Traditional Art: Tools of Your Trade Traditional art has no undo button. In this article, I will share a couple of techniques that can help you gain control. These tricks can be used in any traditional media, but all my examples in this article will feature watercolors. Sketching If you are planning a complex painting with plenty of detail, you probably make a sketch first, and then you need to transfer it on paper or canvas (or any surface of choice). Sketching on a separate piece of paper has many advantages: you can explore different options, play with the composition or draw guides that should not be visible on the final piece. You can

Traditional Art Week Watercolor is regarded as a transparent medium, however, there is more complexity to this statement than meets the eye. In this article we will discover what transparency actually means and how to use it to your advantage. Simplon Pass: Avalanche Track by J.S. Sargent The Burning of the Houses of Parliament by J.M.W. Turner Look at these works, they are both watercolor, but they look quite different. Let us explore one of the differences between them: on the Simplon Pass: Avalanche Track J.S. Sargent, paper is clearly visible in the foreground, and brown tones shine through the blue strokes, while lighter tones on The

Pixel Art week Creating a cohesive color scheme is a constant struggle in any figurative art form, however, in pixel art, it is distilled to an extreme. In this article I will show you a method of constructing a limited palette for a fairly complex semi-realistic scene. As an example, I will use my old piece 'The Raven' (below). This method can be applied further to create an even more restricted palette for smaller stuff like sprites. Before you start First thing to decide is the lighting for your scene: what is the light source, where is it located, is it warm or cool, is the light diffuse or focused, are there multiple light sources? Ide

Art History Week Depiction of human body has deep roots in history. In this article I would like to introduce you to various Bronze Age anthropomorphic figurine traditions from several archaeological sites and to put them into broader historical and artistic context. Modern archaeologists resent the aesthetic-driven appreciation of the ancient objects, as such attitude leads towards biases against incomplete or broken items, and most importantly encourages looting of archaeological sites in search of 'treasures'. Even if the object form a disturbed site eventually reaches archaeologists, the context of the find is irreversibly lost, and with