund Dulac, and his equally underappreciated countryman, John Bauer, along with his own unique style that probably had equal influence on them.

Tenggren was at his best illustrating fairy tales, but he ventured into other territory, and other posts on the ASIFA Archive include some of his early work in styles rarely seen, like his illustrations for Nethaniel Hawthorne’s Wonderbook and Tanglewood Tales, Johanna Spyri’s Heidi and Juan and Juanita by Frances Courtenay Baylor, all three of which are featured in this article.

In addition they have posted two of Tenggren’s other books, D’aulnoy’s Fairy Tales (from which the image above is taken) and The Good Dog Book in this article.

I’ve listed some of the other ASIFA articles on Tenggren below. You’ll find links to them, and lots of other amazing work, in the Classic Illustration section of their “Top Ten Reasons to Contribute to A-HAA” page, which, as they point out, is just the tip of the iceberg.

As always with the ASIFA posts, click on the image for stunning high-resolution versions that begin to do justice to this amazing artist’s landmark illustrations.

What strikes me about Arthur Mount’s crisp, clean illustrations is what he leaves out.

I’m not just talking about the degree to which he simplifies his images, extracting from his reference material just those visual elements that are crucial to conveying the subject, but the line he draws (if you’ll excuse the expression) between a final piece and the temptation to add more.

There are areas in his drawings, particularly of faces, in which most artists would find it difficult to resist adding more, like shadows on noses. Mount holds back, leaving a kind of dynamic balance between rendering and abstraction that walks the edge, and works wonderfully.

He conveys much with his carefully placed and shaped areas of color (which I presume are drawn in a vector illustration program), choosing colors that, though they appear naturalistic, are actually not the colors you might find in a photograph or representational painting of the subject, but are carefully designed to “fill in” for a wider range of colors, a bit like bass players who fill in for rhythm guitar in power pop trios.

I first wrote about Arthur Mount back in 2005. Since then he has added considerably to his portfolio. In addition to his people, who include a number of famous faces, he has sections for architecture, places, objects and maps.

Both his “Storyboards” and “Instructional” sections contain some fascinating wordless storytelling.

Once you pop up a detail image from a thumbnail, you can move forward or backward through the gallery selections. It’s worth noting that simply clicking on the image will move you forward, a nice usability touch.

Mount has an extensive client list, including The New York Times, Fortune, GQ, The London Times, Popular Science, and a number of commercial clients. The Selected Projects section walks though a few of his projects in depth.

I really enjoy beautifully done diagrams, which at their best are a seamless blend of art and design. Mount brings those design skills to his illustrations, with a control of negative space that is the powerful foundation on which he builds his clear, forceful images.

Though the practice by individuals can be traced back further, painting en plein air, meaning in the plain air or simply painting out of doors, was first practiced in significant numbers by artists in the Forest of Fontainbleau in the mid 19th Century. Around that time, the advent of soft metal tubes for carrying paint and the development of the “box easel”, or “French easel” as it is more commonly known today, made it much more practical to carry painting equipment into the field. The practice was subsequently made even more popular by the French Impressionists, and by painters influenced by them in America and elsewhere.

Plein air painting has undergone something of a renaissance in the last 20 years or so, a phenomenon which seems to be growing. As in the 19th Century, there is new equipment that makes the practice easier and more practical, notably a new generation of pochade boxes.

Pochade is a French word meaning a small painted sketch, particularly one painted in oils, out of doors, and often in preparation for a larger, more finished work. I think it’s one of those French words that’s actually used more commonly among non French speakers. It’s derived from a 19th Century French verb, pocher, meaning to sketch.

A pochade box, then, is a portable painting box meant to facilitate the creation of small alla prima paintings or sketches. Modern ones are fitted with tripod mounts which allow them to be set up in an extremely flexible fashion, and carried to the painting site more easily than the traditional outdoor painting box/easel combination known as a French easel.

French easels are still in wide use and have many adherents, and they are better suited for some things, such as handling large scale paintings. There are also a number of other types of dedicated outdoor portable easels for that purpose (like the Soltek or SunEden); but for small scale paintings, the pochade box is becoming the outdoor painting platform of choice.

Some will say that anything larger than 6×8″ doesn’t count as a “pochade”, but the modern boxes are bridging the gap between that definition and the function of French easels, the larger ones easily handling 12×16″ (30×40cm) panels or even larger.

