It is crucial never to guess how a hand should look like. Also the finest artists look at the hand they are not using before them as a example when they are drafting hands. Likewise you should find a pocket-sized mirror and use it to look at your hand from different perspectives or to transform your left hand into a right hand.

A recurring novice’s fault is to make the hands overly small. You should examine the proportions exactly when you sketch a hand. As a guideline, position your hand in front of your head. Observe how it goes all the way from the chin to your hairline. Think of this especially when sketching hands on or near people’s heads in your drawings.

Whilst starting to study how to draw hands it is ideal to depict a unstrained hand posture first. Notice how the digits are not flat when the hand is unstrained. They all of the time bend a little, the little finger much more than the index finger.

First analyze the proportions of your digits. Look at your digits with the palm turned away. You will discover that the digits are approximately one-half the length of the complete hand. Every finger is divided into three sections of different lengths. The upper section (with the nail) is around two thirds of the middle part, and the center part is around two thirds of the lower part (which gives way to the knuckles).

Now for a little bit magic! Turn your hand all over so you see it from the palm side. The proportions of the digits have changed now obviously! The digits now look much shorter. If you measure them you will discover they are much less than one-half the length of the hand. The reason: the skin between the digits appears as part of the palm.

In addition to this observe that all three elements of the digits now are all of nearly equal length. When sketching hands it’s very important to remember this so you do not fall into the trap of sketching identical digits no matter which way you look at them.

The thumb is a entirely different thing, so do not draw it as some other finger. It only has two joints, not three, goes in a different direction and has a completely different form so view it with care. You must also notice how it bends lightly when fully extended.

Drawing other hand positions

The succeeding primary hand poses you should try to sketch is the fist. Notice that the knuckles do not end up in a straight line and that the fore finger and often the middle finger stick out to a higher degree the other digits.

Once you’ve mastered drafting relaxed hands and clenched fists, start sketching hands that point someplace or grab something. Finally you can also test drafting hands that gesture.

Practice these poses over and over employing your own hand as a example. In just a couple of weeks you’ll note a great improvement in your abilities and can start adding additional hand poses to your repertory.

Want to make more progress and learn how to draw? Visit our site, to get more stuff and even a free ebook to learn drawing

One of the leaders in the world in the field of printing is Canada, especially the state of Toronto. In spite of such a heavy and diverse customer base, it is amazing how Toronto can handle the task with such efficiency and aplomb. The prominent Toronto firm Rous and Mann is world renowned for the services it provides and the consumer base it has.

Be it photocopying, digital printing, scanning, the Toronto printing companies are a force to be reckoned with and clearly, amongst the best in the world at what they do. Be it bulk orders or home deliveries of business cards or photocopied papers, the companies keep a tab on how to the customer’s life easy and they do a very good job of it clearly. Such is the impact of printing that it’s used in everything we see nowadays. Print media, newspapers, television, Photostats, Xerox copies or anything related to paper media.

The big hoarding you see all over Toronto are the ingenious work of the Toronto printing companies which surely do a stupendous job of innovating themselves and presenting themselves afresh in front of the huge customer base that they serve. Basically, a printer is a company that provides commercial printing services, often also offering typesetting and book-binding services. The terminology can also pass on to people who work on printing presses, or who owns printing companies. Colored prints, black and white prints, sizes of all sorts in the paper segments make these companies at Toronto almost unreal and diverse as they come. Printing presses also come under this segment in Toronto.

A printing press is an automatic tool for applying heaviness to an inked surface resting upon a means (for example paper or fabric), thus transferring a picture. Nowadays, the Toronto printing companies have started with electronic publishing. Electronic publishing comprises of the digital publication of several e-books and electronic articles, and the growth of digital libraries as well as catalogues. Electronic publishing has turn out to be ordinary in technical publishing where it has been disagreed that peer-reviewed paper and scientific journals are in the procedure of being substituted by electronic publishing. At the speed the Toronto companies are going, Toronto printing company is surely going to have wide spread feet in the print field.

Rafi Michael is an owner of Toronto Printing, At Toronto Printing, Toronto printing company offer a variety of postcards, brochures, banners, Digital printing Toronto, flyers and much more.

