A Website with Online Videos about Art & Artists

Today’s Image

Mustang Island View

Watercolor on Paper

Copyright 2009

I found a website with online videos I want to tell you about in today's art blog.

But first, