Michael Burns Art

Alan Larkin Wins Best of Show at Hoosier Salon The 91st annual Hoosier Salon Exhibition at the Indiana History Center in Indianapolis opened on July 30th, 2015 with a wide variety of subject matter and media. As always, the Hoosier Salon show is well organized and anyone interested in quality art should try to attend the show each year. This year's judges were Qiang Huang and Randall Sexton, who had the difficult task of determining which artist would be juried into this year's show.   Alan Larkin won Best of Show for his  46" x 44" oil painting titled "Alarms and Diversions" receiving $3500 in prize money.  Jerry Smith won Best Landscape for his 38" x 38" oil painting titled "Autumn Canopy" taking home $1000 in prize money. Outstanding Scene went to the Bloomfield Indiana artist Wyatt LeGrand for his 30" x 42" oil painting titled "Accumulate" receiving $500. The $1,000 prize for Best Figural Composition went to Law

Expanding Your Artistic Horizons Series Painting Session 2 Date: 07/15/2017 Subject: Wren on A Dogwood Branch Medium: Gouache on Illustration Board Colors Used In This Session:  Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna, Sepia, Zinc White, Indian Yellow, Grenadine Links to painting sessions:  Session 1 Wren on Dogwood in Gouache Session 2 In the previous post on this subject I mentioned, I had never painted in Gouache, and the only watercolor painting I have ever done was a few watercolor sketches. I did do some quick small sketches with Gouache before starting this session. I wanted to see how the paint flowed on the illustration board and how easy the paint reactivated with water. I did some research online to see how other artists painted with gouache and the techniques they use.  There is an excellent article about the use of Gouache titled   "Painting With Gouache"    from the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators website.  With all mediums, there seem to be multiple tec

Expanding Your Artistic Horizons Series Painting Session 1 Date: 07/03/2017 Subject: Wren on Dogwood Branch Medium: Gouache on Illustration Board Several things have inspired me to paint in Gouache.  One is James Gurney  who is the creator of the Dinotopia Series of Books. I found his blog when I was searching the internet about watercolor sketching. You can spend hours reading through his blog and watching him work magic with Gouache in his sketchbook. James posts videos of his sketching in Gouache, Watercolor, and Casein. The second inspiration to paint in Gouache came when I visited the Cici and Hyatt Brown Museum of Florida Art  in Daytona Beach, FL. Within that museum, there were paintings by artist and illustrator Walter Weber .  Walter Weber was born in 1906 and attended the University of Chicago and the Art Institute if Chicago. He was a mammalogist and is well known for his role as the  Chief Nature Artist for National Geographic Society. I have been to a lot of Museums

Expanding Your Artistic Horizons Series Painting Session 6 and Final Date: 07/03/2017 Subject: Yellowwood Lake, Brown County Indiana Medium: Oil on Paper Link to painting sessions:  Session 1.  ,  Session 2.    Session 3 .  Session 4 ,  Session 5 This was the final painting session for the Yellowwood Lake painting on paper. During this session, I painted the background trees and water lighter to make them recede further into the background. I also added highlights to the foreground tree and weeds. My medium of choice is oil, but as part of  Expand My Artistic Horizons , I wanted to try something different. So choose to use paper as the support. In Session 1 Introduction, I mentioned I had started this painting several years ago, thinking I could use paper for field studies. But quickly lost interest in using paper due to issues I had when trying to paint on paper. Now that I finished the painting and experienced the differences between paper and canvas, I may need to try paper