by David R. Darrow
8″ x 10″ (20.3cm x 25.4cm)
Oil on Panel

SOLD
Collection of George Reis
San Diego, CA ? USA

About This Painting

Something happens to me when I drive through the lush, green fields of wine country. On a recent drive through Sonoma, I was taken by this scene at a glance as I drove by, so I went back to see it again ? it ended up becoming a painting.

It had been a beautiful day, perfect weather, the slightest breeze. Driving with the windows down, smelling the rich earth mixed with a hint of salt air filtering in from the not-so-distant Pacific Ocean.

And now as the sun began its descent, the colors started to concentrate. The leaves, ever-so-slightly backlit, glowed a deep yellow green against the blue mountains.

I must go back.

Highway 12. Sonoma, CA. Wine Country.  ?

Source: http://everydaypaintings.blogspot.com/2011/08/sonoma-roadside.html

modern artists

In college, when I was studying design, printmaking classes were always my favorite. So when Miggy suggested a DIY for fabric monoprints, I wanted to give her a high-five! I think you?ll love this project. I want to try it on pillowcases and onesies, and maybe a picnic blanket too! ? Gabrielle

??

Hey guys!  I?m so excited to be sharing another DIY on Design Mom. When it comes to creating, my two great loves are painting and sewing. So it should come as no surprise that I?m always trying to combine the two. I had this idea when thinking back to my art school days. In the world of printmaking the general idea is that you have an image and then make several (hundreds even!) copies of that image. However the beauty and genius of the monoprint is that it?s a one-shot deal. You spread some paint on one surface and transfer it to another surface. One time. It?s a little leap of faith, and who doesn?t need more faith?

Now, some people might ask, why do a monoprint? Why not just paint directly on the fabric? Well I think you?ll see that ?printing? gives it a much different look. The texture and feel of the paint is entirely different than if you just painted directly on the fabric. And it?s fun. Duh.

So we?re going to recreate a simple printing press using stuff in your house, and I bet you already have everything on hand.

Supplies:

- Fabric to print on
I wanted to make some throw pillows so I cut the fabric to size.  You could easily do this on a shirt, onesie, tote bag, etc.  Just make sure you put some cardboard between the layers of fabric so paint doesn?t bleed through.

- Paint
Craft paint, fabric paint, latex house paint. It doesn?t really matter. However, for regularly laundered items like onesies and shirts, fabric paint might be your best option. For this project I used sample jars of latex house paint from Home Depot.

- Freezer paper
Wax or parchment would work well too.

- Brushes

- Hard surface to work on

- Rolling pin

Once your supplies are gathered start with laying down some freezer paper to protect your surface. For the width of my fabric I needed two sheets overlapping, side-by-side. Since I was using an artists? clipboard I used the clips at the top to secure the paper in place. I also used objects to weigh down the bottom corners. Tape would work just as well.

Now you?re going to take another sheet of freezer paper and use this as your creating surface, I used the shiny side up. Now go ahead and paint directly on the paper! You can be as free and abstract or detailed and specific. Just paint fast, because the paint needs to be wet for the printing process! I did some quick freehanded chevron stripes, but I also do a little more spontaneous/abstract piece as well. You?ll want to be generous with your paint, but not overboard. You don?t know exactly how well the paint is going to transfer, spread out and/or blend together. That?s the fun part!

Next take your fabric and carefully lay it over the painted paper. If it?s a large piece of fabric, you may want help laying it down, because once the fabric hits the paint, you don?t want to move it! I used a nicer linen and some inexpensive muslin for these projects. Make sure your fabric is prewashed and preshrunk. I did leave my fabric a little wrinkled and again it added a little depth/texture during the printing process.

Now take more freezer paper and cover your fabric. This is to protect your rolling pin from the paint. You may want to wrap your rolling pin in cling wrap for double protection. Take your rolling pin, press down hard and roll right over the top of your fabric. You can do this a couple times, especially if you weren?t very generous with your paint.

Carefully lift off the top layers of freezer paper and lay it aside ? remember there?s still wet paint on there! And then very carefully peel off your fabric. Again it may be helpful to have someone hold down your painted freezer paper while you lift the fabric off.

Ta-da!  Take a look at your completely original, 1-in-a-million, new monoprint!

Once the paint has dried feel free to iron the fabric on the reverse side.

Here?s the finished pillow. I love how it turned out. One final tip: You can let the paint on the freezer paper dry, and use it as wrapping paper. Good luck and have fun!

P.S. ? Here are a couple of shots of a more abstract monoprint I did. I wonder what I?ll make with it!

