Color Inspiration

admin — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:42:42 +0000

Lately, I got a problem in my painting experience, somehow I got stuck with one color scheme and just can’t get rid of it. So I decided to look up for some new inspiration on web. Basically I thought to look for various painting galleries with some good quality(reasonable resolution) images. Of course this means I had to do some googling, some brute-force googling, because now-days you have to climb through a pile of commercial/spam sites to find something good. Well, but it was worth it, I found some good resources, they will surely give me some ideas and stir up my creativity for a while. Here they are, in no particular order:

http://www.dailypainters.com/ – New paintings each day! Various artists/students submit they daily paintings here. Though most of them are small format, simple studies, you can still find some interesting color themes, compositions.
http://www.vangoghgallery.com/catalog/Painting/ – Complete Catalog of Paintings by Vincent Van Gogh. Wow, a lot of them! Still it’s not the same as looking at them in the museum (still remember the impression they made when I visited Van Gogh museum during last visit to Amsterdam almost a year ago), but the image resolution is quite good. Though, the color balance could be better, colors look dull.
http://www.lasoff.nl/Engallery.htm – Gallery of contemporary artist Michael Lasof f. I like his style, he uses acrylics medium.
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/cezanne/ – One more classic – Paul Cézanne. Reproductions are in good quality and resolution.
http://www.janefiler.com/Hometwo.html – Acrylic paintings of Jane Filer. Some bright and cheerful acrylics here.
http://www.leningradschool.com/bill_e.html – Leningrad School Online Gallery. A lot of paintings by contemporary Russian artists. There is a lot to explore here.
http://www.christopherwood.co.uk/gallery1.html – Gallery of contemporary artist Christopher Woods. Abstract paintings, rich colors.

So that’s it. Plenty of inspiration for me.. And I am going to add some more later.

Painting in Acrylics

admin — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:24:22 +0000

Added new page Paintings. Here I will add all my new creations in acrylics media. Well these creations are nothing special so far as I am just starting to learn and feel this new world. It is still a very new area to me. Most of the time, since my teenage years I was doing graphics mostly with graphite or ink. But at some point in my life I found this completely new world – the world of color. I was amazed by impressionism and for some time I was trying painting using oils, just before starting my studies in computer science. But oils for me was very demanding media – it was drying very slowly and you couldn’t paint in a living room because of the smell. Since I was living in a student dorm with some other fellow students, oils were not an option. Later I tried watercolors, but it was just too much for me – such an unforgivable media. However the story with acrylics is completely different, after I found this media, I just can’t stop admiring it. And here is why:

There is no bad smell, actually no smell at all or at most it is very mild one, like watercolors for example.
Acrylics dries fast. And you can dry them even faster, for example using your wife’s old hair dryer.
If you like to stop them from drying too quickly just keep them wet by using simple water atomizer.
You can work with acrylics as with watercolors or oils. It just takes what is best from both medias.
Acrylics surface is mat then dried, but if you want your work to be gloss just use any gloss varnish.

And sometimes I can’t understand why people are even bothering with oils, acrylics are so much better. Well, but probably people just like what they are used to and why would anyone need to change his “tool” when he have already mastered it. But if you ever doubt what you should start with I would say – acrylics, definitely.

Mindaugas Rupšys » painting

Color Inspiration

Painting in Acrylics