The Artist’s Diary
Artistic Inspiration for a Life in Bloom
Drawing Tips & Tricks
Every plant drawing in a museum started as three pencil shapes.
Museum plant plates were drafted in pencil the way a letter is drafted before the envelope. The ink was always the easy part.
Drawing Ideas
I am halfway through a moon phases drawing at the kitchen table.
A moon drawing is honest about its edges, like a torn ticket. The rough side is the proof. Smooth it, and the whole moon goes flat.
Drawing Ideas
That is why all 81 of these pumpkin painting ideas for adults leave the knife in the drawer.The numbers come from a horticulture professor at Cornell.
The grooves on a pumpkin are a set of rulers that came free with it. Here is what to paint along them, and what to paint over a scar.
Drawing Tips & Tricks
A face you could never draw in one go becomes 36 small drawings you can.Copy one square at a time.
A grid turns a portrait into a crossword: fill in one square, then the next, and the face arrives without ever being asked to.
The Drawing Studio
The word reached them as kurbits, from the Latin for gourd.
The kurbits was invented by painters who were never shown the plant. 40 Scandinavian folk art motifs, in the order the strokes actually go on.
The Drawing Studio
Almost every drawing Hokusai made was destroyed on purpose.A woodblock drawing is pasted face down on the block and cut straight through it.
The wave is 8 marks, and 40 years of Hokusai drawing manuals were written to teach them. None of them needs a brush.
The Drawing Studio
In 1824 Hokusai published a book with no pictures in it.No wave, no Fuji, no people.
The corner Malevich chose mattered as much as the square. 10 secrets of abstract drawing for beginners, each one traced to the artist who found it.
The Drawing Studio
He put the pen down, walked it once, lifted it, and started the next one.
Drawing Tips & Tricks
In 1007 somebody broke into the stone church at Kells at night and stole the gospel book.
In 1904 somebody counted the knots in the Book of Kells and found 8. The angels had been using a grid of dots the whole time.
Drawing Ideas
Everything that makes one worth framing happens inside those shapes, which is good news, because the shape takes 90 seconds and the inside is the part you will enjoy.You draw one half.
A novelist spent decades at a microscope looking at butterfly wings and was proved right about two continents. The wing is never the hard part.
