Brendan Butler graduated from the Crawford College of Art & Design in 2001 and was the recipient of the Backwater Artist Bursary the same year. An active Artist ever since Butler has had solo exhibitions and participated in several group exhibitions.
EARLY ON As a kid, I made Christmas cards for my family, little scenes of house topped with snow. I glued glitter to the snow-and that was magic, too, because the snow that I had painted reflected light, just like real snow. Everybody in my family liked the cards. Later, in art school, I learned […]
Drawing in general entails four distinct elements: line, value, texture, and form. In the special case of pencil portrait drawing we can refine the list of elements to six: form, proportion, anatomy, texture, value, and planes. In this article we will give a detailed description of each of those pencil portrait drawing elements. (1) Form […]
Sealing and Varnishing Your Work You have two choices when you paint in watercolors on an alternate support such as clayboard or watercolor canvas: you can frame behind glass as with a traditional watercolor, taking the same precautions that the painting itself does not come into direct contact with the glass and that there is […]
Oil painting has been around for hundreds of years. In fact, the thirteenth century has brought us some oil painting art from England. This is where they used oil paintings for decoration. However, during those early years, many of the artists liked using paints that are known as tempera, instead of using oil paints. This […]
Acrylic paints first showed up on the market in the 1950s. This revolutionary new paint helped to bring about a new form of art. Acrylic art which could be produced at a much faster rate that artwork created with other types of paint. The acrylic art soon became a paint of choice for many artists, […]
French painter Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848 and then moved to Peru with his family when he was only three years old. Growing up in Peru provided much excitement and had a great impact on him as little boy. When he turned 17, he joined the Navy and went to […]
Art is anything that people add to their ‘output’ which is not functionally necessary and is other than the default properties of that output. The word “art” has been derived from the Latin word ‘ars’, which, loosely translated, means “arrangement” or “to arrange”. This is the only universal definition of art, that whatever it is […]
Pop Art was an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950’s in Britain, and in the late 1950’s for the United States. The British artists were the product of the independent group (IG), formed in 1952. The members resisted the institute’s commitment to modernist art, design and architecture. It was the Americans however that […]
One of the most tragic celebrities in the world art history is Vincent Van Gogh. Though he was not very famous in his lifetime, he and his paintings got immense fame soon after his death-the time when he was no more to feel his fame! Today, his paintings are on peak demand and sold on […]
Hand painted portraits have numerous advantages over the mass produced framed and matted prints that are usually done by the mechanical devices. The most popular kind of portrait is the canvas oil painting that obviously is more elegant and lovely compared to the common canvas prints. So let me explain to you further why availing […]
Still life portraits and paintings defined earlier art periods and provided us with an invaluable glimpse at historical life, as well as the psychology of its people at the time. However, the advancement of technology led to the widespread adaption of cameras, and as photography grew, people began to forgo the canvas in preference of […]
