Earlier this week I saw on HGTV a woman who put a poster on a canvas and it looked great. I remember how she did it, but I want to know if there are any additional ways to do it. So please give me any suggestion you have on the process and any tips to make it look as nice as possible.

the link below might be what you saw;

this can easily be done by painting a boarder on the canvas tacking the poster down with glue and then painting a polycoat over the top to seal it.

if you paint the polycoat with a brush in a criss cross manner it also leaves brush strokes that make the poster appear as if it were actually a painting.

hint: test your poster with the poly coat first – some poster inks will bleed away if they get wet.

Portraits can carry on conversations and stuff and that’s cool. But it throws me that some portraits are of actual people. What are the rules of the portraits?

1) How do portraits come to possess personalities and consciences of their own? How do portraits come to be different from every day paintings? (I know pics in the Daily Prophet or Quibbler can move around but that’s very different of course)

2) If someone dies and a portrait of them is made, does the portrait entity live on with all of the memories of its living self? Is it practically the same person or just a cheap imitation?

3) How does all this work if a moving portrait is made of a still living person?

I think of the moving portraits to be sort of like Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs in the Marauder’s Map…it just reacts like they would.

We run a free resource directory for artists and want to invite artists and galleries to add their listings. The service is totally free of costs, no mailing lists, nothing nasty. It’s at http://www.artistsinoils.com

Problem is no budget. How best to invite artists and art galleries, art museums, art teachers to take advantage of this service ?

You might find some helpful information here http://www.art-gallery.us

I have been using shutterfly to order prints online. I have picked them for convenience because I can pick them up in about an hour at my local Target without paying shipping. This is especially nice when I just want one or two photos. The quality seems pretty good to me.

What service do you use and why?

I use printrunner. Mainly because I’ve been using them for a while now and I’ve come to love and trust them. Their quality is pretty good and service is kinda cool too. But its hard breaking a routine especially since I have developed a connection with printrunner myself. Plus I travel a lot and since its around nationwide I can always get it delivered to me anywhere. I mean that’s always a plus for me.

My grandmother did several oil paintings before she died. They are lovely, but only valuable to our family.

The painting is sticky and drippy with smoke residue due to heavy smoking around it. My local art gallery wants almost $200 to clean it!

Is there a home-remedy that I could attempt?

Thanks for any advice you can offer!

I can’t make any guarantees about the safety of these methods for your particular paintings. But I can tell you what I do to clean my own paintings, and how we clean the priceless paintings at the gallery I work at.

1. safest, but won’t work on sticky areas: use a very soft brush to remove dust and soot particles (super soft paintbrush, baby toothbrush, shaving brush, that kind of thing). You can buy a micro attachment kit for your vacuum that has small brushes (under an inch in diameter) for deeper cleaning (don’t scrub the surface with the bristles, though–just light, circular passes). If that doesn’t work, you can use a chemical sponge (dry rubber sponge: http://www.spongeco.com/) in short strokes across the surface, but only if the surface isn’t damaged or flaky. It picks up every last bit of dirt and soot, but likely won’t work on the really sticky parts.

2. use soft, clean cloths and water with a few drops of dish detergent. If you can remove the frame to test this on the side or edge of the painting first, do so. Watch the surface of the painting and check the cloths to see what’s coming off, and obviously if the paint colours are lifting off, stop cleaning. Try just damp cloths at first, dab the painting, no scrubbing. If she painted on canvas, be careful not to stretch the canvas by pressing too hard. If damp cloths aren’t working, use a bit more water, just beware that water can seep under varnish, if there is any, and that if the paint is thin, and the canvas or board gets wet, it can shrink or warp and cause cracks in the paint. I’ve cleaned my own paintings this way, but the conservator would wring my neck if I ever tried it at the gallery. I’ve also used rubbing alcohol on a cotton ball for really bad areas…scary, but it works. Use a tiny amount of alcohol.

If these methods don’t work, it might be worth it to ask around at the gallery to see if there is a conservator’s apprentice or helper working there. Ask around unofficially by checking with the security guards, reception staff, gallery shop clerks, etc. He/she might be willing to look at your painting to recommend a solvent or clean it for a lower price (under the table on his/her own time). You could also check antique and framing shops to see if they have lower prices for cleaning services.

It’s like a work of a child? What makes a painting really expensive? I know that the paintings of nature and are really pretty should be expensive. But there are paintings that are really ugly and they look like they were painted by a child but why are they so expensive and valuable?

I’m going to hope you’re trolling here, but I’ll take the risk that you aren’t.

First off, I’ll concede that the art market sometimes makes no sense, and the price of work often does not reflect its true value. But I’ll instead focus on why unpretty paintings not of nature are critically well regarded, rather than highly priced.

Beauty is a difficult notion to pin down, and a very large number of people in the art world aren’t very interested in it to begin with, and among those who are its not definite that their tastes will reflect your own.

Some people see the world as ugly, some people have something ugly inside them to express, some people want to mock traditional notions of beauty. Some people who paint like children do so because they become so frustrated with the drudgery of overly academic teaching that they want to move as far away from it as possible. Some people want to explore things they find fascinating but that are not traditionally beautiful.

As to why this is well regarded: If people find that this ‘unpretty’ piece of work reflects something they feel or think, or even just that it expresses well an interesting thought or feeling, or is looking at something in a new, clever or original way they are likely to respond well to it. If this happens with enough people, including influential critics and collectors and so on, then the work will become valuable.

This is the best I can do. I suspect I find a lot of the paintings you don’t like quite beautiful, or maybe if they aren’t beautiful I empathise with something angry or inquisitive or profound they have to say, so I might not be as much help as I’d like to be.

Hope this helpz.

I know masking fluid is used in water color and acrylic painting. I was just needing to know if it or what could be used in oil paintings? Any help with this will be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
what do you mean by using "paint" to mask on an oil painting?

Contact paper – shelf paper- Frisket paper and painters tape.

Do not use masking fluid as it may not come out of the texture of the canvas.

You might be a redneck artist if messy, rib-eating fingers inspires you to fingerpaint.
As seen on CMT “Country Fried Home Videos”

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In this artistsnetwork.tv video you will learn how to use what is perhaps your most powerful tool for emphasizing your focal point—the unifying wash. Artist Laurie Humble uses exercises and finished painting examples to show you how to use small- and large-scale washes in your work—follow along as Laurie paints overlapping ribbons and then a group of cherries to practice the small scale washes, then background foliage in a garden setting to practice the larger-scale washes that can be used to push back the picture plane. Laurie then paints a street scene to demonstrate how these washes work together to add a depth to your paintings that will immediately make them more realistic and lifelike.

Duration : 0:8:40

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http://artstudiosecrets.com, http://lisagloria.com Alla prima oil painting demonstration of purple and white pansies in a black glass bowl by Lisa Gloria.

Duration : 0:9:59

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