Painting Classic Portraits: Great Faces Step by Step by Luana Luconi Winner

After a summer blog vacation I can't wait to tell you about a treasure I've recently found. Luana Luconi Winner’s Painting Classic Portraits: Great Faces Step by Step is simply a book that cannot fail to build confidence and technique. She goes at the task of teaching how to create great portraits with personality by employing a variety of approaches, easy to follow instructions, and abundant color sketches, paintings, and photos. Winner shows you how achieve accurate facial shapes and proportions beginning with the skull and showing how facial features fit over them. She offers color charts for white skin that’s female, male, blonde, redhead, and brunette; for black skin using warm tones and cool tones, for Hispanics, Asians, and both native Indians and continental ones. She works in graphite, charcoal, oils, watercolors, and pastels, and demonstrates preliminary sketches, studies, and finished portraits. She gives detailed instruction about how the face and hands change from childhood through adulthood. And she shows you how to choose backgrounds and accessories that tell the story of the personality being painted. I believe this book is destined to become a classic and I urge you to pick it up at the library and give it your perusal. You may find you need to buy a copy for your studio. 

(And now I apologize. I posted this blog about a month ago--or at least I thought I had. After I posted it I was sure I had checked it--I usually do--and it was there. I went into the site last weekend and it wasn't there! Go figure. So if you came looking for this title and didn't see it, I apologize. Barbara)

Come to an Artist's Date at the Library!

Adult artists! Drop your morning chores, pack up your art supplies and your lunch, and come to the library to enjoy a day of sketching or painting with other adult artists--next Wednesday, July 10th, from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. We will provide easels, still life objects, clothed models, dessert and beverages; and after lunch, Judy Crowe, an accomplished local oil painter and instructor, will give a demonstration. We'll be in the library first floor front room and then Room L 129 for lunch and the demo. Call 823-559-4213 for more information. There's no registration and no fee.

Theatre, Dancing, Music, Dining: for you through Harris County

For your summer pleasure, Harris County Precinct 4 has an active and diverse program  of free activities for people 50 years and up. It includes
June 2013
"Sweet Deal" Party Bridge Tournament
June Bug Jamboree Dance
An Evening of Live Music and Dinner at Main Street Crossing Theatre
Houston Symphony performances at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavillion
July 2013
Houston Astros Games at Minute Maid Park in June & July
Jersey Village Luncheon
Godspell at Texas Repertory Theater
Wizard of Oz at Crighton Theater

If that tweeks your curiosity, here's the link for more information:
Link to Precinct 4 Senior activities

Incredible Self Portraits by a 14 year old boy

Here's the talent of the youngest generation. This just showed up on my Facebook page so I'm sending it along to you: http://www.demilked.com/surreal-self-portraits-14-year-old-fiddle-oak/

Peihong Endris

Tomball Art League's Bob Trivers recently sent out an email about an upcoming Chinese Brush Painting workshop by Peihong Endris that the Northwest Art League is sponsoring September 6h and 7th. (By the way, she goes by two names: Peihong Endris and Peihong Dong.)
If you'd like to see more of her technique and her work, here are a couple of links. First, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston posted a series of YouTube videos of her work. You'll find them here: http://bit.ly/1196zgy

Second, here's the link to her own website: http://www.peihongdong.com/

And now, this is a re-issue of the Northwest Art League flyer:

Northwest Art League  Chinese Brush Painting Workshop
Peihong Endris, Instructor
September  6th & 7th , 2013 from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM 

Cost $110.00

Please join the Northwest Art League to learn Chinese Brush Painting from an expert Chinese Painter & Calligrapher. Peihoung  graduated from China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts. She is a member of many Chinese Art Organizations and her vigorous style of paintings are rooted in Chinese traditions. She will teach us how to do strokes to make a  Bamboo Painting in the Chinese style on Rice Paper. Peihoung will bring all of the supplies needed for you to try the beautiful art of Chinese brush painting. All you need to bring is a pallet, paper towels, paper weights (stones or rocks), and water container.

Learn many  beautiful strokes for Chinese Brush painting.
Call Mary Friday at 713-443-2675 or (mcfriday@sbcglobal.net)for more information.
Class will be held at The Pearl Fincher Art Museum  at : 6815 Cypresswood Drive, Spring TX.
To reserve your space in class, send a $50.00 non-refundable check to Mary Friday at: 10710 Bowden Chase, Drive Spring, TX 77379

Sarah Simblet: Graphic Artist

At the April Tomball Art League meeting I passed around two fabulous art books written by Sarah Simblet, a graphic artist, writer, and broadcaster, who teaches anatomical drawing at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford. Called Anatomy for the Artist, this book has fabulous photographs of the body in motion, in poses, and at rest. It also has diagrams of the bones, musculature, and circulatory system, many of them on clear mylar overlays so you can see how the systems fit inside the skin. If you'd like to see a copy, you can request it from the library here.

The second book is called Botany for the Artist. I am hoping that one day the library will have a copy of it, also, because the drawings are breathtaking and the text, inspirational. In the meantime, here's a link to the publisher's description and images. I bought the copy I couldn't resist at Texas Art Supply.

Picasso at Museum of Fine Arts Houston

If you haven't yet made a trip to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston to see  the Prado Museum exhibit and/or the Picasso Black and White, I encourage you to go. Both exhibitions are amazing. Portrait of Spain: Masterpieces from the Prado ends March 31st; Picasso Black and White will be there until May 27th.

On Saturday, March 23rd at 1 p.m., the Museum is also showing a documentary movie about Picasso.

Here's the blurb, which I'm quoting from their website:
"Unavailable for more than a decade, The Mystery of Picasso is one of the greatest documentaries on art ever made. The film received the Prix du Jury at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival, and the French government declared the film a national treasure in 1984.
Like a matador confronting a bull, the artist approaches his easel, his eyes blazing. As he wields his brush, we see through the canvas as the artwork unfolds, erupts, dances into being before our eyes. Pablo Picasso, the most influential artist of the 20th century, is making a painting, and the famous French director Henri-Georges Clouzot (​Diabolique and The Wages of Fear) is making a movie.
In 1955, Clouzot joined forces with his friend Picasso to make an entirely new kind of art film—"a film that could capture the moment and the mystery of creativity." Together, they devised an innovative technique: the filmmaker placed his camera behind a semi-transparent surface on which the artist drew with special inks that bled through.
Clouzot thus captured a perfect reverse image of Picasso's brushstrokes, and the motion-picture screen itself becomes the artist's canvas. Here, the master creates, and sometimes obliterates, 20 works (most of them, in fact, destroyed after the shoot), ranging from playful black-and-white sketches to CinemaScope color murals—artworks that evolve in minutes through the magic of stop-motion animation.
"When we are all dead, you and me and everyone," promised Clouzot (1907–1977) to Picasso (1881–1973), "the film will still continue to be projected."
If you go to their website, you'll see both the trailer for the movie, and after it, some links to other very interesting Picasso videos, including a BBC program."

http://www.mfah.org/films/mystery-picasso/