279 Days To Overnight Success

Let me start off with a Question. When is the last time that you read something, and could not stop reading it until you finished it completely, soaking up and absorbing every word?

For me it was yesterday when I came across a remarkable "Manifesto" by Chris Guillebeau called 279 Days To Overnight Success, on his website "The Art Of Non-Conformity".

There is an ocean of hype on the internet about Blogging, Marketing, and get rich schemes on the internet these days, and I am confident that if you make the effort to read 279 Days, you will get the straight facts on how to take your project from idea to success within a reasonable amount of time.

Without going into a long, detailed, and perhaps boring review of what he has written, let me just say that I was;

• Inspired
• Invigorated
• Motivated

after reading his remarkable views and sound advice on taking your next project to a successful outcome.

So head on over and read 279 Days To Overnight Success. You can download it for FREE.

Would love to hear what you think after reading it, please feel free to leave a comment.

Cheers
Terry

Value And The Wyeths, A Lecture By Genevieve Davis

This is a fine lecture on the works of NC Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, and James Wyeth that focuses on a discussion of how these artists have used the concept of value in their paintings. Special thanks to Keith Bond for sending a tweet out about this. @BondArtist 



I enjoyed this very much particularly because she shows some works of Andrew Wyeth that I had never seen before. I just love his work, and became a great fan of his when I was a teenager and discovered his work in an art book my parents had.

You can view more of her videos at medievalartrat on her YouTube channel.

On the same subject you may want to check out another blog I discovered by Clive Powsey that documents a 5 day watercolor workshop he did last year. This link will take you to the blog post about doing a Value Study in watercolor that I found quite useful. You will have to scroll down to the bottom for the post "Class One: Painting A Still Life With Boxes...".

If you want to go through the lessons once you reach the page in the link above, click on "Older Posts" to go to the very beginning of the course.

WJ Phillips, 1970 Exhibition

York Boat On Lake Winnipeg 1930

Watercolor Woodcut Print

Image Courtesy David Duffin

I first saw the Watercolor Woodcuts of WJ Phillips in 1970 at a traveling exhibition of his work hosted by the Hudson's Bay Company. My cherished handbook with a biographical sketch of Walt has been kept safe in well worn condition.

I thought you might enjoy taking a look at it as it gives some insight into his life and provides a good read about his mastery of the watercolor woodcut print method in the Ukiyo-e Japanese style of printing..

WJ Phillips Show 1970

Visit the Walter J. Phillips Website.

More On Walter J. Phillips

Pink Rose Cluster Photograph

Pink Rose Cluster

Buy A Print

I wandered down to my neighbors yard last week to take some photos of the Rose Bush growing in their yard.

Not wanting to be a nuisance, I knocked on their door and asked them for permission to take some shots, and they were kind enough to say yes.

This was taken in the late afternoon around 5:00 pm with my Nikon DSLR which is turning out to be my favorite camera for taking photos. I also used the telephoto lens for the shot.

Watercolor Demonstration by Bob Krysak

Vermillion Lakes Autumn-Canadian Rockies

9" x 12" on Stretched Canvas

$200.00

My brother Bob Krysak has been trying out painting watercolors on pre-stretched canvas panels sold at Opus Framing, and he documented the process in a recent post on his blog.

If you would like to purchase the original painting, you can contact him at bkrysak@gmail.com or visit Bob Krysak Watercolors.

I copied the information into a Word document, and then converted it to a PDF document using PDF Creator free software. After that I uploaded it into Scribd a free service, that allows you to embed the document into your blog post on any blogging platform.

So here is the demonstration as shown below.

Vermillion Lakes Watercolor Demonstration by Bob Krysak

Frances Gearhart-Brilliant Color Block Print Artist

Austerity 1936

11.75" x 11"

Image Courtesy Harold Leitenburg PhD

This is another in a series I call My Favorite Artists, and in particular my fascination with the color block printing process.

Frances Gearhart (1869-1958) was an American artist born in Sagetown Illinois and was the eldest of three sisters all of whom were artists. When her family moved to Pasadena California, she attended the State Normal School (now UCLA) got her degree and spent much of her adult life teaching elementary school for several years.

Although she was a self taught artist, she spent a number of summers studying art with Charles H. Woodbury, and Henry R. Poore. In the early years she spent most of her time working with watercolors, but later on she mastered the art of the color block printing process and continued with that for the rest of her career.

The most interesting aspect of her color block printing for me is that she used oil paint as the pigment for printing which I find fascinating. Each color was painted on the block (one block for each color) with a dry brush, and then the impression was taken, and the block had to be repainted again and again for each subsequent print. Although she used wood blocks for some of her prints, it is documented that she favored the linoleum block over the wood for most of her print runs.

She was a very prolific print maker, and was considered a pioneer in the American color printing movement. I can only imagine how she painted the oil paint on the color blocks in the above example to illustrate the blending of colors in a very soft and mellow manner. I find her work to be not only exquisite, but very inspiring and very pleasing to the eye.