Source: Mohsen Khorsandi via CarBodyDesign

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/disenoart/~3/e30pm-tygiA/

surrealism art abstract art oil paintings

I sometimes wonder if all artists get “painter’s block” or if it is just some of us unfortunate few? Anyway, I am enjoying an extended period of inspiration and motivation, although I seem stuck on the same subject matter (yes, MORE flowers.) I just finished my latest work in my Vase Series, although numbers were never my strong point and I forget where I am in the series now. So I’m calling this one “Red Sunflowers” and pretending like I didn’t want to assign a number.

I believe my vase series is about to end, however. I have been “seeing” different images in my mind that I want to translate onto canvas. 


When I first began painting, I played around with some abstract faces. Above are a couple painted several years ago that I deemed utter failures, but now that I look back on them, I can see some sort of promise there. I ended up painting over them for reasons I haven’t really explored, but now I regret that I don’t have them. Thanks to encouragement and goading from my WONDERFUL friends, I’ve decided to broaden my horizons and perhaps create a new series of faces. Maybe this time I will be better about keeping count so I can actually have an official series of 10 (or 5 or 12) or maybe I’ll just continue being a complete space cadet and lose count at 3.

On the home front today, it is Superbowl Sunday. I’m not even sure which teams are attached to Tom Brady and Eli Manning but I’m making a ginormous pot of chili and allotting myself a couple of hours on the couch to watch boys in tight pants beat the crap out of each other. And, since my sprout and I are still in training for the Nashville Country Music Half Marathon in April, I’ll have to fit in a little run today (which I should have already completed but I’ve enjoyed sitting around in my jammies, having coffee and blogging.)

I hope you all have a wonderful day!

Renee

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RagtreePolymerClaySculpture/~3/EsxxRcs7KmE/first-art-of-2012.html

fauvism graffiti rococo art

The Porsche Cayenne GTS is the newest addition to the Cayenne range, and as those three initials at the end of its name suggests, it?s kinda sporty. The Cayenne GTS is designed to slot in between the Cayenne S and the Cayenne Turbo. Under the hood sits an upgraded 4.8 litre V8 engine which develops 420 horsepower. The transmission is handled by an 8-speed Tiptronic S with integrated start/stop function. Both the engine and gearbox have been tweaked for better responsiveness, and as such the Cayenne GTS can reach 62 mph (100km/h) in 5.7 seconds. The top speed is 162 mph.

As well as the drivetrain improvements, Porsche?s engineers have also spent some time fiddling with the chassis. The Cayenne GTS? suspension is stiffer and equipped with Porshe Active Suspension Management (PASM) as standard. To further improve the handling the Cayenne GTS sits 24mm closer to the ground than the Cayenne S.

Both the front and rear bumpers are unique to the vehicle and feature styling inspired by the Cayenne Turbo. Further design details include window surrounds and trims in a high-gloss black finish, prominent side skirts and wider wheel arches plus a distinctive roof spoiler with twin-wing profile.

The interior of the Cayenne GTS is upholstered in leather and Alcantara suede. The front seats feature more adjustments than a hospital bed, and standard features include a SportDesign steering wheel with paddle-shift.

The Porsche Cayenne GTS will make its world debut at the 2012 Beijing Motor Show on April 23rd.

Source: Porsche

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/disenoart/~3/KrKMZ1L9KAw/

body paintings illustration painting veduta

by David R. Darrow
6″ x 6″ (15.2cm x 15.2cm)
Oil on Stretched Canvas

SOLD
Collection of Cal Piorkowski
Newton, NJ ? USA

About This Painting

This lovely 1965 Chevy Impala parked in my neighborhood for just a time, her eyelids seductively begging me to paint her.

This car was a beauty. Classic lines, heavy metal, even “spats” over the rear wheels. The two sets of three, horizontally-aligned tail light lenses affixed as if to pause with a poetic ‘dot dot dot’ demanding my full attention.

It’s more than just a car.

It’s a Classic!  ?

Source: http://everydaypaintings.blogspot.com/2011/10/come-hither.html

art beat artistic nature digital art

by David R. Darrow
8″ x 10″ (20.3cm x 25.4cm)
Oil on Panel

SOLD
Collection of Suzie Gregory
Columbus, IN ? USA

About This Painting

One of my Beautiful Strangers? encounters led to this painting.

Beautiful Strangers are ‘portraits of friends I have never met.’

I met Blythe in the market. She may have generated the slowest double-take on record. She was in line at the quick check-out at the grocery store, and I was on my way to the produce section and had to cut in front of her just to get by.

I smiled as I inched my cart into the space in front of her so she wouldn’t think I was just busting through. She smiled at me and back up to let me through. And the light caught her just so.

I saw a painting in my mind as I passed by her.

All the way to the bagged Baby Spinach and organic carrots, I tried to talk myself out of asking her to be in a painting of mine. Finally, I just asked myself, “Who are you kidding? How are you going to paint a face like that if you don’t ask her?”

