أبريل 2021

In 1987 I traveled on assignment with National Geographic to Italy to explore Etruscan archaeology.  We descended a ladder into the recently...

( Link to YouTube video ) Starting with transparent watercolor and finishing with a few touches of opaque gouache, I paint a farm road. The ...

It's rare to find "Animal Painting" or "Animal Anatomy" listed in any art school curriculum, because the models are ...

In this YouTube interview , I chat with veteran art teachers Marshall Vandruff and Stan Prokopenko, founder of the online tutorial source Pr...

Drawing by Adolph von Menzel, Road Along a Park Wall Emile Chartier said of Balzac: "His genius consists in taking the commonplace as h...

What are bars and candlesticks? A chart is a graphical representation of historical prices. The most common chart types are bar charts and c...

The German word  Traumbild  means "dream image." The source of the image might be a daydream, a nightmare, or a hallucination.  He...

An old car sketched in a 3.5 x 5.5 inch sketchbook . To suggest rust stains, I melt brown ink lines from a fountain pen with a water brush...

A big and little trumpeter from Waterfall City in Dinotopia; A Land Apart from Time .  

Humanoid raccoon warriors populate the parallel reality of "  The Architect of Sleep " by Steven R. Boyett.

Visual form agnosia is the inability to recognize familiar objects. The problem isn't just being able to name something that you see; it...

Here's a pocket vista of Baltimore in a tiny book (3.5 x 5.5 inches). -- Why paint small? 1. More portable. 2. Less expensive. 3. Less o...

On our Facebook group "Color in Practice ,"  Ryan Coker  came up with a great solution for drawing the grids for the Triad Tests. ...

Ada Leenheer  asks: Hi James I like your use of casein as an underpaint, but here in the Netherlands a casein paint in tubes is unavailable....

Scientists at Purdue University have developed a white pigment that they say is significantly whiter than existing pigments. A surface looks...

Andrew Wyeth, Open House A while ago I asked which subject would interest you the most for the next plein-air painting challenge. "Aban...

Curator Eleanor Jones Harvey had completed the years-long task of gathering the art and artifacts for her Smithsonian American Art Museum ex...

  "Forsythia is pure joy. There is not an ounce, not a glimmer of sadness or even knowledge in forsythia. Pure, undiluted, untouched jo...

I paint the flowers of a forsythia shrub using a limited palette of watercolor and gouache. I show how to start by capturing the overall ges...

  Our boat brought us to a settlement of crested hadrosaurs and their human assistants,  where we spent a few days drying out in the smoky a...

Colexification refers to a method of mapping the meanings of words.   All languages have words for basic emotions like love and anger and sh...

Suppose an art director looked at one of your pieces and said "Great, but could you make it more goth?"  You'd know what to do...

Downtown Clock, Bryan, Texas,  gouache  For this 45 minute gouache sketch I used ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow, burnt sienna, and white.

Eugen Dücker  1841-1916 painted this portrait—possibly a self portrait—in 1900, showing a portable lap box rig used frequently by plein-air ...

For a long time, scientists believed that images were decoded in a bottom-up process. It was thought that the image arrived on the retina an...