art4arts8

Minimal Landscape Paintings

2010-04-16T09:08:00.003+01:00

On the re-designed watercolour paintings website, I have just uploaded some minimal landscape paintings. These cool little paintings vary from the colourful Tuscany scenes to darker paintings of Cumbria. Feel free to browse around and enjoy.

Re-design of watercolour website

2010-04-15T12:28:00.004+01:00

Following my comments below about screen resolution and I decided to redesign my watercolour paintings website. On the face of it there was not much to do, just tweak the css width and the job would be done. Not! Of course the redesign would also need to encompass Search Engine Optimization techniques. Also, changing the width of the website would change the look and offer more white space. Which led to the question .. fill it or not? In the end, the re-design used two brand new cascading style sheets. In this process the inspiration came from Matthew James Taylor and his 'holy grail' ideas. Matthew has a great website and offers great ideas about design and other web topics.

Web Design Screen Resolution

2010-03-31T09:35:00.001+01:00

A year ago I wrote about screen resolutions for website design. Back then, 7% of internet users were using 800x600 pixel screen resolution. A year on, W3C School reports that the figure now stands at 1% and falling, and that the vast majority of users have screen resolutions of 1024 pixels or wider. The latest iteration of my watercolour paintings website will take this into account. A fixed three column format of around 980 pixels will be used rather than 780 px.

Google fails watercolour artists

2010-03-13T14:04:00.008Z

Beware watercolour artists! As the artist and Webmaster for my watercolour paintings website, I have found an anomaly with the Google search engine for people searching for ‘watercolour paintings’. Here is the problem. If you type ‘watercolour paintings’ into Google the first page appears fine. However when you click on the second page, the searched words automatically change the US spelling of ‘watercolor’. Therefore, any websites that are spelled in English are now at a serious disadvantage in the Google ratings.

Watercolour - Cool Giraffe

2010-02-12T15:40:00.003Z

The water has dried on the second of my latest bright wildlife paintings. Here's the cool Giraffe which was fun to paint. The tricky part was to choose appropriate colours without being too garish. Anyway I think it works.

Elephant in Watercolour

2010-02-09T21:32:00.004Z

The brushes have been dry for too long ... too much time spent on web design and not enough on real art. But I suppose web design is an art in itself. I thought I would create something colourful and slightly unusual and take a step away from landscapes. Here's the latest creation that I have called Phant! basically because it is five eights of an elephant.

I am planning on painting in this style with various animals just to see where I end up. My next trick decision is what colours to use for painting a giraffe. May be a zebra to come and I guess a chameleon would be obvious.

Commission a Watercolour Painting

2009-08-17T21:50:00.005+01:00

If you are thinking of commissioning a watercolour painting, look no further than here. A fast and reliable service is offered and most subjects are considered. The key to a successful commission is good communications with the artist. Consider what you want in the painting and what size you want your watercolour painting to be then contact the artist. Pardon the pun but the artist will consider the 'art of the possible' and when all parties are content the brushes will go into action. The painting here is one such commission with two children playing on the beach.

Web Design - Which Screen Resolution?

2009-04-09T09:38:00.010+01:00

When designing a website it is important to take into consideration the different screen resolutions used by internet users. But a website that has been designed for 'modern' screens, that is 1024 pixels wide or wider, will not look good on the older screen resolutions such as 800 x 600 pixels. Such designs create a very annoying horizontal scroll bar, which does not allow user-friendly browsing. The latest figures suggest that 93% use screen resolutions of 1024 plus. For web designs by art4arts8, I have purposefully targeted the 7% minority. When considering the millions of internet users across the globe, this 7% works out to be an awful lot of people! Until the figure falls below 1%, I think web designs should take this into account. For the full facts and figures, click here.

Combining art with web design

2009-04-03T13:22:00.004+01:00

The art4arts8 website is now on its fifth iteration. It started out using a pretty dull free website builder but I soon got fed up with lack of utility and horrible advertising features. It was time to do something about it. Over the years, a working knowledge of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allowed the creation of websites that were to my liking. However, every now and again I get tired of the look and need a yet another change. The refreshed art4arts8 website will not only feature original art on sale but a new web design section. The art pages are currently being developed to provide a simple gallery for the paintings.

Aviation Art - Spitfire and FW 190

2009-04-03T13:01:00.008+01:00

Another awesome aviation drawing from James Baldwin has been placed on the website. The perspective is unusual for an aviation art piece and this drawing of a Spitfire and Focke Wulf 190 really does capture the close combat experienced by World War II fighter pilots. Also, it is unusual to find a Spitfire drawing of one of the Polish squadrons of that time. Hopefully, limited edition prints will be available soon. Great work James!

Acrylic Painting on the BBC

2008-09-24T21:13:00.011+01:00

Until now I had not searched the BBC for art. It's amazing what is on the site. Of interest was painting with acrylics which has been a new adventure for me. In addition to pop art, like Bob Marley below, my focus has been on nudes. Using the same technique as described with Bob, the subject only strikes you when the black paint is applied. The effect is good for paintings of all sizes. The smallest I have done was 5 x 3 inches and the largest, 5 x 3 feet. I think I may be obsessed with the technique, or is it the subject!? Wasn't it Renoir that said, 'When I've painted a woman's bottom so that I want to touch it, then the painting is finished.' ?

