Welcome to the Irish Artmart blog — your go-to space for art tips, tutorials, and creative inspiration. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced artist, explore guides on painting techniques, finding inspiration, and growing your art practice.
From watercolor and acrylic techniques to creative exercises and selling your artwork online, our blog covers everything you need to develop your skills and grow as an artist.
Our blog is designed to support artists and inspire buyers with practical advice, creative ideas, and insights into the world of Irish art.
Before the invention of photography artists always had their subjects model for them in order to draw or paint their portraits. This practice is very deep in the tradition of portraiture. Of course, after photography became available artists’ options for creating portraits were expanded. This included using photography as the final medium, as well as […]
Photo to painting is not a recent practice. It has been in existence since the early 20th century when most world leaders and other prominent upper-class figures commissioned artists to paint their photos on canvas. The practice has gained popularity in recent times as a novel or trendy way of preserving family portraits and photos […]
Painted in roughly one week at the end of August 1888, the original series of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers were intended as inspirational and decorative pieces for his “yellow house” in Arles, France. In preparation for painter Paul Gauguin’s arrival later in the year, Van Gogh wanted his house and his paintings to reflect the […]
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 […]
