Lines and Colors art blog
  • Daniel Danger

    Daniel Danger
    Daniel Danger is an illustrator and printmaker based in New England.

    His ink and monochromatic approach gives his works a strong graphic sensibility, and a wonderfully spooky atmosphere, suggestive and foreboding. This is heightened by his enigmatic titles. (Roll over the images on the homepage/gallery of his website for titles.)

    Danger titles his website “Tiny Media Empire” and apparently offers screenprints at times, though the Store section is not currently active.

    There is little on his site about his process, but his blog goes into more detail, including process images.

    According to entries there, he works in scratchboard on clayboard, a thicker variation of the normal scratchboard support, and an equally demanding and painstaking process.

    Color is applied either in paint or digitally, sometimes in a combination of both.

    [Via Comics Beat]



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  • Eye Candy for Today: Leighton’s Garden of the Hesperides

    The Garden of the Hesperides, Frederic Leighton
    The Garden of the Hesperides, Frederic Leighton, large version here.

    Original is in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool.

    See my post on Frederic Lord Leighton.


    The Garden of the Hesperides, Frederic Leighton, large version here

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  • Takuma Kaneko

    Takuma Kaneko
    Takuma Kaneko is a Japanese artist who studied art in the U.S. and Europe.

    As far as I can tell from the brief bio on his website, he is living and working in Japan, though most of the landscapes in his website gallery are of European scenes.

    Kaneko’s landscapes are bright, painterly and immediate, with an enjoyable play of light and shadow. You will also find figurative work and still life subjects in his gallery.

    Note that additional pages of landscape images can be accessed from the linked numbers under the “Recent Landscapes” header at the top of the main gallery page.

    Kaneko also maintains a blog, on which he posts work in progress and location photos. The blog is in Japanese, but there are two strings of characters at the very bottom of each page, the right hand one of which is a link to earlier posts.

    Kaneko was a Landscape Category Finalist in the 2011-2012 Art Renewal Center Salon, and there is a high-res image of the painting above, bottom on the ARC site.



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  • Proko drawing tutorials

    Stan Prokopenko, Proko.com drawing tutorials
    Proko.com is a website maintained by artist and teacher Stan Prokopenko, in which he offers a number of free drawing tutorials as well as a full length portrait drawing instructional DVD that can be purchased through the site.

    The free tutorials are among the best I’ve seen on the web, and to date feature instruction on drawing the head and facial features, basically in the manner of the Andrew Loomis method of construction (see my posts on Drawing the Head and Hands, Figure Drawing for All it’s Worth and Creative Illustration).

    The videos are well produced, and Prokopenko has a nice breezy manner of instruction. There are also seasonal posts about drawing characters for Halloween and Christmas, and a post on his materials with instructions on his method of sharpening a charcoal pencil for “painterly” tone drawing.

    The videos are also available on Prokopenko’s YouTube channel.

    Prokopenko also has a website on which you can see his portfolio of paintings and drawings.

    [Via Dave Gibbons: @davegibbons90 on Twitter]



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  • New Frick Collection Website

    New Frick Collection Website
    The Frick Collection, as I pointed out in my post from 2010, is a relatively small museum in New York that is remarkable in its ratio of size to masterpieces.

    Though perhaps without as much drama and attention as the website makeovers of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2011 and the recent redesign of the Rijksmuseum website, the Frick Collection recently debuted a freshly redesigned version of its web presence.

    The new Frick site is cleaner, more modern and most importantly, better organized. There is a dedicated secondary site, collections.frick.org, devoted to searching the collections, though it is integrated with the main site. The search and browse functions, and particularly the display of search and browse returns, is much improved over the old site.

    The display of the works themselves, though in a clearer, more neutral setting, is largely unchanged. The images have a zoom feature, but unlike more flexible ones on the sites of the Morgan Library, the Rijksmusem or the National Gallery in London, which can be zoomed in a fullscreen interface, this one is restricted to a relatively small window that cannot be enlarged, and part of the window is always obscured by the preview thumbnail. It’s unfortunate that the museum chose not to address this in the makeover.

    That being said, it’s still a delight to be able to easily find and zoom in on gems from the Frick’s superb collection, even in a limited interface. There is also now a revised and improved “virtual tour” of the museum’s rooms and grounds, itself in a zoomable interface with hotspots on the works linked directly to the detail page for the work (above, second from bottom).

    It’s a fun way to pay a virtual visit to a great museum.



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  • Aelbert Cuyp

    Aelbert Cuyp
    Though he painted other subjects, Aelbert Cuyp is best known as one of the premiere landscape painters of the Dutch Golden Age.

    His scenes of ships on the waterways of his native Dordrecht are filled with shimmering light effects, illuminated sails and glowing clouds. Even his humble scenes of cows grazing are given a romantic intensity, bathed in the glow of dramatic early morning or late evening light.

    Cuyp’s landscapes have something of an Italian influence, even if only second hand through the work of other Dutch painters like Jan Both, who traveled there.

    I particularly enjoy Cuyp’s drawings, of which made many, both as preliminary studies for paintings and apparently, like Rembrandt, for their own sake.

    In fact I find in his drawings some of the same degree of simple observation, economical rendering and uncannily strong sense of place and atmosphere as I admire in Rembrandt’s drawings.

    The best quality images I’ve found for Cuyp’s work on the web are the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Google Art Project, National Gallery, London and the Rijksmuseum. Cuidad de la pintura is a great source for his drawings.



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Vasari Handcraftes artist's oil colors

Charley’s Picks
Bookshop.org

(Bookshop.org affilliate links; sales benefit independent bookshop owners; I get a small percentage to help support my work on Lines and Colors)

John Singer Sargent: Watercolors
John Singer Sargent: Watercolors

Sorolla the masterworks
Sorolla: the masterworks

The Art Spirit
The Art Spirit

Rendering in Pen and Ink
Rendering in Pen and Ink

Urban Sketching: Understanding Perspective
Urban Sketching: Understanding Perspective

World of Urban Sketching
World of Urban Sketching

Daily Painting
Daily Painting

Drawing on the right side of the brain
Drawing on the right side of the brain

Understanding Comics
Understanding Comics

Charley’s Picks
Amazon

(Amazon.com affiliate links; sales go to a larger yacht for Jeff Bezos; but I get a small percentage to help support my work on Lines and Colors)

John Singer Sargent: Watercolors
John Singer Sargent: Watercolors

Sorolla the masterworks
Sorolla: the masterworks

The Art Spirit
The Art Spirit

Rendering in Pen and Ink
Rendering in Pen and Ink

Urban Sketching: Understanding Perspective
Urban Sketching: Understanding Perspective

World of Urban Sketching
World of Urban Sketching

Daily Painting
Daily Painting

Drawing on the right side of the brain
Drawing on the right side of the brain

Understanding Comics
Understanding Comics