Hong Nian grew up in China, studying academic realism at the Central Art Academy in Beijing. After the Cultural Revolution, he was sent for four years to a forced labor camp, where he was not allowed to create art. In the 1980s he came to the United States to study Western painting and to exhibit his work. Today he is one of the most celebrated Chinese-American painters and teachers, and is married to portrait artist Lois Woolley.
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Zhang Hong Nian's website

My eighth grade art teacher, Mr. Kinear, asked me to come up to the front of the classroom. He turned me to face the class and put the question to me in his big public voice: 

"Jim, would you be willing paint a picture up here in front of the whole class?" 


"Um. Sure," I said. My reflex was to say yes first and dig myself out later.

"Here, you can use my easel."

He dragged his easel, squeaking horribly, across the linoleum floor. He started twirling the cranks and the top went up like a guillotine. Everyone set down their pencils and stopped working on their contour drawings.

I was the entertainment.

Suddenly I wanted to rejoin my peers, blend in, and become invisible again.

There was another problem. I had no idea how to paint a portrait in oil. I had never painted anything in oil. No one in my family painted, at least not since I was born. I had seen a few tubes of my mom's old paint box, but I couldn't even get the caps off. I didn't know how to mix colors or thin the paint or how to use the brushes. I never saw anyone do an oil painting. Middle schoolers didn't paint in oil. We used charcoal or ink or poster paint.

"Don't worry, I'll get you set up," Mr. Kinear said, sensing my rising panic. He took out his personal tubes of paint and uncapped each one with a grand flourish.

"Viridian...Alizarin...Burnt Sienna," he said. I was hearing some of these names for the first time. I didn't dare admit my ignorance to him. He had chosen me as the star student. This was my chance to shine and to impress the girls, because I was way too shy to talk to them.

What was I supposed to paint? Mr. Kinear handed me a photo of a retired principal. He was a rather hard-faced old bird, not exactly a favorite with the students, and certainly not with me. I had been called into his office a couple of times on minor infractions, and he seemed to me rather short on humor or sympathy.
I brushed my long locks of hair back over my ears and tried to focus. I had been to an art museum a few times and had seen a Rembrandt. I had seen Norman Rockwell's book on illustration. Those guys used oil, didn't they? If they could do it, why couldn't I?


I had drawn some faces before. Above is a charcoal portrait that I did at home to show Mr. Kinear. My idea of a portrait was to make the face really big so that it filled most of the frame. I knew I could draw fairly accurately.

I started by drawing the face with a pencil. Then, as the class watched my every move, I squeezed out the paints and started mixing and dabbing on color. How do you mix a flesh tone? It wasn't pink exactly. I tried mixing burnt sienna with white: white to make it lighter and black to make it darker. The principal was taking on a ghoulish pallor.

I had a lot of trouble with his eyes. Everything I did made him look more and more like a turkey vulture, glaring back at me in a hungry sort of way, like he wanted to pick the flesh off the bones of my carcass.

After a couple of weeks of effort, I finished. I was surprised when Mr. Kinear declared the final painting a success. Newspaper reporters came and took photos. It was decided to hang the finished portrait in the cafeteria, high up on the wall, where the principal could cast his gaze down over everyone eating their lunches. I was proud, but also embarrassed when I stood there in front of everybody for the unveiling. I was a hero. The girls liked me, and it was all because of my art.

The next day, my pride came crashing to the ground when I came into the cafeteria, and saw that my portrait had been the target of a food fusillade. Big hunks of bologna stuck with mayonnaise to his cheek. Strings of spaghetti festooned his forehead.

I never really knew if they messed up the portrait because it was a poor painting, or because he was a poor principal, or just to pay me back for being the head student. Probably a little of all three. It was my first taste of public opinion, and I learned a very important lesson: The nail that sticks up above the rest will get hammered down first.

Anders Zorn, Self Portrait

Biographer Karl Asplund said in 1921: "With Zorn it was not a question of the jargon of the studio, with its talk of 'the emancipation of art.' In the depth of his heart he would rather conquer the subject, retain it, explain it, and communicate to others in his own way the pleasure his eyes had experienced."

Anders Zorn, Self Portrait

Sitting around a breakfast table with other artists is a golden opportunity to practice quick portrait sketches. Here's Ken Laager, drawn with water soluble colored pencils and some watercolor.

Marc Holmes, a leader in the Urban Sketchers movement from Montreal, also joined us on our trip last week to Massachusetts. I sketched him using black and red-brown watercolor pencils with a little watercolor in the background.

Here's my expedition kit for water media, with casein and gouache in the bags, two watercolor pan sets, a box of pencils, my homemade pochade rig in the upper left, and assorted tripods and camera gear, which I used in the Higgins Armory Museum video.

People love interacting with machines, even when they know it's all a game. Gutmann has brought the device all over the world, and has produced over 700 portraits with it.
Direct link to Vimeo. Via BoingBoing

Since I usually paint people who aren't holding still, it's a luxury to work from a posed model for a change. Instead of portraying the model exactly as she appeared in the art studio, I imagined her standing in a forest, turning to listen to a far-off sound.

The study is painted in watercolor with a bit of gouache, and it's very small: 5 x 8 inches.

