Japanese Body Painting Artist

This is the fourth in a series of posts about tips from RHS Gold Medal winners. The three previous posts are: Ten Top Tips for winning an RHS Gold Medal for Botanical Art (April 2013) More Top Tips for winning an RHS Gold Medal for Botanical Art (April 2014) 15 Top Tips for presenting work at an RHS Botanical Art (April 2014) You can also find a summary of the Tips and Techniques - including

Below you'll find the names of the people who won medals at the RHS London Botanical Art Show today.  You can find out more about them and their exhibits in my previous post about RHS Botanical Art 2016 - Selected Artists Well done to the RHS Organisers for having the list of medal winners available as a pdf file on their website by the time I got home! Best Botanical Painting by Julie

This year's Annual Exhibition of The Pastel Society - NOW @ The Pastel Society - opened to the public at the Mall Galleries on Tuesday. It continues until 3pm on Saturday 5th March.  The Society very kindly invited me to their pre-PV Lunch and I spent a very long time at the exhibition on Monday afternoon! Featuring works created in pastel, pencil, chalk and charcoal, the Pastel Society exhibits

Arts Council England has commissioned a new national study into how visual artists in England live and work. This is a link to the Artists’ Livelihoods survey which forms part of the study. What makes this study - and survey - serious and different is that it is being conducted within the context of a a broad coalition of partners from across the visual arts which have shaped and support

The exhibition of artwork by the 50 artists shortlisted for the Artist of the Year 2015 Prize sponsored by Artists and Illustrators Magazine opened yesterday at the Mall Galleries and is on display until the end of Saturday 27th February. The "Artist of the Year 2015" gets £1,000 in cash and gallery representation at Panter & Hall. You can see the rest of the prizes on offer on the competition

I'm busy finishing artwork and matting and framing drawings for hand-in submission to the annual exhibition of the Society of Botanical Artists tomorrow. I ended up doing something completely different to what I had planned. I've done two drawings of the sacred lotus (Nelumbo nucifera) neither of which are the conventional view of the lotus Nelumbo nucifera bud and bloom by Katherine

If you've ever fancied improving your drawing knowledge and skills at a leading art school in the UK, I recommend you take a look at the 2016 Short Courses offered out of term time by the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford University. The courses are not cheap and there's a limit of 16 places on each course however I expect some of them - particularly those taught by Sarah Simblet - will be booked

Some of you will have heard that Parliament was proposing to do away with printing laws on vellum. This raised all sorts of very understandable concerns amongst artists using vellum about whether the loss of the Parliamentary contract would cause business problems for the UK's oldest vellum supplier William Cowley - and consequently cause problems for the supply of vellum to artists in the UK

Last night I discovered that I'd missed an excellent BBC programme called Apples, Pears and Paint: How To Make a Still Life Painting which was broadcast last month. It provides a history of what has historically been the least popular genre of painting - and the depiction of fruit, flowers and domestic objects - from the still life painting in Egypt and Pompeii to Cezanne and Picasso via

Van Gogh's Bedrooms is a very unusual exhibition opens in the Regenstein Hall of The Art Institute of Chicago today. It closes 10th May 2016. While most of us won't be able to see it in person, there are quite a few resources online which allow us to appreciate some of the effort which has gone into this exhibition. At the end of this post I've also listed my very extensive list of posts on this

The artwork selected for the Columbia Threadneedle Prize exhibition at the Mall Galleries is different from previous years - and I like it a lot better. Threadneedle Prize Exhibition: A view of the Main Galleryprior to the Preview Compared to previous years, the changes I noticed are that the art - to my mind - is a lot more accessible. This is an exhibition which will be enjoyed by more

The Threadneedle Prize has a £10,000 Visitors' Choice Award which is voted for by people visiting the exhibition. Every time the Threadneedle exhibition is held I always do a post devoted to the pictures I would have chosen as my shortlist for "The Columbia Threadneedle Prize: Figurative Art Today" a.k.a. (at least by me) as 'the Threadneedle Prize".  In effect they contain the picture I'm

Is the type of art that people buy online the same as the sort of art that people like to create? This post is going to look at: the similarities and differences between the type of art that British and American people buy online how this compares to the type of art that people like to paint. It's important to realise at the outset that that neither the subjects that people search for or the

The winner of The Columbia Threadneedle Prize 2016 of £20,000 is Lewis Hazelwood-Horner. The competition is the leading open competition for figurative and representational art and the exhibitions are held annually at the Mall Galleries. The prizewinning work is called "Salt in Tea". Lewis has also won a solo exhibition for a wider body of his work at Mall Galleries later this year.  Lewis has

I'm very disappointed in North Light Books.  I used to think they were a great publishing firm for artists. I always used to look out for their new publications and was delighted when I found out my book would be published by them. The reason I'm disappointed is that North Light Books have put out a Call for Entries for urban sketchers to contribute pen and ink art for a COLOURING BOOK! the

Thirty five botanical artists have been selected by the RHS Picture Committee to exhibit at the dedicated RHS Botanical Art Show 2016 in the Lindley Hall in the City of Westminster on 26-27 February 2016. This is the largest number of botanical artists in one RHS Botanical Art show during the time I've been visiting. Below you can find A list of the artists exhibiting in 2016 organised by the