Celebrities Honor Frida Kahlo with Updo’s, Mustaches and MonkeysJuly 6th marks Frida Kahlo‘s birth, and this anniversary puts the famed Mexican artist at 110. During her lifetime, Kahlo’s style was as much of note as her art, perhaps because so often one leveraged the other.Kahlo created 55 self-portraits (close to a third of her total painting output), and each showcased her powerful individualism, the pride she had in her heritage and her desire to conceal certain parts of her body and reveal others.
We’re fortunate to be painting in a time when there are so many wonderful pastel surfaces commercially available. But even with the proliferation of available surfaces today, there are times when a homemade surface fills the bill.To create a homemade, sanded pastel surface, you’ll need the a substrate and the ground components (binder, grit and, optionally, a tone):Substrate: This is the surface that the abrasive material will be adhered to.
Painting Water in PastelPainting water is a complicated subject, probably more so than any other landscape subject. It requires the most planning of all the landscape elements. With painting water in pastel or in any other medium, you first must slow down and observe. What you’ll find is that you start to see what is really there, and not just what you think you see.
Every piece of art has it’s own vocabulary, a visual vocabulary that give it structure and interest. Whether you do abstract art, non-objective, or even realistic, you’ll find at least one, if not more, of these elements at work.Each of these basic art elements are important to the success of your work, but we tend to take them for granted.
There are three components to a representational painting: subject matter, medium and style. Each provides a painter with a means for creative expression. I like to compare them to music. The subject matter becomes the arranged notes upon a sheet of paper. The medium becomes the instrument to be used for the performance such as watercolor, oil or pastel.
What Do You Know About Piet Mondrian?Art historian Hans Janssen hopes to reveal the true nature of a man “who embraced life and was completely fascinated by painting,” in his new biography, Piet Mondrian: A New Art for a Life Unknown (in Dutch: Piet Mondriaan. Een nieuwe kunst voor een ongekend leven), according to artnet News.
