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Arts RSS FeedsThomas Jones: How to Survive Climate Change - On a damp, chill, blustery August afternoon in Whitby a few years ago I overheard a disgruntled holidaymaker declaiming ? to his family, to anyone who would listen, to the wind ? that ?global warming is a load of codswallop.? One of his children, a boy of around ten, was valiantly trying to explain to him the difference between climate and weather. But he wasn?t paying attention, or couldn?t hear over the gale and the sound of his own voice. ?Glo...Feed Source: www.lrb.co.uk Mike Jay: Memorylessness - Memory creates our identity, but it also exposes the illusion of a coherent self: a memory is not a thing but an act that alters and rearranges even as it retrieves. Although some of its operations can be trained to an astonishing pitch, most take place autonomously, beyond the reach of the conscious mind. As we age, it distorts and foreshortens: present experience becomes harder to impress on the mind, and the long-forgotten past seems to draw c... Emily Witt: Claire Messud?s Spinster - The narrator of The Woman Upstairs is Nora Eldridge, and from the start she describes herself as something of a non-entity. ?I?m neither fat nor thin, tall nor short, blonde nor brunette, neither pretty nor plain.? She?s 42 and ?neither married nor divorced, but single. What they used to call a spinster, but don?t anymore, because it implies that you?re dried up and none of us wants to be that.? Spinsters, in the old novels, are sexless, meddleso... Pooja Bhatia: What Happened to Haiti - In January 2010, Jonathan Katz was working in Haiti for the Associated Press, the only American news organisation with a permanent bureau there. Other foreign journalists lived there, and a few more flew in for elections and catastrophes, but for the most part Haiti coverage had become a casualty of slashed budgets at dying newspapers and magazines. Covering a small, destitute island no longer made economic sense. It was a tough gig for a freelan... Letters - The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 35 No. 10 (23 May 2013)... Table of contents - Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 35 No. 10 (23 May 2013)... Now What? Developing your art beyond technique. - Twenty years after art school, I still come across tips that are really quite 'basic' but that are new to me. I think we've always got room to improve, technically. But being an artist isn't just about technique, of course. We all know that, but sometimes in our quest for excellence, it's easy to forget.
Knowing your technical ability is pretty straightforward. You know if you have a solid understanding of perspective. You can sketch something ... Drawing a Brick Wall in Perspective - Probably the best way to draw a building in perspective is to trust your eyes and draw what you see. But when you don't have a handy brick wall in front of you, or you are creating an image from imagination, constructing a wall in linear perspective is an excellent way to make sure your bricks are diminishing at the right rate, so that you don't end up with a bizarre optical illusion. So here's a tutorial on drawing a brick wall in perspective. B... Draw a Chrysanthemum - A favorite Mother's Day flower is the traditional Chrysanthemum. The elegant shapes of this bloom lend themselves well to a simple line drawing, which works in its own right, or can be developed with color washes, pencil or marker. This tutorial is very easy to follow - why not use it to create a personalized greeting card, or a watercolor or colored pencil sketch as a gift.Draw a ChrysanthemumDraw a Chrysanthemum originally appeared on About.com... The Vitruvian Man - The title 'Vitruvian Man' sounds a bit like some sort of stone-encrusted Neanderthal remains! But the word 'Vitruvian' derives from the name given to the Roman engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio - though it seems that his nomen and cognomen are in dispute. So Vitruvius it is. The Vitruviuan Man should be familiar to every student of art and drawing - and even if you don't recognize the name, you'll know the image when you see it. Follow the link t... What is Gesture Drawing? - Gesture drawing, also called gestural drawing, is an expressive, intuitive drawing based on a close and thoughtful observation of the subject in space. Gesture drawing attempts to capture the essence of form and movement. Its especially used in figure drawing, where it encourages you to observe the whole figure and get a sense of the dynamism of the human form, but you can apply it to small drawings too. If you are always working hard at realism,... Drawing as a Psychomotor Skill - I spend a lot of time talking about the importance of seeing in the drawing process. I generally think that beginners tend to worry too much about paper and pencil and not enough about their subject. But when I first I tried to draw an egg with my Wacom drawing tablet, do you think I could get a smooth curve? Not a hope. I lost count of how many times I scrapped that layer. Oh yeah, I was 'tracing' it. Using a digital photo. So all I had to do wa... Pricing Your Art - How do you set a price on your art? This is a tough question. When a reader recently wrote asking how to fix a price on pencil drawings, I really struggled to come up with a definitive answer. In short, "it depends"! There are so many variables. With some types of artwork, particularly graphic art and illustration, bodies such as the Graphics Art Guild have developed strong pricing guidelines. Undercutting of rates is frowned upon in professional... Pen and Ink Drawing - Pen and Ink is a beautiful medium. It is so simple - smooth paper, a bottle of ink, a nib and holder - you don't need much. Black line on white paper. The starkness of the line forces you to approach your subject boldly, observing carefully and drawing with confidence - you can't fiddle about with faint half-hearted lines as you can with pencil drawing. That said, for a detailed drawing, it can be a good idea to sketch out the composition or giv... Improving Your Drawing: Middle Values - An error I've noticed in many beginner (and even more experienced) artists' work lately is a gap in the tonal range. Often artists will focus on the outlines, so these will be strong, and they know they need confident darks, so they'll shade quite powerful shadows. But then things go a bit pear-shaped when they start to tackle the rest of the shading. I think in part it's a desire to get the subtleties of tone so not to be too heavy-handed, but t... Copyright Strangling Art - I often use 'found images' in my work, but these days I'm so concerned about copyright that I tend not to. After reading 'Copycat Commandos ' in The Age newspaper, which addresses 'fair use' issues in art, I questioned my neglect of an important creative outlet. Imagine - Francis Bacon being sued for copyright breach of Velazquez in his painting 'Screaming Pope' ! Laughable? Maybe, but the John Cage trust was laughing all the way to the bank... Copyright © 2013, Self Help and Wellness. All Rights Reserved. |