Online Art Community News

Joaquin Sorolla Exhibition at the National Gallery, London

Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light If you live in the UK or are planning to visit in the next few months, this exhibition of Sorolla at the National Gallery of London should be top of your list. This exhibition titled...

Tips for Advanced Painters on the Online Campus

The Virtual Art Academy has been designed to help both beginner and more experienced painters. If you are a more experienced painter, or a professional artist, we have a system in which you can create your own custom...

New Guide

I have just done complete re-write of an article I wrote about ten years ago comparing pochade boxes. It includes all the latest plein air equipment, including both pochade boxes and other lightweight easels and palette...

Daily Tips for Painters

5 Reasons Why You Need to Varnish Your Oil Painting – How To Varnish An Oil Painting

This article talks about how to varnish and oil painting and why you should do it. Should I varnish my oil painting? If you want to protect your paintings it is a good idea to varnish them. Varnish protects the painting...

How to keep your oil paints from drying out

Want some valuable tips on how to save money on paint? and how to cut down on all that weight you have to carry when painting plein air? Then read this article … When I go out plein air painting, I don’t...

A Guide to Painting Competitions

This is a guide to the best competitions to give you a kick start in your painting career. Why Enter A Painting Competition? One of the best ways of getting you, and your work, noticed is to enter a painting competition...

Student Showcase

Congratulations Susan!

I want to share that I sold one of my plein air paintings in the Oregon Lavender Festival Paint out show. This felt so affirming of all the hard work of studying others work, color harmony, composition, itness of...

Exhibition Selected Paintings, by Oksana Melenevska

Congratulations to Okasana for having four paintings accepted into 67th Open Annual Exhibition of Hertford Art Society, UK. She also sold one a watercolor “Old Port, Liverpool”, so we can say she is now a...

Award Winning Paintings, by Jane Haskins

It is always nice to see so many VAA students winning prizes for their work and getting recognition. Congratulations to Jane this month for not only one, but two prizes! Both are very nice pieces of work. The first has...

Margate Harbour Arm by Rachel Jane Boxall

I painted this from a photo as I did not have the weather or inclination to stand outside. I used most of the aspects of the workshop F section: the warm/cool palette (which is my favorite).base linesI simplified the...

Denise Maxwell – “Winter Scene, Coquitlam River”

A lovely snow scene by Denise. I love the juicy brushwork, and the bold and harmonious colors used. Great composition too! A really nice piece of work.

Barry

Winter Light, by Denise Maxwell

Another lovely snow scene from Denise. The color of these snow scenes is amazing!

Panicale, by Georgie Rey

In Tuscany with Barry

Georgina really captured the lively spirit of the Tuscan Lunigiana hills here. I love the bold design and breakdown of spaces in the painting.

Barry

Woodland Scene, by Susan Hood

This is a delightful woodland scene by Susan Hood. It is full of light and air – you can just feel the atmosphere in this painting.

Barry

Alumni Showcase

Sun Rises over St Marks in Venice

I got up before dawn to carry my pochade box setup to St Mark’s Square in Venice and then waited for the first light of the day. When the sun rose it hit the spires of St Marks turning it into a beautiful display...

Painting of Venice – Via Garibaldi, Castello

Cat. No. 923 Via Garibaldi Venice – 9in x 12in – Oil on Linen Several years ago I lived in Venice. I will always have fond memories of the street where I painted this sketch. It is one of the few remaining...

Washing Day, Pontremoli, Tuscany

It was nearly 40 degrees C so I found a nice shady place to paint. These washing lines in a local village caught my eye. I used a fair amount of impasto paint on this small piece. Here are a couple of detailed images. I...

Geraniums – a still life painting

Cat. No. 1021 Geraniums

A small painting I did last year in my friend’s studio in China.

Plein Air Painting in Italy: San Terenzo Carnevale

This small sketch was done during the last half hour of sunset at San Terenzo, in the Gulf of Poets, Liguria, Italy. This is when the colors in Italy are the most beautiful. This shows my process for quickly capturing...

Street Scene – Songzhuang China

Cat. No. 1245 Songzhuang Street – 50cm x 40cm – Oil on Linen I did this street scene painting in Songzhuang this week. Songzhuang is Beijing’s largest art district. Almost every building in this small...

Notre Dame

Cat. No. 1248 Notre Dame Fire “Tribute to Compassion” – Oil on Linen – 60cm x 60cm – 2019 I painted this today because I have a very personal connection to Paris. It was the French painters...

Award Winning Painting: Primitive Pots, by Sue Downie

The Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours Award: Sue Downie from Virtual Art Academy Sue has been studying with the Virtual Art Academy now for five years. This painting recently won the award given by the Royal...

A Tibetan Festival In Qinghai

I have been working on this painting for a while. It is quite large, 100cm x 100cm, and I wanted to capture the same color feeling and looseness as the small plein air sketch I did on site. This turned out not to be so...

Roses In Tuscany

Cat. No. 1231 Pianello Roses, Lunigiana，Italy – 16in x 12in – Oil on Board – 2018 The setting sun intensified the glowing red roses outside my studio in northern Italy. The background of the forests...

An Italian Garden

This park is on the Ligurian coast just south of Genoa, Italy. It has lovely gardens overlooking the Mediterranean sea, and with the hills and beautiful villas of Genoa rising behind it. The light late in the evening...

Painting in an ancient Chinese village

Cat. No. 1216 Xinchang Flags, Old Town Shanghai – 40cm x 30cm – Oil on Linen – 2018 Here are some paintings I did recently in Xinchang, an ancient Chinese village on the outskirts of Shanghai. I was...

Visual Music & Poetry™ – Understanding Museum and Contemporary Works

Madonna with Child and Two Angels, by Fra Filippo Lippi

Visual Poetry In this painting Lippi took a traditional holy image and gave it a strong sense of humanity, both through the emotion in the expression of affection between the family members, and in the choice of clothes...

Giovanni Boldini: The Suprising Things You Can Learn From His Pencil Sketches

What can you learn from the sketchbook of Giovanni Boldini. A surprising amount really …. Giovanni Boldini brief biography Giovanni Boldini (31 December 1842 – 11 July 1931) was an Italian genre and...

Sunny Day by Daniil Volkov

There are some great critiques of this beautiful work of Daniil Volkov by the Virtual Art Academy students Michal, Susan, and Rocio this month. Michal said it all when he said: “Study of this painting is amazing...

Brushwork That Captures a Time & Place

Creating Poetry Armin C. Hansen (1886-1957), one of the founders of the Carmel Art Association in Carmel, California, was renowned for his ability to use brushwork to capture the vitality of life by extracting the...

Evening Calm by Vladimir Karnachev

The interesting thing about this painting is the clever way Karnachev created a very simple four-value notan structure, then added detail and interest to that design using color spots of a different temperature, but...

Birch Grove, Algonquin Park, Tom Thomson

Birch Grove Algonquin Park, painting by Tom Thomson

This painting by Tom Thomson shows the principle of unequal space division. If you look at the spacing of the trees, they are all different distances apart. This variety adds more interest to the painting. You can also...