A pochade box shouldn’t be confused with a simple painting box, which holds painting supplies and a wooden palette, but has no provision for acting as an easel.

I did a bit of research this year before acquiring my own pochade box, and I’ll try to give you the benefit of my rather exhaustive search with an overview of what I found.

Most pochade boxes are designed to handle flat painting panels, like primed Masonite, or canvas attached to a board, though some will also hold (but not carry) small stretched canvases.

Pochade boxes come in a variety of sizes, usually to fit standard size panels, such as 6×8″, 8×10″, 9×12″, etc. The smaller boxes are lighter but also have a smaller palette area, though most manufacturers offer palette extensions or add-ons of some kind, as well as ways of attaching fluid cups and holding brushes.

Most pochade boxes are primarily aimed at oil painting, but some of the manufacturers also have pastel or watercolor models, and oil oriented boxes can be adapted for watercolor with the addition of a watercolor palette, as most of them have panel holders that will open to a flat position.

Types

Pochade boxes fall into two major configurations; the first type, I’ll call “palette and panel only”, the second, I’ll call “all in one” (obviously not official terms of any sort).

The former is a combination of a recessed palette surface, usually a wood traditionally used for palettes, like birch (which some artists cover with a sheet of glass or plexiglass), with an attached, hinged panel holder, forming the easel. The whole unit has a standard photographic tripod mount underneath that allows for it to be adjusted and set in virtually any position when mounted on the tripod.

The painting panel is held in place by a variety of mechanisms, depending on the manufacturer. There is also variation in the means of adjusting the angle of the easel back.

For the palette and panel style boxes, painting supplies and wet panels are carried separately, and the manufacturers often sell complete “kits” that fit into a wooden box, cloth bag or carrying pack.

The “all in one” style pochade box not only provides a palette and easel, but also incorporates storage for painting supplies and the built in provision for carrying wet panels.

The advantage of the all in one style is that everything is in one unit, and the painting supplies are at hand in drawers or compartments right there near the palette while you’re painting. The disadvantage is that the all in one boxes are bulkier and heavier, and require a more sturdy (and expensive) tripod.

“Palette and panel only” style

Open Box M

This is one of the most popular and well regarded manufacturers of this type of pochade box. They use a spring loaded horizontal clip system to hold the panels, which allows access to all parts of the panel without obstruction.

Their complete kit includes a walnut carrying box and matched wet panel holder. They also have lightweight kits with a soft pack instead of the outer box.

In addition, they make “palm boxes“, meant to be held to the hand with a strap instead of mounted on a tripod. You can also purchase the palette/panel holders separately, without the panel carrier and outer box.

I note that, among others, James Gurney, who is a dedicated plein air painter as well as a talented studio painter and illustrator, uses an Open Box M pochade box, and recommends it strongly. I have a high regard for Gurney’s expertise, and I take his recommendation as a major seal of approval. Gurney’s blog, Gurney Journey, has a number of posts in which you can see good shots of his Open Box M pochade box in use.

The Open Box M web site is a little confusing, in that their “Product List” doesn’t include many of the products and buying options available from the individual menu choices. Open up the menus on the left and click on the sub-choices to see the full range of products. They have dedicated models for pastels and watercolor. The boxes range from 8×10″ to 12×16″.

EASyL and ProChade

EASyL and ProChade are brand names for pochade boxes from Artwork Essentials. These also have their adherents among well known painters. Notably, Kevin Macpherson, who some of you may recognize as the author of some very popular (and quite good) books on painting, has given the ProChade model his official endorsement.

The EASyL and ProChade models use a vertical spring-mounted holder that does not restrict the size of the panel horizontally (though past a certain point, you would overload the box). The boxes range from 10×12″ to 12×16″.

The EASyL models (though not the ProChade) provide carrying for wet (or dry) panels in the back of the easel, placing them somewhere between the panel and palette style and all in one style of boxes. Some of the models offer a limited compartment separate from the palette area for carrying a few supplies. You can order a separator grid that fits in the recessed palette area for pastels.

When looking at the product pages on their site, note that they offer downloadable PDF files that go into more detail about the boxes than the web pages. There is also a PDF chart comparing their various boxes side by side. Their boxes come with a matched tripod.

