July News

Six of us (John, Chuck, Kathy, Earl, Lynne, Mike) met for lunch on July 22 at Applebee's at 53rd & Central (by Menard's and the Fridley welcome sign). I photographed the Fridley welcome sign before lunch.

Earl showed some practice paintings of clouds and a book of clouds photos he is using for reference. He is planning to upload some pictures when he figures out how to do it. Kathy showed us the current status of her grandaughter painting and the book Drawing With Charcoal, Chalk, and Sanguine Crayon she is planning to use for her fall drawing class. Mike told us about his photo book The Quiet Hours published by the University of Minnesota Press. Lynne has been concentrating on digital photography this summer and has put some of her photos on Flickr under the name "cityclickernet."

CityPages has a nice review of Mike Melman's book and you can search inside the book at Amazon. I checked the book out of the Minneapolis Central Library. It is listed in the catalog at 12 Minneapolis libraries but not at the Anoka County libraries.

I also checked out another photography book Photographing Your Artwork: a Step-by-Step Guide to Taking High Quality Slides at an Affordable Price. That book tells the proper way to photograph artwork using a 35mm manual SLR camera, tripod, lights, an exposure meter, a gray card, exposure bracketing, and squaring up the artwork in the viewfinder (Amazon has an excerpt you can read online). I shot my picture with a handheld point-and-shoot digital camera using autofocus and autoexposure--definitely not the recommended method. I tried to square it up on my camera's LCD screen but wasn't very successful--I ended up skewing it in Photoshop to square it up and also adjusting the color a bit.

acrylics by earl

South Pier Lighthouse - Canal Park, Duluth, Mn

Old Skelly Station from n.e. corner of University & Lowry Ave N.E.


The Godfrey House

Acrylic Color Mixing & Glazing

These are several interesting and useful articles I found on the Golden Paints website:

Color Mixing Guide has important color information and mixing exercises.

Clean Color Mixing compares inorganic and inorganic pigments and the effect of matting agents on color.

Golden Acrylic Glazing Liquid describes many ways of using acrylic glazing liquid.

Karen Cooper Acrylic Paintings & FineArtStudioOnline

When I study the examples in painting books, I often find that I like an intermediate stage better than the finished painting.

I really enjoyed Karen Cooper's acrylic paintings at the Stone Arch Festival of the Arts. She has a simple colorful style that I find more interesting than detailed realistically colored paintings. Karen Cooper has an excellent website, Karen Cooper Paintings. The portfolio section of the website is divided into still life and figurative paintings. Her recent paintings are mainly figurative, which she describes as "people in places you want to be." Her people are usually very simplified and are not meant to be portraits.

In addition to showing many paintings in her portfolio, there are two blogs. Cooper, about painting, blog is a journal blog. Cooper, daily work blog is a "project blog" where she writes about and shows various stages in a painting's progress.

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Note for dedicated web surfers: I couldn't resist clicking on the link at the bottom for Artist websites by FineArtStudioOnline.com. There you can find many artist websites--go to the page that has a list of all the artists.

Landscape Composition Rules

I am taking a Photo Composition and Design course this summer, and I was given a link to a list of Photo Composition Articles. I found one article on the list that is actually about painting — Landscape Composition Rules by Johannes Vloothuis.

Since I am currently working on a landscape painting based on one of my photographs, I found this article very interesting and useful. I discovered a couple things in my painting that I should probably change. I recommend this article for anyone interested in painting a landscape. As the author states: "Rules are made to be broken, in which case you should at least know what rule you are breaking and why and not err due to insufficient knowledge."

Fridley Community Education Acrylic Painting Class

Today was the last meeting of the spring session of the "Painting with Acrylics" Community Education class at Fridley Community Center. The class was taught by Kathy Buchanan, shown here advising a student on her painting. Three sessions of the class (fall, winter, and spring) were taught on Tuesday mornings this year. Kathy is planning to teach a daytime painting class and an evening drawing class next fall.

The classes are good for both beginning and experienced painters. Students may copy paintings of the "masters" or work on original concepts. Kathy supplies individual help when requested as well as demonstrating some basic painting techniques.

Van Gogh's Brushstrokes

I have been trying to imitate Van Gogh's brushstrokes on a couple of paintings and have not been getting satisfactory results. I took my camera to the MIA recently and took some closeups of a couple of my favorite paintings, including Olive Trees by Vincent Van Gogh. Although the light in the galleries does not seem very bright, I was able to get some useable pictures without a flash or tripod. By useable, I mean good enough to study on my computer, not good enough to print. It is also possible to view many paintings closeup using the zoom feature on the MIA website.