Sunday, March 23, 2008

23rd March 2008: Who's made a mark this week

Four of the Daily Paintworks community of daily painters
(L to R) Justin Clayton, Karin Jurick, Carol Marine and Qiang Huang

Workshop demonstration at Karin Jurick and Carol Marine's workshop
at the Williamson County Art Center in Round Rock (north of Austin), Texas

Daily Paintworks colleagues and very popular daily painters Karin Jurick (A Painting Today) and Carol Marine (Carol Marine's Painting A Day) recently got together in Round Rock Texas to teach a workshop to some very lucky people. I gather it was particularly fascinating for people to see the similarities and differences in approaches of Karin, who works from her own photographs and laptop screen, compared to Carol who works from life and her own still life set-up.
  • Read Karin's take on her first ever week of teaching a workshop in this post My Week. This includes an account of her driving all the way from Georgia to Texas and back again. For those not familiar with the journey (that'll be me!) I checked Google Maps and the map query made it 949 miles across Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas!!!
  • Plus Carol's post "Demo Apples" & "Self Portrait".
They were joined at the end of the workshop by fellow Daily Paintworks people Justin Clayton (who lives in Round Rock) and Qiang Huang. (who like Carol lives in Austin). Their website provides more details about workshops in the USA and Canada given by members of this community.

Portrait by Karin Jurick
and self-portrait by Carol Marine
copyright the artists

I always really enjoy reading the blog posts from students after a workshop - so here are all the ones I could find!
I've been so busy with "ah ha" moments, I haven't even thought of taking pictures of my own paintings. I can truly say this has been one of those "Things" that happens on your "Art Journey" that is a major step in the way you think about painting and the way you execute it! It's like Carol & Karin have flipped on another circuit breaker in my brain!
Mary Spires
Art supplies
  • Yippee - a NEW BRAND of lightfast coloured pencil!!! Nicole Caulfield has been reviewing Luminance from Caran d'Ache on her blog (Nicole Caulfield Art Journal) and providing an assessment of what they are like. She was asked by Caran d'Ache to test the pencils during their development and some of her artwork is included in their promotional material.
  • There are 76 colours in the range - you can see them across the top of this page which shows some of Nicole's artwork - it looks like I may have solved my problem with reds (see yesterday's post)!!! 61 of them meet the ASTMS 6901 Lightfastness 1 standard while the remainder are at least 80% lightfast. This is a really major improvement. I guess that means CPSA will need to do a version 6 of the Lightfastness Test Book!
  • So far I've only been able to locate two sites Artifolk in the UK and Vicenç Piera (Barcelona) which is selling the pencils - in Euros! It's worth noting that these are VERY EXPENSIVE and, as yet, they are not available as single pencils from open stock. A 38 pencil tin works out at £2.27 a pencil and the 76 pencil tin is no much less at £2.10 per pencil.
Art Blogs
A couple of blogs about parenting and children's art development
  • Jean Van’t Hul (The Artful Parent blog) - in Northern Carolina - has done an interview with Laura (see above) about developing your children's art skills .
  • For all those who have created blogs to record their kids art, Gwynn at My Kids Art provides a sad note on which to end her blog last week.
International Sketchcrawl

A quick reminder that the 18th Worldwide Sketchcrawl is next Saturday - 29th March.

If you go to the Sketchcrawl Forum you can see all the places where people are indicating they'd like to go. Lots of places but not a lot of posts as yet - unless you live in San Francisco or Milan! The posts build during this week so it's a good idea to keep checking back. If nobody is being specific, decide where you'd like to go and make a definite suggestion as to start point and destination.

Vivien Blackburn and I will be sketching around and about the Mall Galleries (in 'The Mall') where we'll be visiting the Annual Exhibition of the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours.

Art Education
Art videos
  • The Dulwich Picture Gallery website has a wonderful set of videos about paintings included in their latest exhibition Coming of Age American Art, 1850s to 1950s. The 'movies' introduce the exhibition and then there are four films about individual paintings by Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent and John Sloane.
  • Ed Terpening (Life Plein Air) has been posting about his workshop in Palm Springs (Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3) with Mark Kerckhoff and has done a video Two Desert Demos of a couple of his paintings made from snapshots taken while painting plein air. He's also posted a video of a Mark Kerckhoff Demo - which starts with him painting in ink and then he continues in oils according to Carlson principles
He then washes in his first transparent paint layer based on the landscape planes described by John F. Carlson (from lightest to darkest): Sky, Flat Plane (eg, ground), Slanted Plane (eg, hillside), and Upright Plane (eg, tree). He selects a mid-tone gray wash in the middle of the darkest dark and lightest light FOR THAT PLANE. He then brings up the local color for each object.
Ed Terpening - commenting on Marck Terckhoff
Art Business and Marketing
and finally......

Did you know that Easter is apparently fantastically early this year? Apparently it will never ever be as early as this again in our lifetime because it's 220 years until the next time it's Easter Sunday on March 23rd. For the explanation read what Dinah Mow wrote on her blog (Idle thoughts of an idle woman). Good thing too - I woke up to snow this morning!

Happy Easter Egg hunting! Don't forget - too much chocolate makes your hair fall out! ;)

5 comments:

  1. Oh my word, Katherine! This has to be the biggest, richest, most toothsome post yet on Making a Mark! Your blog is Art Blog Central---no two ways about it. There's so much here that I've made notes to myself to come back and study and to pursue links and more links. I do look forward every Sunday to seeing what's happened in our big, worldwide art community. Thank you so much for providing this treasure trove of info and inspiration again and again. And thank you, too, for your mention of my trip to Paris, my sketching with our friends, and the interview at Artful Parent.

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  2. thanks for the mention :) and I'm looking forward to the exhibition on Saturday and doing a bit of sketching :)

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  3. Laura just wrote what I was thinking as I scrolled through your post! There's so much arty goodness here it's almost more than I can take in, thanks for all the wonderful links and information, I don't always get to it all but what I do is great fun and enjoyable to see and learn from, thanks Katherine!

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  4. Dear Laura and Cin - I had a big smile on my face when I read your comments!

    The thing is the blogosphere has stacks of really good material for artists and it just makes it more and more difficult when I try to put this blog post together each week to leave stuff out. I do try to edit it down but I also like to make sure there is a place for every sort of contribution.

    So long as all you good people out there continue to write and come up with good stuff then I'll continue to try and find it.

    I am of course also helped enormously by all those people, like yourselves, who help me to have one of the most satisfactory experiences going - a surf through a good blogroll!

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  5. Thank you for the mention Katherine! I enjoy reading here, always amazed(and delighted by) the information you have under your fingertips!
    ronell

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