Like Open Box M, Artwork Essentials carries a line of pochade box and plein air painting accessories, in their case one of the most complete, including a clamp-on lightweight umbrella and even plein air style picture frames.

Heffernan ArtWorks

Heffernan ArtWorks is the husband and wife team of retired engineers Suzanne and David Huffernan. She paints, he turns out pochade boxes and wet panel carriers. The pochade box is a single 11×15″ model with a configuration and panel holder setup somewhat similar to Open Box M.

The panel holder on the pochade box can accommodate 5×7″ to 16×20″ panels and the wet panel carriers come in three models.

“All in one” style

Judsons Guerrilla Painter

This is the brand of pochade boxes you will most commonly encounter in retail settings, art supply stores and online art suppliers. They seem to have that market sewn up for the moment (along with some French easel manufacturers), and the other brands usually have to be ordered directly from the manufacturer.

They have a line of pochade boxes and accessories and sell their own branded tripods as well. They show a typical setup for oils, watermedia and pastels.

The Guerrilla Painter boxes feature a compartmented space beneath the palette area, accessed by sliding the palette surface to one side. They are probably the deepest boxes on the market with more space for supplies. The hinged back holds two wet panels. If I understand the configuration correctly, one of them is the active panel, which is held in place by clips. The clips in this case do not appear to be spring mounted or adjustable, apparently limiting the horizontal size of the panel to the size of the box unless you use an optional adapter. They indicate that the box can accommodate larger panels vertically, but it seems to be one of the least flexible of the panel holder systems.

They also sell umbrellas and a broad range of other pochade and general painting supplies and accessories. They also make small “ThumBox” models, with a thumb hole in the bottom, for holding like a traditional artist’s palette, in addition to the tripod mount. The thumb boxes are 6×8″ and the Guerrilla Box comes in 9×12″ or 12×16″ sizes.

Though tripods are not included with the boxes as they are with ArtWork Essentials, Judson’s site is helpful in that they offer separate tripods matched to their boxes, eliminating the need to guess at what’s appropriate.

Art Attack

Art Attack, sold through Willow Wisp Farm Studios, is a few different products. Art Attack 1 is a cross between a pochade style palette and a French easel type of panel holder (more like a traditional easel). It mounts on a tripod and has no built-in storage. The Art Attack 3 is a dedicated pastel version of this.

Art Attack 2 is a 9×12″ pochade box with a Guerrilla Painter style supply compartment and palette, but a more flexible adjustable panel holder that looks like it’s spring mounted vertically.

They also make Art Attack 5 (I don’t know what happened to 4), a palette and panel holder designed, interestingly enough, specifically to mount on a car steering wheel so you can paint in the rain, (or while cruising down the highway I suppose). The Art Attack boxes are crafted by a single woodworker, Mike Taylor. They can be ordered with or without a tripod.

The Billups Box

Designed by artist Betty Billips, these boxes come in 8×10 and 9×12 sizes and feature a drop down front with wet panel storage (up to six panels) accessible shelf-like, under the compartment for supplies.

The palette is a fold-out system, twice the size of the box.

The boxes are made of high-impact plastic instead of wood.

Abbey Easels (UK)

This UK manufacturer of various styles of easels offers three pochade boxes, though it doesn’t look to me as though they can be tripod mounted and are evidently meant to be used on a table. One fits 203×152mm (8×6″) and the other 360×255mm (14×10″). They also offer a watercolor pochade box meant to fit an A5 pad in the lid.

It doesn’t look at though the lid angles are very adjustable.

Utrecht (Jullian)

This is a small “thumb” style box, meant to be held in the hand with the thumb through a hole in the bottom like a traditional palette. It’s made by Jullian, who manufacture the most popular French Easel, and branded for art supply company Utrecht.

The box itself is 7×9″ so I might assume that the panels it fits are 6×8″ (or 6″ wide x whatever high), however, I’m not at all certain. The online store says to contact Utrecht customer service for questions about panels to fit the box, so maybe it’s made to accommodate a metric size. The customer service link, and a larger photo of the box, are on this page.

The Jullian site (UK) only shows them as sold with a set of paints and brushes and includes a panel sized at 22×16cm. Whether it will as comfortably handle a 6×8″, or if the Utrecht branded version is different, is a a little unclear. I assume Utrecht customer service has the answer.

