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Corel Painter X art software simulates a Bamboo Pen ... without the drawbacks of traditional pens, which can clog, spatter, or run dry. Young Ronald Searle and his friends enlisted in the British Royal Engineers at age 19 during World War II. They were stationed in Singapore when the city was captured by the Japanese in February 1942. Searle and his friends were taken prisoner and shipped to a dense tropical jungle to build the Burma-Siam railroad. They worked at forced labor in sweltering heat, chopping through miles of dense bamboo forests and hacking a path through granite mountains. On a starvation diet of less than 400 calories per day, plagued by insects and disease, victimized by brutal guards, the prisoners began dying like flies. The guards quickly killed any member of the ragtag group who fell behind. Searle recalled: My friends and I, we all signed up together. We had grown up together, we went to school together and they all died like that. So few of us came out of it. B...

The skills of drawing and color are critically important and yet they don't find their full expression until they're teamed with a strong composition. If you're going to make a great picture you have to have a great composition. That will be our topic of study for this years composition workshop on Saturday, July 10, 12-8pm . So whether you're a landscape painter, figurative or entertainment artist, if you're in the LA area I'd love to see you there. Composition: design for dynamic picture making : Slideshow presentation and lecture, 12-3pm : Lectures on the fundamentals of effective picture making. Discussions on the creation of mood and environment. Principles for organizing complex scenes into pleasing arrangements. Strategies for solving compositional problems quickly and effectively. Studies of Composition in history and the modern day Painting demonstration, 3:30-5 Compositional ex...

In 1863, artist Albert Bierstadt and writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow left New York on an expedition into the great American wilderness. Bierstadt dreamed of painting spectacular western landscapes while Ludlow planned to write about them. The two men also had something to work out between them: Bierstadt was in love with Ludlow's wife, Rosalie. The men traveled together for nearly nine months. They picked up fresh supplies in Kansas and followed the Overland Trail, working their way through Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and into what would one day become Yosemite National Park. Nobody knows for sure what the two men discussed around the campfire at night, but things must have gotten a little testy in Colorado when they discovered a beautiful 14,000 foot mountain and Bierstadt named it after Ludlow's wife . Bierstadt is reputed to be the first man ever to climb Mount Rosalie. The travelers reached the west coast before winter. They found a steamer ship in San Francisco tha...

. . Compressed charcoal on Rives paper. .

Anyone curious about the identity of the next great artist will surely want to tune in to the new TV reality series, Work of Art: The Next Great Artist . In last night's debut, host and judge China Chow (ranked #54 on the Maxim list of the Hot 100 Women of 2001) welcomed a gaggle of artists who will be pitted against each other as they claw for celebrityhood. In the first phase of the competition, Chow told the artists how to create "a successful portrait." "Chow: show the inner essence of the subject" Art lover Sarah Jessica Parker (Sex in the City) then exhorted the competitors to "be brave." But nothing quite compared to the the moment when the oleaginous, double breasted Simon de Pury, described as a "leader in the international art world," purred inappropriately over a nude portrait of a contestant half his age ("I seenk eet loooks vehreee appeeling"). The cumulative effect reminded me of Ambrose Bierce's observation,"...

. . Here's another idea piece for the ogre encampment from Shrek Forever After . .

. The ogre resistance encampment was an interesting challenge, here's one of many passes we took at it: Moleskine sketch Color rough "Ogreifying" the location in photoshop Establishing the scene as an ogre encampment and finishing in photoshop. I prefer the previous image over this one, I'm a location guy more than a character painter but they asked me to populate the scene with characters. This is what I came up with.

"Vertical Hold" by Sterling Hundley Somewhere between the art you have not seen yet and the art you have stopped seeing because it has become too familiar... Between the veteran artist running out of original ideas and the child who believes his every crayon line is unprecedented... Between the artist who aggressively competes with all his peers and the artist who is oblivious to where he stands... Between the professional who desperately depends on art to pay the mortgage and the amateur who resorts to art to fill an idle Sunday afternoon... Between the expert who is hamstrung by too much knowledge of art's long history and the airy ignorance of the novice... Between the artist who is shackled by the demands of unreasonable clients and the heedless freedom of an artist with no audience at all... Between the investor who views art only in financial terms and the fan who is insensitive to the economics that make art possible... Between the person who ignores art and the p...