Questioning Landscape ConventionsIn his book on watercolor painting, Francis Russell Flint expressed a common rule of composition: "Avoid lines that cut a picture in half, both vertically and horizontally."View of Madrid, 1987-1994, 72x94 in. by Antonio López García, painted on locationAntonio López García (born 1936) broke the rul…
School Bus: Step-By-Step in GouacheHere's a step-by-step sequence of the school bus painting that I showed you recently. The medium is watercolor and gouache.I used a background-to-foreground approach, starting with the sky, then the trees, then the surrounding setting, and finally the bus and its details. Previous post about the sch…
Short Film about a Magical Sketchbook"Lila" is a short wordless film that follows a young woman with her magical sketchbook. (Link to video).Fantasy meets reality when she holds up her sketches next to her subjects. The drawings animate and seem to enter the subjects' worlds.The film's magic realism, and the idea of a woman mending the…
Armand Baltazar's Illustrated Trilogy "Timeless"Armand Baltazar, an artist and senior designer at Pixar, just inked a deal with HarperCollins for a three book illustrated series called "Timeless."According to the Hollywood Reporter, the trilogy is "in the vein of Avatar and Harry Potter. The story centers on a boy — joined by a motley gang of fri…
Video Chat for Outdoor Painter Magazine(Link to video)Here's a short video chat I did in Wyoming for Bob Bahr of Outdoor Painter magazine. He asked me about gouache, casein, watercolor, and our cross-country sketching adventure.Here's the painting I was working on when I did the interview.----SKB Foundation, a weeklong painting workshop …
Painting a Street Scene in Watercolor Here's a video that I made while painting a row of shopfronts in Huntington, Indiana. (Direct link to video)My first step is to first measure out a reasonably accurate perspective drawing in pencil. I cover the surface with a light ghost wash.Then I place the watercolor tones with a flat brush. I st…