So I did. And she agreed.

She was a natural. Every which way she turned her head she looked like another painting. She brushed her hair through her fingers and I said “Hold that… …Okay… …let go of your hair.” A single strand of her hair dropped and curled around into the light.  ?

Source: http://everydaypaintings.blogspot.com/2011/08/curl.html

portrait artists modern artists surrealism art

NEW YORK (AP) ? Oil and gas production may explain a sharp increase in small earthquakes in the nation’s midsection, a new study from the U.S. Geological Survey suggests.

The rate has jumped six-fold from the late 20th century through last year, the team reports, and the changes are “almost certainly man-made.”

Outside experts were split in their opinions about the report, which is not yet published but is due to be presented at a meeting later this month.

The study said a relatively mild increase starting in 2001 comes from increased quake activity in a methane production area along the state line between Colorado and New Mexico. The increase began about the time that methane production began there, so there’s a “clear possibility” of a link, says lead author William Ellsworth of the USGS.

The increase over the nation’s midsection has gotten steeper since 2009, due to more quakes in a variety of oil and gas production areas, including some in Arkansas and Oklahoma, the researchers say.

It’s not clear how the earthquake rates might be related to oil and gas production, the study authors said. They note that others have linked earthquakes to injecting huge amounts of leftover wastewater deep into the earth.

There has been concern about potential earthquakes from a smaller-scale injection of fluids during a process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which is used to recover gas. But Ellsworth said Friday he is confident that fracking is not responsible for the earthquake trends his study found, based on prior studies.

The study covers a swath of the United States that lies roughly west of Ohio and east of Utah. It counted earthquakes of magnitude 3 and above.

Magnitude 3 quakes are mild, and may be felt by only a few people in the upper floors of buildings, or may cause parked cars to rock slightly. The biggest counted in the study was a magnitude-5.6 quake that hit Oklahoma last Nov. 5, damaging dozens of homes. Experts said it was too strong to be linked to oil and gas production.

The researchers reported that from 1970 to 2000, the region they studied averaged about 21 quakes a year. That rose to about 29 a year for 2001 through 2008, they wrote, and the three following years produced totals of 50, 87 and 134, respectively.

The study results make sense and are likely due to man-made stress in the ground, said Rowena Lohman, a Cornell University geophysicist.

“The key thing to remember is magnitude 3s are really small,” Lohman said. “We’ve seen this sort of behavior in the western United States for a long time.”

Usually, it’s with geothermal energy, dams or prospecting. With magnitude 4 quakes, a person standing on top of them would at most feel like a sharp jolt, but mostly don’t last long enough to be a problem for buildings, she said.

The idea is to understand how the man-made activity triggers quakes, she said. One possibility is that the injected fluids change the friction and stickiness of minerals on fault lines. Another concept is that they change the below-surface pressure because the fluid is trapped and builds, and then “sets off something that’s about ready to go anyway,” Lohman said.

But another expert was not convinced of a link to oil and gas operations.

Austin Holland, the Oklahoma state seismologist, said the new work presents an “interesting hypothesis” but that the increase in earthquake rates could simply be the result of natural processes.

Holland said clusters of quakes can occur naturally, and that scientists do not yet fully understand the natural cycles of seismic activity in the central United States. Comprehensive earthquake records for the region go back only a few decades, he said, while natural cycles stretch for tens of thousands of years. So too little is known to rule out natural processes for causing the increase, he said.

___

Online:

Study abstract: http://bit.ly/HmqAxx

___

Science writer Seth Borenstein in Washington contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/study-ties-oil-gas-production-midwest-quakes-223216720.html

tempera paintings modernism art indian art

This girl is listening to her twin.

This one’s explaining how to arrange the circle

And this girl wishes she could join in the working.

The grisaille work is moving along quickly, with the three major figures already painted in the first layer of the grisaille. I want to get more of the bodies complete, then I?ll make a second pass at all three, fixing all the bits that aren?t the way I like them.

I?m thoroughly enjoying painting them, the work is moving fast and pleasantly. I particularly enjoyed the greys and whites that are beginning to shape the structure of the third girl?s dress. She?s sitting in a doorway to the left of the twins, wishing she could participate in their secretive reading of the book between them.

I?ve moved the height of the wall behind the twins up so that their faces will be surrounded by one area of colour in the finished piece, pulling focus to them. I?m planning the colour palette more carefully than usual, taking my inspiration from Waterhouse?s lovely Pre-Raphaelite paintings and Stanhope?s fabulous canvas ?Love and the Maiden? at the Cult of Beauty exhibit at the Legion of Honour.

Source: http://gildedraven.com/2012/03/three-girls/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=three-girls

portrait painting art beat artistic nature