If Gallup Media received a request to perform a poll in order to find out what do people know about Vincent van Gogh, what results would they get back? I guess, something like “he was Dutch, he drew flowers, he cut his ear off.” What the artist had had lost had eventually given him a worldwide fame, or rather notoriety. But how did it happen?

After long period of constant invitations Gauguin finally arrived to Arles in October of 1888. The two worked together throughout the end of October, the whole November and the part of December. Gauguin painted “The Painter of Sunflowers: The Portrait of Van Gogh”, Van Gogh painted “Van Gogh’s chair” and “Gauguin’s chair”, they exercised collective painting and discussed art. Or more correctly, the argued and fought fiercely about art – Christmas and New Year were coming and bringing the end of two troubled geniuses’ relationship along with them. The crisis peaked on 23rd of December, 1888.

By that time Vincent`s mental health – due to his lifestyle – had already been deteriorating: he was subject to frequent bouts of depression and melancholy caused by some metabolic disease. At that night he suffered from one of these strengthened by fear that Gauguin was going to leave him for good. According to official version, at that night Vincent either experienced a tremendous mental breakdown or was heavily poisoned by evaporations from leaden paints. The information of the events followed was gathered from one exclusive source – Gauguin.

According to one version, related by the first modern primitivist in his memoirs “Before and After” written in Tahiti at the end of the century, he was making his way through place Victor-Hugo when he heard familiar quick and nervous steps behind him. He turned around and saw Vincent running on him with a razor blade in his hand. He looked at van Gogh, and the latter suddenly turned and ran away, because Gauguin’s look “must have been very powerful”.

After that van Gogh got back to the Yellow house and cut off his whole left ear (according to one part of testimonies), or the lower part of his left earlobe (according to another part of testimonies). Having washed his ear, wrapped the severed tissue into a newspaper and covered his head with tall beret (or some other headgear) he went to the brothel (as was stated the local newspaper “Le Forum Republican”), requested a prostitute named Rachel and passed her his parcel with words “Keep this object carefully” (these words are reproduced in every account concerning the episode), went back to the Yellow house and went to a blood-drenched bed.

Later van Gogh was put in the hospital, was discharged in January but due to his constant delusions and hallucinations was under the permanent supervision of Dr. Rey of the Arles hospital. In June of 1889 he committed himself to the psychiatric asylum situated in the town of Saint-Remy-de-Provence, 32 km from Arles. Paul Gauguin went to Paris and had never seen van Gogh in his life – despite Vincent’s request to visit him in the hospital.

Paul Gauguin’s account doesn’t seem very reliable. Actually there were at least two of them, first being told to painter Emile Bernard immediately after return from Paris, the one that reveals some details of the decline of their relationship, dreadful description of the aftermath of van Gogh’s self-harm and slightly different description of the central episode of the night. Van Gogh ran after Gauguin (he had walked out of the house) and told him: “You’re silent, but I shall be so too”. Gauguin went to the hotel and Vincent returned to the Yellow house.

Vincent van gogh ear
Seofox – Surfing the WWWorld!

At the end of 2009 in Amsterdam, a famous correspondence between the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh and his brother Theo was published for the first time. These six books contain hundreds of letters along with illustrations to them. Authors of this resource have created a specialized dictionary of the “Van Gogh time” explaining names of geographical places and famous people of the time mentioned in the letters, art terms and Dutch words used in the correspondence.

The Van Gogh brothers started their correspondence after the younger Theo had visited Vincent in the Hague. At the time Vincent was 19 and Theodorus was 15. The brothers kept writing letters to each other for 18 years (1872 – 1890), 697 of which have survived to our days. Of these, only 36 letters were written by Theo, who treated his brother’s letters with more respect: thanks to that now we can read 661 letter of the genius artist.

First letters were short and plain. For instance, in one of them Vincent asked his brother to give up smoking pipe and to study works of great artists and writers. But by and by the elder brother started sending Theo his pencil sketches from the peasants’ life and in general letters gradually became more thorough. Vincent having found a grateful listener in his brother related to him his views on life and art. In these letters – written both in Dutch and French – the artist mentioned more than 300 paintings he was working on at the moment. Moreover, many specialists believe that this correspondence is not merely of a literary interest – a large number of his letters the painter accompanied with sketches to the paintings he was working at the moment.

