Commission a Watercolour Painting

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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!