The Head of the Virgin in Three-Quarter View Facing Right, Leonardo da Vinci
Black chalk, charcoal and red chalk, 8 x 6 1/8″ ( 20x15cm). In the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Click on “Fullscreen” under the image, then use zoom controls or download arrow.
It’s not always easy to separate ourselves from the cultural icon and view Leonardo simply as an artist — but it’s always worth it.
Victo Ngai is an illustrator, originally from Hong Kong, now based in New York. “Victo” is a nickname for Victoria.
Her clients include: The New Yorker, The New York Times, Sundance Film Festival, Wired, Scientific American, Tor Books, ABRAMS, International Herald Tribune, Utne Reader and a number of other editorial and advertising clients.
She uses a line and color fill style in which the lines themselves are rendered in colors. I don’t know about her actual influences, but I see in her work resonance with European comics artists like François Schuiten and Hergé.
She has a wonderful commend of texture and detail, and a skill at intermixing areas or detail with passages of muted color, accented with brighter areas of focus.
You can view portfolios of her work on her website, BeHance, Tor.com and Morgan Gaynin, Illustration Representatives. You can find additional work, along with preliminaries, sketches and work in progress, on her Tumblr blog.
Arthur Streeton was an Australian landscape artist active in the late 19th and early 20 centuries. Like the American Impressionists working at the same time, Streeton and other painters in Australia were influenced by the new approach to painting pioneered by the French Impressionists, but took the influence and went their own way, creating unique and individualistic interpretations of the Australian landscape.
Streeton was the core member of a group or artists that gathered to paint a Eaglemont camp in Heidleberg, Victoria, near Melbourne. Streeton also traveled in England and Europe, painting scenes in London and Venice and was an official war artist during WW I.
His paintings are among the most highly regarded in Australian art, and his work, though not well known in general outside Australia, has been influential on a number of artists.
I particularly enjoy his use of uncommon canvas proportions, some of which are dramatically horizontal or vertical.
Lately, I’ve been painting on location in gouache, a wonderful and often overlooked medium (more on that in a later post). In the process, I’ve worked out an inexpensive and simple portable kit for carrying my supplies, that also makes an impromptu lap box for painting.
It consists of two shallow (Rubbermaid style) food storage containers, one of which fits well inside the other when open. The bigger one is roughly 10-1/2″ x 8″ (27 x 20cm); the smaller one is 9-1/2″ x 5″ (24 x 13cm). I’m sorry I can’t tell you where I got them, as I’ve had them for a while, but try Amazon if you can’t find something at your local K-mart or dollar store. In my case, they are two different brands.
They don’t fit inside each other when closed, I stack them. The larger one carries the sketchbook (Stillman & Birn 6×8 Beta Series), folded paper towels, a few small sheets of wax paper and a square-sided spice jar. Into the smaller one go my paints (my usual colors for a limited palette, plus Viridian and Burnt Sienna), brushes and 2 small plastic watercolor trays. These are 3-5/8″ × 7-1/8″ (9 × 18 cm), and are less than a dollar at Blick.
I also have a plastic water bottle with a screw cap that I got from the travel container section of the drug store.
All of this goes into a small, lightweight gym or duffel bag that sits flat and opens at the top (something like this one or this one), and has pockets for the water bottle, my ubiquitous Thermos of tea (without which, nothing else functions), and whatever else I feel compelled to carry around that day.
In use, the food storage containers fit one inside the other, and just leave room for the spice bottle to act as a brush holder and the sketchbook to be propped up in the outer one (this is the tricky part about matching sizes of containers). In the inner container are the paint trays, stacked one on top of the other and switched as needed, under which is a paper towel for wiping brushes, separated from the paint tubes by a piece of waxed paper.
The whole deal sits pretty comfortably in my lap, and is decently functional, despite a bit of fuss to get at the paint tubes. The water bottle sits outside, wherever convenient, waiting to be knocked over when I’m not paying attention.
Images on Lines and Colors are usually not linked, but in this case, click on the image above (or click here) for a larger version.
This Saturday, September 28, 2013, is Museum Day, when hundreds of museums across the U.S. offer free admission.
Participation is limited to two tickets per household, and must be ordered online in advance (I think you can order on Saturday before you go).
Search for participating museums near you by address or by state.
The event is coordinated by Smithsonian magazine.
(Images above, a few museums I like to visit in Delaware: Delaware Art Museum; Pennsylvania: Brandywine River Museum, Rosenbach Museum; and New Jersey: Newark Museum, Montclair Art Museum)
Cory Loftis is a visual development artist working at Disney Animation. In his off hours, he fills his blog with delightful drawings of a variety os subjects. Loftis is one of those artists whose drawing style os so lively and springy, it looks like he loads his pen (stylus) with liquid fun.
