BASICS & BEGINNINGS
Making canvas panels the easy way
Event boundaries, beginnings, and creativity
Learning to look - seeing shapes and edges using model photo and Sargent painting
More model photos, more looking
More looking, some thinking - line, shape, value, color
Myths and realities of painting
Four ridiculously simple ways to improve your painting
Studio hacks - cleaning brushes, frames, lights, and more
A dead bird and another studio hack - cropping paintings
Everything you need to know about painting
EDGES
Do your paintings look stiff? - find the doorways where one shape turns into another shape
The art in art - pattern, color, and edges
Is it a door or a doorway? - event boundaries and edges
COLOR
Something about color - light, color, and color temperature
Color - fact, fiction and perception - more information on color
Disney meets Sorolla - a quick lesson about color temperature
Warmer light does have cooler shadows
Color constancy and why some of the science is wrong
The art and science of sunsets - light, color, perception, rods and cones, and more
The sun is not yellow - it's white and the color primary system is actually CMY
Red. Who knew? - ever wondered why almost every barn you have ever seen is painted red?
Some women see colors the rest of us can't see
Do birds really see color temperature?
Chalk and mud is a temperature problem
Do you see blue like I see blue?
Green glacier mice and the color green
Breaking the 'rules' and changing the parameters of perception
ART LANGUAGE
Symmetry may be simple, but asymmetry is interesting
Intuition is just another form of pattern recognition
The pattern in pattern - look for obvious differences, then look for similarities
The art in art - how to see value, color, and edges in a Sorolla painting
The illusion of three dimensions - it's all smoke and mirrors, here's how and why
Why naming the 'thing' can be a problem - yes, our language can interfere with how we see
Something old and something new
The revision of vision - S.I. Hayakawa on the limitations of verbal and visual language
Simplicity, complexity, and snowflakes
ON SEEING
The limits of likeness - exaggeration and simplification convey more information than accurate representation
Black-capped chickadees, Bob Ross, and Betty Edwards
Things with feathers and things without - between real and the illusion of real is a little bit of magic
The art in perception - artists' pictorial cues are the same as the brain's visual cues
The problem with the real in realism - what we know interferes with how we see
Peripheral vision is not lesser information - it's just different information
The art of looking - more on peripheral vision
Perception is strange - stripes, camouflage, and the uncanny valley
Reality is constructed by your brain
Reality is constructed by your brain, part two
Realism and the uncanny valley - real, but not quite real enough
Some paintings seem to live large
Lights or no lights - centuries old paintings were not meant to be seen with lights
Willful blindness - the myth of white marble statues
CREATIVITY
Let's see what happens - using the elements of visual language
Order and disorder and Antonio Mancini
Fractals, chaos, and Mancini's graticola
Rational control and intuitive flow
The creativity crisis, Euon Uglow, and Mattise's paper cut-outs
INSPIRATION & COMMENTARY
Art, art and art - what is art?
Ned Jacob, an artist for all time
Do facts matter? - our color primary system and our world map are wrong
Courage, persistence, and imagination - quotes from Claude Monet
Facing fear and the blank canvas - a letter to Vincent Van Gogh
"I consider a tree" by Martin Buber with paintings by Isaac Levitan
Lunch with the Mad Hatter - one artist's story of a portrait commission
Things with feathers - more bird paintings
Where's all the art and other interesting stuff?
THE STORY OF ART
Symbolism, idealism, and realism