For a free ebook on the color block printing process, you can view it in a previous post of mine titled Japanese Watercolor Woodcut Print-Free Ebook.

If you have any information on using oil paints for color block printing, please email me, and I will gladly update this post with the information.

You can view more images of her work on the Frances Gearhart Website.

Terry Krysak is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com

The Study Of Color-What Every Artist Needs To Know

Image Source Wikimedia Commons

Public Domain & GNU Free Documentation License GFDL

Although we spent a great deal of time in Art School studying color in first year, I must admit I have forgotten probably half of what I learned, and now that I am back engaged in painting I find myself in "study" mode once again, in order to improve the quality of my paintings.

So here is a quick post on some resources that I have been introduced to lately that I think will help artists in general to build upon their knowledge of the subject and hopefully provide some useful resources that you can come back to and rely on now and in the future.

This first link is to a website called The Dimensions Of Colour by David Briggs that is probably the ultimate resource in understanding the technical nature of the principles of color in a comprehensive fact filled manner with outstanding color illustrations.

Index Of The Dimensions Of Colour with links

Part 1: Introduction Starting with Colours in Space.
Part 2: Basics of Light and Shade
Part 3: Some Basics of Colour Vision
Part 4: Additive Colour Mixing
Part 5: Subtractive Colour Mixing
Part 6: Colour Mixing with Paint
Part 7: Hue
Part 8: Lightness and Chroma
Part 9: Brightness and Saturation
Part10: Principles of Colour for Painters

The above information is very detailed and will take you some time to get through, if you want to start off with something a bit less detailed, visit the
Free Color Painting Lessons by Richard Robinson.

Below are some book titles on color theory you might be interested in.

Colour: A Handbook of the Theory of Colour by George Henry Hurst
Goethe's Theory of Colours by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Colour Dynamics Workbook Step by Step Guide to Water Colour Painting by Angela Lord
Theory of Colours by the MIT Press

If you find any other useful information on color theory, please comment and I will update this post, take a look at the link, and post it into this resource.

Terry Krysak is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com

Japanese Watercolor Woodcut Print-Free Ebook

Hirosige Utagawa 1797-1858

100 views of Edo, #35

Image Source Wikimedia Commons Public Domain

I wanted to write again about Japanese Watercolor Woodcut prints because it is one of my favorite forms of art, and it was a complicated process which involved a great deal of craftsmanship as well as artistic talent.

Japanese Prints are a wonderful artform that depicted life in Japan and made art more affordable to the average person. 

While reading about an American woodcut artist, I came across an ebook that was written by F. Morley Fletcher that describes in  great detail the whole process of how to create the watercolor woodcut print from start to finish. There are a number of examples of prints in the book as well as hand drawn illustrations of the many tools and methods that are used.

Although the book was created in 1916, it is well written and very concise with regards to the materials, and the processes the artist must go through in order to complete a series of satisfactory prints. 

You can read the contents of the entire ebook below or you can download the entire book for free from the Gutenberg Project location.

More of my posts about the Watercolor Woodcut
Ukiyo-e The Art of Japanese Woodcut Printmaking
W.J. Phillips Master Of The Watercolor Woodcut

Terry Krysak is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com

Wood Block Printing

Is YouTube An Artform?

Well guess what, the Guggenheim Museum in New York City thinks that it is, and you have until July 31, 2010 to submit your video for consideration for the museum's showcase of the most exceptional and creative video in the entire world.

It sounds very much like YouTube Play will consider any type of video either new, or created within the last two years and there does not appear to be any type of restriction on what the content of the video is, it is left up to the creative talents of film makers, animators, and pretty much anyone who has access to a video camera. Only one submission per person will be considered.

In YouTube's words, they are looking for something different, Not what's now, but what's next.
We all know how YouTube videos often go viral around the world, and here is your chance to let your creative juices flow, and perhaps make the cut for the top 25 videos that are chosen.

Walt Drohan-Artistic Genius And Brilliant Teacher

Sunderland AB-A DD862 Oil Painting

by Walt Drohan 1933-2007

Image Courtesy of Castle Archdale

This is another post in my series of My Favorite Artists, and the influence this artist had on my life.

At the start of my second year at the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD) we moved into a brand new building which was an enormous improvement over our first year of taking classes in various locations and rooms on the SAIT campus including some that were held in very old quonset huts.

The high point of second year was that the head of the Ceramics department, Walt Drohan, was supervising the construction of a large kiln that he designed, and we were able to view the entire process from the ground up which was an experience that one would not normally have when taking a ceramics course.

Walt was a brilliant instructor who shared all of his knowledge, holding nothing back, and we always had full attendance in class when it was known that he would be teaching us at various times throughout the year. One of my fondest memories was when he gave us our first watercolor lesson. My original intent of going to art school was to be a watercolor artist, and I managed to convince him that watercolor and brush work to me was very important with respect to applying designs on pottery, and lucky for me he agreed.

Walt was born in Calgary in 1933 and became passionate about art at a young age, attending the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art, and after completing this program he continued graduate studies at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Flint Michigan, returning to Canada in 1957.