Danielle from Anthony Cerniello on Vimeo.
You may have seen those "photo-a-day" time lapse videos showing the aging process. This one is a little different, showing a person aging very gradually, almost imperceptibly. (Direct link to video)

According to Colossal's Chris Jobson, videographer Anthony Cerniello traveled to his friend Danielle’s family reunion...
"....and with still photographer Keith Sirchio shot portraits of her youngest cousins through to her oldest relatives with a Hasselblad medium format camera. Then began the process of scanning each photo with a drum scanner at the U.N. in New York, at which point he carefully edited the photos to select the family members that had the most similar bone structure. Next he brought on animators Nathan Meier and Edmund Earle who worked in After Effects and 3D Studio Max to morph and animate the still photos to make them lifelike as possible. Finally, Nuke (a kind of 3D visual effects software) artist George Cuddy was brought on to smooth out some small details like the eyes and hair."

Cerniello says: "I attempted to create a person in order to emulate the aging process. The idea was that something is happening but you can't see it but you can feel it, like aging itself."
Thanks, Greg Shea

 My perspective was pretty close up, since my seat was right beside him. My sketchbook, watercolor paints, water cup, rag, and casein paints are all in my lap. That's my son Dan playing accordion on the far left.

I had one failed start, which you can see below in the center of Step 1. This is a lay-in of someone else that didn't work out because my subject moved to another pose. No problem--I just shifted gears, wetted out the lines, and dove into the new portrait, painting over the other one.


When Josh switched from flute to bouzouki, I started a second sketch, since the pose was so different.

I was using watercolor and water-soluble colored pencils for the warm colors, and casein for the white and black. Most of this painting is transparent, but casein gave me opacity where I needed it. Most of the painting was done with a very large sable watercolor brush. The whole study took about 45 minutes.
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Bio of Joshua Dukes
Fife and Drum Corps
The Yanks Band
Previously: Dan, Accordion

Here's a new "talking portrait," a video where I combine archival audio with sketchbook art. (Direct link to YouTube video). When my son was just starting out with the accordion, I interviewed him rather formally. Over the next few years, I sketched many of the heroes he talks about at the Irish concerts we attended.
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Listen to a free track of the Yanks new album here.

Alongside him was his good friend Robin Williamson, harpist and storyteller formerly of The Incredible String Band. They were touring together soon after the release of their 1994 Grammy-nominated live album "Wheel of Fortune"

Listen to a sample track from Wheel of Fortune on DailyMotion
"Wheel of Fortune"on Amazon

While we talked, I sketched his two yellow labs, who keep him company in his studio.
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Wikipedia on Everett Raymond Kinstler
Kinstler's website

In a letter, Zorn explains the idea behind the portrait: Barker "reclines comfortably on the soft divan, having just spent time gazing at his sweetheart's portrait, and now he casts a tender glance at his dog who stands over him and looks him wonderingly in the eye. The painting could be called Rivals. I like to turn my portraits into paintings."

Zorn later abandoned the anecdotal angle in his portraits.
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Book: Anders Zorn: A European Artist Seduces America
A large Zorn exhibition will come to the Legion of Honor in San Francisco in November, followed by the National Academy in New York.
Anders Zorn complete works online
Anders Zorn (1860-1920) on Wikipedia

A couple nights ago I was in Boston having supper with some artist friends. While we waited for the food to be served, I painted a portrait of Richard, who sat across from me under a down-facing spotlight.


The light hit his forehead and nose, leaving the rest in shadow. Within the shadow, the bottom half of his face was lit from the light bouncing off the table. This lighting gave him a film noir look. He has chiseled features, with well defined planes, which makes him fun to draw.


It was a fancy restaurant, and I had to be careful not to get my paint on the cloth napkins. To keep things simple, I limited the colors to black and white casein paints. Even though my transparent watercolors were open and available, I didn't use them.


Two steps in the process.
1) I quickly sketched the main shapes with a red-brown watercolor pencil. Then I quickly massed in the shadow as a single tone.
2) I used darker values for the up-facing planes and the side planes within the shadow.



This detail of the final sketch is about an inch square. You can see how I was trying to group the values within the shadows according to planes. So for example, the side planes of the mouth barrel, the jaw, and the forehead received a darker tone. A little of that red-brown pencil shows through the shadow.

Right before the meal arrived, I went to the rest room to wash out my brush and palette.

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Paints: Jack Richeson / Shiva casein colors 
Moleskine watercolor notebook

Winsor & Newton Series 7 round watercolor brush

Yesterday I tried out my new casein paints at my wife's singing group.


(Video link) I'm painting a friend of mine named Alan Neumann, who sings bass in the shapenote singing society at Bard College in New York.


I'm using an improvised easel to hold my sketchbook on a camera tripod. I start by painting over a not-so-hot sketch done in the Atlanta subway. I'm starting to get the hang of caseins--they're like oils on adrenaline. The whole portrait takes about two hours.
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More info:
Paints: Jack Richeson / Shiva casein colors 
Moleskine watercolor notebook
Richeson's informative FAQ about casein.
Sacred Harp Singing at Bard College
Sacred Harp Singing in New York State
The tune is White #288 ("Long Time Traveling")
Subscribe to the James Gurney YouTube channel to see videos before anyone else

In 1981 I drew a portrait of two guys on the Santa Monica pier, then asked them to describe themselves into a tape recorder.

(Photo by Susan Voss)
I sat off to the side with my sketchbook on my knee. I wanted to capture Quang Ho’s confident stance and the big curve of his new palette. “I bought it because it looks so cool, really,” he said.


While he painted, he discussed everything from color to cosmology, interspersing profound musings with self-effacing jokes.