Throughout his whole life Theodorus was financially helping his elder brother allowing him to concentrate solely on his art. Theo being aware of Vincent’s sensitivity towards this tried different tricks. At first Theo had been assuring his brother that it was their father who had been sending him money. But eventually the artist found out who was in fact helping him. All his life he was uneasy because of the fact that he depended on his younger brother. He wasn’t either much consoled by the excuse that that was Theo’s way of contributing to the creation of his paintings and that they would divide money from paintings’ sale in future. Notwithstanding the fact that Theo was an art dealer he didn’t manage to sell any of his brother’s works.

In 1884 the brothers made a deal. In exchange for Vincent’s paintings, Theo committed to provide his brother with 200 francs a month along with brushes and canvases of the highest quality. The younger brother was providing the artist with clothes and was paying for his medical treatment. According to one version Vincent committed suicide because of guilt that he was feeling before Theo who had to support not only Vincent, but also his wife and child and an old mother. On June 27, 1890 Vincent van Gogh shot himself. He had positively refused medical treatment and died two days later in the hands of his beloved brother. Vincent’s last – unfinished – letter to Theo was found in his pocket after his suicide.

Church in Auvers-sur-Oise where Vincent had shot himself didn’t let bury him in its cemetery. But the burial was allowed in the village of Mery not far from town and on July 30, 1890 Vincent van Gogh was buried. Theo was desperate after his brother’s death and outlived him only by 6 months. He was originally buried in Utrecht, but in 1914 Theo’s widow – Jonanna Bonger-van Gogh, ardent admirer of van Gogh’s work – re-buried him in the cemetery of Auvers, near Vincent. Their graves are still there.

http://www.vangoghpaints.net

The business of selling art on line has become very competitive. Over the last few years literally hundreds of websites have been developed as paid (or free) on line art galleries. Many people now want some affordable art for their home so the accessibility of art has become a evident through these on line art galleries.

So as an artist, how are you going to get any visibility amongst the maelstrom of art available? It is an ever increasing challenge to get your art to appear in front of a user. below are some tips to help you with getting your art sold:

Step 1 – choose an art gallery that ranks in Google for your type of art, so for example if you sell “sea scape oil paintings”, do a search in Google for both “sea scape oil paintings” and also “”sea scape oil paintings galleries” – you then really only want to focus your effort and possible money if they charge on the sites that appear in the first ten organic results. It is worth also looking at the paid listings although these sites will almost certainly charge a fee. It is not necessary to pay a fee, there should be at least one free gallery on page one in Google that will provide you with decent sales rates – completely free!

Step 2 – Once you have decided on which on line galleries to appear in, make sure you write a title for each piece of work that will get found. If you have done a piece on a rough sea, think about what a potential buyer will search for – the likely hood is there search term will include the style of art the want eg: “sea scenes” but they will probably be specific and search for “oil paintings, rough seas scene” – so make this your title! do not be tempted to use a name that bears no meaning to the art

Step 3 - Make the description work! it has to be keyword rich about the work, write about the medium, the paint base, the painting itself. the colors used and the framing (or lack of it) – all of this will mean your description is keyword rich and will get more chance of being found. Also – add in some notes about shipping and how you prefer to ship and take payment, the simpler you make it for someone to buy the better. Offer NO obstacles. PayPal is an easy way to take payment

Step 4 – Make the price reasonable. See what other works are going for that feature on the same terms as your work and aim to be in the middle

Step 5 – Ensure you tag the work, if the site allows tags (related search terms) apply the same logic as with the title

Step 6 - Provide an easy way to communicate with a buyer.

That’s it! These tips will help you sell more art. I wish you best of luck.

OilPaintingsOnline.com is free for any artists to promote any types of art work, be it a painting or a sculpture, I do not mind. It is a simple site with many tools and features to help both buyers and sellers interact – in a non committal and very open way.

Nigel R Frith
Founder
http://www.oilpaintingsonline.com