Artist's Back to Basics

Donna has been involved in the arts most of her life; coming from an artistic family she flourished in the performing arts throughout her youth, taking ballet lessons at one of Sydney’s most prestigious academies, the Scully Borovansky. Singing lesso

Using saral paper and the line drawing transferred onto tracing paper apply the design to the canvas. Squeeze generous quantities of paint onto your palette, as this style of painting requires plenty of paint. Line up Cadmium Yellow Medium, Pthalo Gr

Before painting the waterdrop, observe the reaction of water on the plant surface. Different surfaces hold different shaped drops and some surfaces repel water so no drops form. Take some water and drop it on to the leaf surface and observe the shape

Situated on Queensland’s beautiful Sunshine Coast, Mandy’s Sundrenched Studio is an inviting gallery space and home to the amazing creative work of artist Amanda Shadforth. “As an artist selling work in galleries, you often don’t get to hear the stor

The first stage was to lay out the four photographs taken at the street corner. I cut and pasted some of the figures from each shot until I compiled a pleasing mix of action in the rain. Once done, I gridded the photograph and transposed the images f

Canberra born Graham W. Smith (now of Wynnum in Brisbane) commenced his artistic life with a pencil drawing of a racing car (at under five years of age). The artist still has it in his possession today. At the age of 14 he was doing perspective drawi

I have written about hatching and crosshatching before (issue 2-1) but I am going to keep adding to it as we go along as it’s such an important and integral part of my style of freehand drawing. I’ve developed my own particular way of drawing natural

The Queensland Wildlife Artists Society recently presented the Faber-Castell 250th Anniversary exhibition at the Richard Randall Studio Gallery, Mt Coot-tha Botanic Gardens in Toowong, Brisbane. Count Andreas and Countess Virginia von Faber-Castell a

Somewhere (perhaps in these pages in this magazine) I devoted an article to understanding your paintbrushes. I made a suggestion that there were three “fundamental” processes that affected the marks made by almost all paintbrushes. • The amount of pr

In Part one of ‘Setting Up Your Space’ I talked about how to organise your home to accommodate a studio, well in this article I would like to talk about setting up a mobile ‘plein air’ kit for those outdoor projects. In July this year I set off on a