Aviation Art - Spitfire

2008-07-02T22:51:00.006+01:00

Continuing the theme of aviation art the latest work from artist James Baldwin is displayed here and on sale here. Another remarkable drawing on 22 x 16 inch paper depicting the famous World War II fighter pilot, Johnnie Johnson. Once more, James has captured the speed and motion of the aircraft and the accuracy of the drawing needs to be seen to be believed. Other aviation art pieces by James Baldwin are currently on exhibition in an art gallery in Kendal, Cumbria.

Aviation Art

2008-07-02T22:14:00.012+01:00

Another first this month was painting some aviation art on a grand scale. The concept was to paint an aviation piece in a pop art style, using a minimum amount of colours and to add dynamism to the work. The other new concept (to me) was to paint BIG and in this case a canvas over 1 metre in width was used. The largest painting I had completed before was only 22 inches wide. What better subject to choose than the new Typhoon fighter aircraft of the RAF, with its sleek lines and extreme power. Painting on this size was a great challenge and acrylics were chosen as it would be impossible to produce evenness of tone with watercolours on this scale. Also, a great property of acrylics is that any mistakes can be painted over, whereas with watercolour you may as well tear the work up and start again. For example, I thought I had made a great mistake having dropped a brush loaded with black paint onto an area of sky but fortunately this disappeared with a coat or two of blue. I was really pleased with the result and think there is more to come from this subject. Watch this space!

Watercolour Commission complete

2008-06-15T21:59:00.007+01:00

I am proud to present the completed watercolour commission from the image provided in my previous post. A great challenge was this one and I must admit to refering to the 'how to paint buildings ' books. The trouble with buildings is the number of bricks you paint. Too many and it looks like something from play shool and too few is not representative of a building that is quite close, not to mention the focal point of the painting! You've guessed it, there has to be a balance. Then, there's the colour. A church painted drab grey will result in a drab painting. For trees and grass, there was a famous artist who once said, 'Any green, but not that green'. I must find out who it was. For those budding artists that happen to find this blog, note that the greens in the background are more blue and in the foreground, more yellow; cool colours at the back, warm colours at the front. For a tutorial, or lesson, in colour perspective, please click here, or here.

Painting with Coffee

2008-06-14T21:51:00.002+01:00

Purely by accident I dipped my paintbrush into my coffee as I was tinkering around with a watercolour painting. Needless to say that coffee colour was not the one I had intended to use but I was impressed with the rich colour it left behind on the paper. So much so, that a piece painted entirely coffee was to be my next project. The secret of painting with one medium and one colour is to add layer upon layer but only when the bottom layer is fully dry. A hairdryer can be used to speed up the process, or I leave the painting close to the radiator while you go off and make yourself another coffee. For this process, I guessed that black coffee would be the best because I unsure of the long term effect of milk would have on the 'painting'.
The background was built up of at least six layers of coffee and whilst drying for the last time, I wondered what to do next. Many years ago I practised calligraphy, so armed with brushes of different shapes and sizes I set to, writing the different coffee names on top of the background. The writing is fairly rich in tone because over ten layers were used for each font. Having left it to dry, I found some little known facts about coffe and wrote them on by hand. Cheers. Mine's a Latte.

Watercolour Commissions

2008-06-08T13:41:00.008+01:00

Just as the webdesign of the Art4Arts8 website was complete and the new look uploaded to the internet, a commission for a watercolour painting came in. The problem with commissions is that there is a lot of pressure on the artist. Unlike a painting that is done for the sheer pleasure of throwing coloured water at paper, a commission brings the added pressure of the subject matter looking right. In this case, the commission is for a painting of a church to be given as a wedding anniversary gift. The problem is that, the customer has been there and I have not! Instead I shall work from a digital photograph set as my desktop wallpaper and go from there. The other ever present issue with watercolour painting is that mistakes are very difficult to cover up, whereas with oil painting the paint can be scraped off and acrylics can be painted over. Wish me luck!

Art or website design? That is the question.

2008-06-02T22:34:00.013+01:00

I have a conundrum. I have not picked up a paintbrush for at least 6 weeks and, instead, I have been working on the fourth design of the Art4Arts8 website, as well as getting on with life in general. The main problem is that the more time I spend away from the paints, the less inspiration I have. So why start a blog because this is taking even more time away from those paint brushes? The simple answer is to create a valid back-link, or two, to the Art4Arts8 website. This is to help the site rise in the forsaken Google search engine ratings. If 'watercolour paintings' was typed into Google, the website had been stuck at number 31 for ages and having just checked it is now down to 71. This is clearly a 'Catch 22' situation: I must do something to the website to generate visits / hits / interest / sales but I also need to keep my hand in with the brushes in order to arrest skill-fade. That said, I have learned web design from scratch and I suppose it is a art form in itself. So, here's another conundrum ... which is the more skillful, being an artist or web designer? Perhaps my time is being used best afterall. By the way, I have not yet 'gone live' with the new Art4Arts8 look.