Three good art blogs

Wow, I haven’t posted here in a while! This blog started as a sort of studio journal as I was getting serious about learning the basics of paintings, but now that I’ve made some progress I think there are better uses to it than documenting errors and work-in-progress stuff. There is a lot of stuff I’m interested into (books, art theory, other artists’ works, etc.) and a lot of material I’ve gathered while learning painting which I think is worth reviewing. So that’s the blog’s new goal. I’ll be posting WIPs too from time to time but they won’t be the main focus any more, also because I already post them on my Tumblr when they are worth showing.

I've also changed the blog rating to NSFW so I can safely post and discuss erotic art, one of the topics I'm most interested in.

I’ll start simply by mentioning the three other art blogs which have taught me the most about art in the last few years. Hopefully they may be helpful to other self-taught artists and painting enthusiasts.

Gurney Journey
This one is very famous but it can’t be recommended enough. It’s the blog of James Gurney, one of the best realist illustrators in the world and author of excellent books about the basics of painting. The books draw heavily from his blog posts so a wealth of complementary information can be found browsing past posts. Plus it’s updated almost daily and there’s always something interesting being discussed. If I had to name a single must-read art blog it would be this one.

Stapleton Kearns
Blog of the eponymous landscape painter. No longer updated but well worth reading from the start if you’re interested in oil painting. It discusses in depth many painting materials and techniques which I couldn’t find discussed anywhere else on the web, in addition to giving clues for beginners, explaining basic principles of composition and commenting on great landscape painters of the past.

John K. Stuff
Blog of animator John Kricfalusi of “Ren & Stimpy” fame. This one needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The author is quirky to say the least and has some very strong opinions against modern animation which I don’t always find agreeable. Nevertheless he knows his stuff from a technical standpoint and makes a lot of interesting points when criticizing the design of 80s cartoons and CG characters. The blog revolves mostly around the topic of composition in comics and cartoons, often analyzing Disney, Warner Bros and Hanna & Barbera classics. It’s still updated although now it’s just a WIPs blog and promotion tool for the author’s new projects, the streak of educational posts ended somewhere in 2012. Still the first six years or so of archives are worth browsing. A few links to images and Youtube videos are broken but that doesn’t hurt the explanations too much.

There are several other blogs I followed and follow but I’ll leave them for future posts. I always appreciate good art blogs, so if you are reading this, please feel free to suggest me any that you find interesting! Thank you.