Pochade.co.uk

Another small box. Pochade.co.uk was the site of UK pochade painter Antony Bridge, through which he was selling some of his small paintings. You may have seen some of his videos on YouTube.

He added painters Ben Spurling and Carl Melgari to his site, and started carrying a single model of small pochade boxes.

This is a handheld model, and has space for three 6×8″ panels and a bin for storage. It looks like the method by which the panel is held in the lid may restrict access to the edges of the panel, but it’s hard to tell from the limited photos. They sell for £65.

(Note to Antony: you might want to slow down your animation and stop it after three revolutions. It can be annoying and doesn’t give a very good view of the box.) The boxes are made by a UK carpenter and designer under the name of Red Top Designs.

Alla Prima Pochade

Like the Art Attack and Pochade.co.uk boxes, Alla Prima Pochade boxes are crafted by a single woodworker, Ben Haggett, though he is a full time dedicated pochade box maker as well as a plein air painter.

Alla Prima has a full line of sizes and styles and should be thought of in the same league with the larger manufacturers like Open Box M, EASyL and Guerrilla.

I have to make a bit of a disclaimer at this point.

After doing the research you’re getting the benefit of here, looking at all of the options I could find, and determining that my personal preference was for an all in one style box, I decided on one from Alla Prima Pochade. I was very impressed with the design, features and evident craftsmanship.

I then approached Haggett about redoing the Alla Prima Pochade web site, to which he agreed, and he is now my client. The web site you’ll see if you visit is the one I designed. So I can no longer say I’m unbiased; though I was when I initially made my decision to choose one of his boxes.

Haggett is damnably clever. His boxes feature several different configurations, based on the size of the box and the best solution he can design to accommodate carrying panels, brushes and other supplies in each. He also has unorthodox and clever solutions for the hinge mechanism, using torsion springs that eliminate the need for knobs or wingnuts.

His panel holder solution is equally unorthodox and remarkably flexible, consisting of a lower panel rest held in place by (uncommonly strong) magnets, that move in channels behind the panel holder, and a sheet-spring top clip. Like the EASyL models there is no restraint to the horizontal size, though you can only carry that so far without it becoming unwieldy.

Magnets also close the box lid, which holds four 1/8″ thick panels (or two 1/4″). The panel storage has a removable adapter that allows for carrying smaller panels, e.g. the 10×12 model can carry a 10×12, 9×12, 6×8 and 8×10 all at the same time. The magnets also make it easy to stick palette knives to the box when working, though palette knife painters have to be careful when painting in the vicinity of the bottom panel holder.

In the smallest, 6×8″, model, he uses a sliding palette to cover the storage bin, like the Guerrilla Painter configuration. In the 8×10, he has a single drawer. Both feature clip-on palette extenders.

The larger boxes, 10×12″ and 11×14″, utilize two drawers that can extend in a balanced manner when painting, one of which can hold a palette extension and both of which are drilled to serve as brush holders.

There are “lite” versions of his two biggest models - essentially palette and panel holder only variations with no drawers. They still incorporate brush and wet panel storage (2 panels instead of 4). Haggett can also build custom pochade boxes on request.

All of his boxes can be extended with optional “piggyback adapters” that tie into the box when closed (with magnets and a strap) to allow for carrying larger panels than the lid would normally accommodate (e.g. the 6×8 box can carry 8×10″ panels, the 10×12 can carry 12×16″). The piggyback can hang from the tripod when painting to serve as an extra bin.

The Alla Prima Pochade boxes themselves range in size from 6×8″ to 11×14″; the 11×14 can handle up to 14×18″ panels with its piggyback.

Like most of the other manufacturers, he also sells separate wet panel carriers for extra storage. Alla Prima doesn’t sell tripods, but Haggett does give a few suggestions.

Their are videos of Haggett demonstrating the boxes and how they work, that are also available on YouTube.

I got the 10×12 “Bitterroot” model (image at the top of the article shows my box in use) and I’ve been very pleased. The box is physically beautiful and a joy to use. My father was a woodworker and museum model maker and I know good woodworking when I see it. The cleverness is put to good use and the box is extremely easy to set up, and everything just seems to be exactly where I need it while painting. Plus the thing smells great.

Tripods

Except for some of the handheld models, most pochade boxes are fitted with tripod mounts, though you can certainly use them in your lap or on a table. I’ve mentioned in the course of the article that although some boxes come with tripods, most don’t.

