This month I’m starting a series on a subject I really love and that is learning from the masters. Since I don’t have formal art training, I have spent a lot of time viewing and thinking about the beautiful work that has been created before us.

Letting Your Art Speak for Itself

This is the second post about social media observations, you can read the first one here.

As I said in my first post, I am no social media expert, but here’s another thing I have noticed about posting art and I will get straight to the point.

I visited the library a few days ago in search of a landscape painting book by Edgar Payne. I hit a dead end with that book but in perusing the art section I found a couple other books to check out, one of which is all about the rituals of art. It is titled Daily Rituals: How Artists Work edited by Mason Currey. It is an interesting compilation of descriptions of daily routines of well-known artists such as Mozart, Beethoven, Hemingway, Updike, Einstein and the like.

How do you find your subject matter to paint? For me, it is my camera, whether driving down the road and snapping photos with my iPhone, or driving the backroads on foggy mornings with my big girl Nikon. I usually take shots of anything to which I am drawn. Many of them go into the trash bin, but I have found several keepers through the years using this method.

I have been invited by artist Olga Furman to teach an online landscape painting class and I am excited to announce the opening of registration for the course - Earth, Water, Sky: Painting Atmospheric Landscapes.

Selling Your Art Online
by Beth Cole

We just finished our art club’s annual art and photo competition, whew! We displayed over 130 entries from around the area, what a beautiful exhibition. Especially fun was the interest from young people, we had lots of grade school age entries as well as those in the high school years.

Which brings me to what I am writing about today. I was asked by a young person and others as well, “how do you sell your art online?”.

One of the things I have come to realize on my painting journey is that painting is all about problem solving. When you begin to think of each painting as a puzzle to be solved, it makes the process less about you and your self-talk (I’m no good at this, I want to break this brush, why am I even trying…..etc. sound familiar?) and more about the painting and its potential.

Have you guys heard of Carolyn Edlund's art business service, Artsy Shark?

She offers many opportunities and services for artists, including a juried feature opportunity.

I love Edward Seago's work. He was an English artist who painted in both oils and watercolor. The muted palette he uses is so intriguing to me. Artist Todd Williams first introduced us to his work in the workshop he taught for our art club last fall. 

This is the fifth and final post in my sharing series about painting with oil. You can read the first, second,  third and fourth posts here.

Cleaning Your Brushes

Brushes are our tools. We need to take care of them so they will last and help us well with the work of our hands.

This is the fourth in a series about painting with oils, sharing what I have learned so far. You can read the first, second, and third posts here.

Applying Paint

In this post I want to write about the best part of painting – applying the paint! I usually don’t start with a white canvas, instead, I mix a background color (usually in the pinkish family) and dip my brush in mineral spirits to get it nice and thin. Then I brush this all over the canvas. Sometimes I mix a warm and cooler color and apply one for land and one for sky, it just depends. Drips happen sometimes, and I really like that, but I usually take a tissue and wipe everything fairly dry so my actual paint doesn’t mix with the mineral spirity paint.

This is the third in a series on painting with oil, what I have learned so far. You can read the first post here, and the second one here.

Choosing Your Surface

Stretched canvas or canvas panels have been my go to painting surface for most of my painting time with oil. I like this option because both are affordable and easy to find at Hobby Lobby or wherever.

I love this painting by Edward Seago. The grays are so delicate. There is a variety between cool and warm. And the horizon line with the buildings is beautifully painted in such close values. I love the contrast of light and dark - the standing water against the dark buildings. The sky is at once warm and cool and full of lively clouds. I just like the feel of this painting - it takes me there. These are the reasons I chose this painting to study. I have others from Edward Seago that I want to paint in the coming days. There is something about his style that I really like.

This is the second post in a series I am working on about oil painting. Here is the link to the first post.

Mixing Colors and Using Medium

This post is about mixing colors and using medium in your oil paint.

Nebraska artist Patty Scarborough had some great advice about mixing paint on her blog, she said (and I agree) the best way to learn how to mix colors is hands on experimentation – in other words - trial and error. There really is no substitute.

This is the first in a series of articles I want to write about painting with oils. Before I started painting with oils I was pretty intimidated. Tales of trash cans bursting into flame and toxic materials with strict handling rules kept me tiptoeing around them for sure.

But as I have continued to study master artists and great paintings that I really like, most of them are done in oil. So, a few years ago, I started learning more about the process of oil painting and while I certainly don’t know it all, I am happy to share what I have learned.

Frits Thaulow was a Norwegian impressionist painter. I learned of him through the book Landscape Painting by Asher Durand and Birge Harrison. He was praised by Harrison for the way he painted water, and I agree, what a master he is!

I just finished reading Landscape Painting by Asher B. Durand and Birge Harrison. Great read. It is a combination of letters written by both artists to their students, Durand's originally published in 1855, and Harrison's originally published in 1909. 

Happiest new year to you dear reader!

This piece, Prairie Marsh, started a few days ago in the wee hours of the morning when I couldn't sleep, you know how that is. I think it was 4:00 in the morning. Those morning hours are good to me. 

Here is another master painting study, a work by John Frederick Kensett titled Mountain Lake.

Kensett was a member of the second generation of the Hudson River School of artists. His work is associated with the American Art style of Luminism. I love this style of painting (along with Tonalism) and I look forward to painting more and applying what I am learning to my new pieces for 2017. 

This is a second piece I have studied by one of my favorite master artists, Alexei Savrasov. You can see more of his work here.