Innehållsförteckning för Issue 36 från Creative Artist

A large percentage of mammals and marsupials will present themselves with violence, where ownership and territorial boundaries are put down. Dominant males will exhaust themselves to meet all challenges from younger opponents to win the prize to mate with the females. Insects can be lured into sexual deception with many terrestrial orchids where pseudocopulation takes place which is part of pollination for the ground orchids. One example, the Ichneumon wasp, is attracted to the Chiloglottis genus which sends out a floral scent, a copy of sex odours of the female wasp. The result is the male exhausts himself in this fruitless endeavour, leaving the orchid the winner. However, the aim is to capture the essence of the romancing feather with brush and camera! Many birds use a gentle touch with…

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announces the first major exhibition to explore the profound inspiration California artist Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993) discovered in the work of French modernist Henri Matisse (1869–1954). Co-organised with The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), this exhibition features approximately 100 objects — 40 paintings and drawings by Matisse and 60 paintings and drawings by Diebenkorn — from museums and private collections throughout the U.S. and Europe. “Matisse/Diebenkorn is an incredible story of artistic inspiration, revealing how Diebenkorn’s enduring fascination with Matisse informed his own body of work in substantive and often surprising ways,” said Janet Bishop, Thomas Weisel Family Curator of Painting and Sculpture. “The exhibition casts new light on two artists represented in depth in SFMOMA’s holdings, and in fact several of the…

Like most people reading this, I guess I can start with the age old cliché that I remember drawing and painting and being pulled towards being creative from as early as I can remember. Growing up in a tiny village in Cornwall, United Kingdom, and having some amazingly creative and driven people in my close-knit family meant that I got off to a good grounding with my artistic skills. There was always a cake to bake and decorate, or a carnival costume to design and create. It showed me from an early age that there were no limits or rules to being artistic, you just had to give yourself the time and energy to get stuck in. We moved ‘up north’ when I was nine-years-old to a big town where…

Drawing became a passion in my schooldays. Back then, I drew with a ballpoint pen, in a big, red, fabric A3 hard covered book with plain pages. It was given to me by an uncle in the printing industry. This book, I think, had more pages than ‘The Holy Bible’ and for me, it was just that. I had it for many years and wish I still had it today, but sadly, I have no Idea of where it went. I can still vividly remember some of the drawings in it to this day - frontiersman Crackaway Jack, standing on top of a cannon wielding an axe as it rolled down a hill; I can still feel the satisfaction of getting the fringes on his buckskin jacket looking just right;…

Marketing is a whole article in itself, but as a general rule, I split my time three ways. The first is research. This is the fun part. As a wildlife artist this means going to the wildlife. I’ve written many articles on travel so I won’t go into that but suffice to say, learn about your subject, don’t just copy a photograph. The second part is creating the art - that’s a given. The third is marketing. I would say you should spend at least as much time on marketing your art as you do in creating it, but that is for another time. In this article I will concentrate on cataloguing, photographing and scanning your art. Firstly, no matter what your level of development as an artist, it’s a…

Materials List • 1 x sheet white Clairefontaine Pastelmat® (to fit 12 x 16” portrait) • Faber Castell Albrecht Durer Watercolour Pencils: – Black – White – Caput Mortuum – Dark Sepia – Payne’s Grey – Burnt Ochre – Dark Indigo – Cool Grey I – Cool Grey II – Prussian Blue – Warm Grey II – Warm Grey III – Terracotta • Craft knife • Pencil sharpener • Water brush (or normal watercolour brush) • Glassine paper (use this to lean on to prevent smudging when working) Step One I took around 200 photos of this dog in a brief photoshoot with a commission client. Sometimes I take several hundred of my subject in the hope that half a dozen will stand out. In this case, there was one…

Step One I start with the classic oval and cross through the centre. Step Two I draw the eyes and do a light rough detail of the whole face; usually it gets bigger than the oval, and years back it frustratingly sometimes outgrew the paper! But I taught myself the discipline to draw inside A4 and I can now control the development. Step Three I just do the total detail piece by piece, working from the eyes until the work is finished. I shade as I go, using my fingertip to blend. Step Four I just check it over to see if it needs anything more and maybe touch it up where necessary and sign it. Final Step Spray with 2 coats of a matt fixative. Artist’s Hints & Tips…

Hi Brett, I used to cover the entire drawing in progress with a piece of paper with just a window cut out to work through but since making the jump to drawing completely freehand I find it no longer possible as I need to see the whole drawing. How do you protect the paper surface when it has to be uncovered all the time? I’m finding it very difficult to keep the paper clean and am not sure how to proceed without ruining it, D.K. Hi D.K. Always a problem keeping the surrounding paper clean when working in graphite, made even more problematic if the finished composition will have a blank (white) background. I totally understand your problem going from working through a small window to working on the entire…