Month: December 2011
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Picturing Winter on Tor.com
In what I think is both a terrific idea and a beautiful result, Irene Gallo, art director of Tor Books, posted a column yesterday on Tor.com to mark the Winter Solstice in which she had asked 20 contemporary illustrators to suggest some of their favorite images of winter. The article features images of some of…
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Elwood H. Smith (update)
As I mentioned in my previous post about him from 2007, Elwood H. Smith has a delightful illustration style that carries echoes of great comic strips from the early part of the 20th Century, and somehow manages to look both retro and modern simultaneously. Smith hits the right balance for me between old and new,…
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Antoine Vollon
Though he also painted landscapes, interiors and figures, 19th Century French painter Antoine Vollon was best know for his lushly painted still lifes. Vollon was greatly influenced by the superb still life painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, and followed in his love of simple food and kitchen related genre subjects. At his most expressive, Vollon’s thick, fluid…
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Where They Draw
I don’t know about you, but I find photos of other artists’ workspaces fascinating. The fascination is probably partly simple curiosity and partly looking for ideas, with perhaps a touch of finding reassurance that other artists function in spaces that are as messy as mine (grin). Where They Draw is a Tumblr blog devoted to…
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Secrets of Corel Painter Experts
Among artists who work in the medium of digital painting, most notably visual development artists, comic book artists and illustrators, the two most popular applications for painting and drawing directly on the computer with a ressure-sensitive stylus and tablet are Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter. Photoshop, because of it’s much broader range of use in…
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Heart of the Andes, Frederic Edwin Church
I’ve suggested on several occasions that prior to the invention of movies as we know them, painters were the special effects wizards of their day, wowing the faithful (and cowing the doubtful) in church altarpieces and murals, and, in the 19th Century, displaying their detailed large scale works in theatrical settings, in some ways anticipating…