His artistic career attracted numerous awards, including the Senior Canada Council Grant, many private commissions, and he exhibited his Ceramics and Paintings in a number of galleries across Canada. As a teacher he was very kind and thoughtful, and was able to impart knowledge in a way that was inspiring on one hand, and also acted as a catalyst to creative development on the other hand. Near the end of his teaching career he became the Dean of ACAD and left a strong, vibrant, creative college for future generations to come.

I just love the oil painting of the Sunderland shown above, and truly was not aware of his painting genius until hearing of his passing in 2007. My searching of the net for information on him informed me that he was an avid aviation buff, and that he also created numerous landscape paintings of the Alberta prairie environment.

Here is a list of some links that I have found that I hope will help you to appreciate his legacy and share with others the impact that he had on the history of Canadian artists.

Triangle Gallery-Walt Drohan Images.

Walt Drohan On Artnet

Walt Drohan On Hodgins Auctions

Contemporary Aboriginal Art

Salish Box

Artist Unknown

About a month ago I was visiting a friend in Birken, and he was given this gift from a mutual friend in Mount Currie. Our mutual friend Ken purchased the box as a gift from a native carver from the Mount Currie Band.

However he did not remember the name of the carver, which is a shame as it would be nice to give credit where credit is due.

The box appears to be made of pine, and I just love the intricate designs on the box and the masterful manner in which the designs are painted on the box.

The cover depicts a Thunderbird design and for me is the best part of the box which is a modern day representation of Salish Art.

Salish Art

Laureen McMullan-Remarkable Expressive Paintings

Oryx

Copyright Laureen McMullan

I recently connected with another artist who was in my class at The Alberta College of Art & Design and wanted to share her work with you in another post about My Favorite Artists.

After graduation Laureen set up her own pottery studio, and worked very hard at that until it became very difficult to maintain that business due to market conditions, and the general decline in the pottery market which made it impossible to continue. At that point, Laureen decided to devote more time to painting in Acrylics, and has produced an impressive portfolio of work. Her paintings have been added to collections around the world, and she has had her work in numerous shows over the years.

I chose to use the word "Expressive" in the title for this post because that is the one of the words that comes to my mind when I have thought about her. For me her expressive nature comes through big time in her paintings, and her subject matter is varied, and her feelings radiate through the paint and canvas as she takes us through the journey of what is important to her.

I hope that you will take this opportunity to view the work of this award winning artist on her website Laureenart, and enjoy the many works she has created with such mastery. Many of her works are available as well as cards and Giclee prints.

Marketing For Artists-Run Your Own TV Ad For An Affordable Price

If you are an artist, and you have a budget for some advertising, how would you like to create your own ad for TV and be able to run it on national TV within your budget at an affordable cost? For those of you who answered yes, read on.

Leave it to Google Adwords to come up with something new, Google TV Ads that allows you to upload your own TV ad promoting your product, and Google will have it run on the TV networks that you choose, at the time that you choose, and you can begin by entering at the start the budget that you have available for your Ad campaign. This is an amazing idea when you think of it, I mean how many people in general can afford to run an Ad on TV let alone an Artist?

The video above is self explanatory, and was created by Seth Stevenson, who set up a goofy self produced video, and created a website for people to click on in order to track how many visitors could be attracted to the website.

OK, so how did I come across this information? I have been studying Internet Marketing for almost two years now, and have been following a very successful Internet marketer by the name of Frank Kern, and clicking on his name will take you to one of his websites where you can sign up for free, and get all kinds of free cutting edge solutions on building a successful Internet Business. I am not an affiliate for any of Frank's programs, and I won't make a dime from linking to him, but he gives away a bunch of good stuff.

So for you Artists out there looking for more ways to draw traffic to your blog or website, this might be something useful to look into.

Jim Speers-Exquisite Pottery

High Fired White Stoneware Jar

Copyright Jim Speers Pottery

This is another post in my series of My Favorite Artists and today I want to introduce you to Jim Speers, a fantastic potter that I went to art school with.

I attended the Alberta College of Art and Design in 1971, and Jim and I met on the first day when we were put into groups of home room classes, and we became friends right away. I wanted to become a painter, and Jim was interested in taking pottery. In first year we did everything, drawing, painting, print making, pottery, and sculpture.

I found out early on that they did not teach Watercolor, and I was not fond of the work of the painting instructors, and did not want to take commercial art either. So after much thought, discussion with classmates and a fair amount of "wringing of hands" I decided to take pottery as well because they had excellent instructors, and I knew that it would be a great learning experience.

Jim moved back to Edmonton Alberta after college, and eventually set up his own pottery studio, and now creates a wide variety of production pieces, and one of a kind pottery works of art.

Without question in my mind, Jim has grown into a master potter and his work is truly exquisite. I love his attention to detail, and his designs are just beautiful and inspiring with a brilliant expression of form, shape and design.

Jim is also an avid photographer, creates 3D imagery, and spends some time building websites as well.

So if you are interested in pottery, I invite you to visit his website Jim Speers Pottery and take some time to view and enjoy his amazing works.