Even the lightest boxes are heavier than most cameras, so your $30 K-Mart tripod probably won’t hold them very well except for the smallest models. For the all in one style, the largest of which can weigh in at 8-10lbs or more with paint and panels in them, you’ll want a sturdy professional tripod.

If you’re serious, look at a professional specialty camera store (as opposed to typical mall stores). Some of the brands mentioned include Bogen (Bogen Junior or Bogen Digi), Velbon and Silk. James Gurney uses a Velbon CX 444. I went a little overboard and got a Bogen Manfrotto 190 and a 488 head (tripods and heads are often separate units at the professional level).

As Ben Haggett points out, though, a tripod for a pochade box doesn’t have to be rock steady as it does for a camera with a large lens, and you can often get away with overloading them well beyond spec; as long as they don’t have a flimsy head or plastic quick release shoe that will break under strain.

Check eBay, Craig’s List or your parents’ attic. You’ll be surprised how many tripods are gathering dust somewhere, waiting to be used.

Panels

There are various sources for buying or making primed or canvas covered panels. I sacrifice money to save time and buy already prepared 1/8″ Ampersand Gessobord panels from Dick Blick.

Sizes

When I give sizes for the boxes, it’s a reference to the size of the panels they hold, not their outer dimensions. For the benefit of those outside the US here is a rough conversion of common panel and box sizes:

6×8″ — 15×20cm
8×10″ — 20×25cm
9x 12″ — 23×30cm
10×12″ — 25×30cm
11×14″ — 27×35cm
12×16″ — 30×40cm

(and here is an interesting map of all of the countries in the world that do not use the metric system).

Do it Yourself

If you’re inclined to woodworking, or simple tinkering, there are some DIY options.

Artist Easel Plans

Artist Easel Plans is a web site that offers $15 plans for building what looks like a reasonably professional pochade box, in theory for around $30 in materials (though this figure is probably a few years old). You could, of course, design and spec your own box, but they’ve saved you some steps and guesswork here, provided you like their designs. You could also take their plans as a starting point for your own.

The pochade box is (I think) designed to carry 10×12 panels and will hold smaller ones as well with a horizontal spring clip similar to Open Box M. Panel storage is under a lift-out palette that sits in the bin and could also be used for supply storage. (I’m not sure from the pictures if you can store both panels and supplies or must choose between them.) Not the most convenient arrangement for getting at supplies when working, but serviceable I suppose. There are slide-out trays for holding brushes and cups while working.

Plein air artist Bill Sharp has apparently built one of these (or something very similar) and has a larger photo on his blog.

There are also plans for a pastel easel and a watercolor pochade box that oil painters may find appealing as well, with a different (and perhaps more practical) configuration than the other pochade box.

The paint box conversion

David R. Becker shows you how he converted an old wooden painting box (the kind simply meant to carry paints and a palette) into a pochade box with the addition of some homemade brackets, new hinges and a “Teenut” fastener for the tripod mount.

His box is designed for water media, but could easily be adapted for oils. No fancy panel holders here, the panel just sets in the lid. I’m not sure how you would keep smaller ones from moving around.

Sketchin Dan’s DIY pochade box

A kind of how-to in the form of a Flickr photo stream, annotated with notes on the photos for a basic box to hold 6×8″. The panel holder setup is a bit crude, consisting of office supply clips, bolts and washers, but hey, we’re talking cheap DIY here. He doesn’t go in to much detail on the box itself, mostly concentrating on the hinge, panel holder and accessories. He also, unfortunately, breezes past the rather crucial point of the tripod mount.

The $15 cigar box pochade box

Ellie Clemens tells you how she converted a wooden cigar box into a small hand-held pochade box with inexpensive hardware.

This is probably a clue to where the original pochade boxes came from. I can just see Constable or Corot tinkering up one of these in the 1800’s.

Michael Brown is an artist about whom I can find little information. I came across his work on the web site for Gallery Nucleus.

He indulges in some delightful weirdness involving vaguely bunny-like things holding matches, sinister looking rabbits and birds with human eyes, and, in particular, beautifully colored translucent imaginary undersea invertebrates, floating languidly somewhere in the dark oceans of Brown’s mind.

The gallery offers prints as well as originals and a book of Brown’s recent works.