December 2012 – Lines and Colors

Happy Leyendecker Baby New Year 2013!

Posted onMonday, December 31, 2012Monday, December 31, 20123 Comments

J.C. Leyendecker New Years babies
As I’ve done for the past seven years, I’ll wish all Lines and Colors readers a Happy New Year with more Saturday Evening Post covers by J.C. Leyendecker, the great American illustrator who originated the modern tradition of representing the new year as a baby.

My your new year be filled with beautiful art!

Eye Candy for Today: Vigée Le Brun self portrait

Posted onMonday, December 31, 2012Monday, December 31, 20123 Comments

CategoriesEye Candy for Today, Gallery and Museum Art

Self Portrait in a Straw Hat, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun.

A stunning self portrait by one of my favorite underrated painters.

Vigée Le Brun had an uncanny ability to make the fashionably pale skin of her female portrait subjects, herself included, almost luminescent.

This is apparently a copy she made of an earlier version of the same composition, itself inspired by Rubens’ portrait (possibly of Susanne Lunden) titled Le Chapeau de Paille.

This version is in the National Gallery, London. Use the fullscreen arrows and zoom controls to the right of the image to zoom way in on the portrait.

I love the way she has skillfully blended pale yellows and reds with the subtle blue-greens in the shadows, moving effortlessly from warm to cool passages, in modeling her calmly focused and strikingly beautiful face.

Eye candy indeed.

Link: Self Portrait in a Straw Hat, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun

Sherrie York

Posted onSaturday, December 29, 2012Saturday, December 29, 20124 Comments

CategoriesGallery and Museum Art, Prints and Printmaking

Sherrie York is a Colorado artist who works primarily in the medium of reduction linocut.

This is a relief printing method in which the run of a given print is done in stages of impressions from the same block —as the block is re-cut and reduced in printing surface to be printed in a different color with each successive pass.

On her website, York has galleries of her linocut prints, as well as woodcuts, painting and drawings.

She also has a page describing the process, and often goes into more detail on her blog, Brush and Baren.

[Via Making a Mark]

Link: www.sherrieyork.com
Brush and Baren, (blog)

Eye Candy for Today: Monet winter scene

Posted onThursday, December 27, 2012Saturday, December 29, 20125 Comments

CategoriesEye Candy for Today, Gallery and Museum Art

Ice Floes, Claude Monet.

A marvel of atmosphere and suggestion.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Use Fullscreen and Zoom or download.

Link: Ice Flows, Claude Monet

Edwin Rhemrev

Posted onThursday, December 27, 2012Thursday, December 27, 20122 Comments

CategoriesConcept & Visual Dev.

Edwin Rhemrev is a visual development artist based in the Nertherlands who works in the fields of gaming and theme park design.

His website has galleries of his work in sections for environments and characters, as well as a sketchbook. Rhemrev also maintains a blog on which you can find works in progress, news of upcoming projects, and more annotation to the images than you will find on the website.

Rhemrev’s drawings and sketches have that wonderful springy, loose kind of style you often encounter in good visual development artists, with a lot of freedom and action on top of a solid foundation of draftsmanship.

Some of his color work is bright and energetic, while much is subdued and moody, and often rendered very effectively in monochrome.

As I frequently find with concept and visual development artists, some of my favorite pieces are among Rhemrev’s personal projects, where he can let his imagination roam with out the constraints of client requirements.

These include his fun take on the thought of what a hypothetical sequel to The Incredibles might look like (images above fourth from bottom).

I also particularly enjoy his digital plein air sketches of locations in The Hague (above, bottom two).