Blog Title: lines and colors : a blog about drawing, painting

The Tale of How book

I’ve written before about The Tale of How, a short, wonderfully original animation by The Blackheart Gang, featuring the artwork of Ree Treweek. I’ve also talked about Shy the Sun, a commercial production company featuring members of the Blackheart Gang, including Treweek and Jannes Hendrikz, which has been producing marvelously eccentric ads for companies like read more..

Brett Helquist

Brett Helquist is best known for his illustrations for the popular A Series of Unfortunate Events children’s books by “Lemony Snicket” (Daniel Handler). Helquist was born in Arizona, grew up in Utah, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Brigham Young University, and currently lives and works in New York City. He cites as read more..

Joseph Zbukvic

Joseph Zbukvic is a Croation born artist living and working in Melbourne, Australia. Zbukvic’s atmospheric, emotionally resonant watercolors have a wonderful characteristic of being simultaneously loose and crisp — loose in that he suggests rather than elaborating, and crisp because of his masterful command of edges. He has a highly refined sense of when to read more..

Blue and green, or is it?

Like anyone who works with painting, design or color in any form, I occasionally struggle with color; not just with mixing and choosing colors, but with the actual perception of color, the ability to answer the seemingly simple question “What color is that?” All of my studies of color and color theory have led me to read more..

John Pugh

Trompe l’oeil, French for “trick the eye” is an illusionary art technique with a long history in Western art. The intention is to create an optical illusion, in that the viewer is given the impression that there is a three dimensional object or scene before them, not just a realistic image (see some of my read more..

Juan Gallego

Spanish painter Juan Gallego paints images that are technically floral paintings, though they are unlike any I have seen. Gallego take his inspiration in close-ups of flower forms that are convoluted, multi-layered and often have a wrinkled or withered appearance. These are the basis for his large scale compositions (it’s instructive to see a photo of read more..

Peter Gric

Born in the Czech Republic, Peter Gric emigrated to Austria at the age of 12, and studied at the Academy of Arts in Vienna. His paintings are representational, but they largely depict imaginary objects or landscapes, that can at times seem architectural, at times organic and at other times, a combination of the two. Gric paints read more..

J.W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite

For those familiar with the English Pre-Raphaelite painters, the phrase “modern Pre-Raphaelite” may sound as much an oxymoron as the Surrealist phrase “Soluble Fish”, in that the Pre-Raphaelites named their group after their desire to return to the “pre-Raphael” purity of the early Renaissance. John William Waterhouse was never a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he read more..

Mattias Adolfsson

Mattias Adolfsson is a 3D artist living outside of Stockholm, Sweeden and currently working for gaming developer Simbin Development Studios. Having apparently put aside traditional drawing for a while, Adolfsson returned to regular drawing when he started his sketchblog Mattias Inks, in 2006. Since then he has populated it with a wonderful and fast growing read more..

Clark Hulings

In addition to receiving a degree in physics from Haverford College in 1944, and an appointment to work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, Clark Hulings studied art with George Bridgeman (whose books on anatomy are among my favorites) and influential teacher Frank Reilly (see my post on Frank Reilly) at the Art Student’s read more..