My Art Wanderings

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732 - 1806) was a prolific French painter in the last decades of French monarchy whose style was in the Rococo (or Late Baroque) movement. The Rococo movement, among painters, was typified with delicate colour selections, curved form, and a definite flare for the romantic.

This week we're having a look at the concept of toning your canvas. The video here is focused on oil painting, but the concept of toning is often applied to other mediums as well including gouache, acrylics, graphite, and more.

The Italian Renaissance is a phenomenal period of art history, especially for painting. There are many well-recognized masters of that era that remain household names even today and for good reason, they produced an enormous body of very high quality work.

So while we tend to think of Michelangelo or DaVinci when we think Italian Renaissance, there are others of impressive skill such as Francesco del Cossa (1430 - 1477).

This week it's a look a different concept around perspective, more specifically how you can create the illusion of depth based on the effects of atmospheric haze on the image.

Pieter Bruegel (~1525 - 1569) was a Dutch painter during the earlier Netherlandish period whose efforts, among others, helped to shape what was to become the golden age of Dutch painting.

This week Marshall Vandruff takes us through an introduction to perspective using a very straightforward and engaging style to describe the core concepts of angles and their relationship, tricks of perspective, and more. The video serves as an introduction to a larger series of videos he had recorded way back in 1994 and has made available for a very reasonable $12 for the full set. They're very analog, but nevertheless effective, and the price as hard to beat.

Emile Claus (1849 - 1924) was a Belgian painter noted for his role in the Impressionist movement known as Luminism, which placed a great deal of focus and attention on light effects. He created Vie et Lumière artist group and is widely considered to be a pioneer of Belgian Luminism.

The dreaded first page... You have a new sketchbook, the first page is blank, what do you do? Panic sets in, you freeze, the page never fills and you never get started!

John French Sloan (1871 - 1951) was an American painter of the American Realism movement and a member of the Ashcan School that specialized in scenes of New York City.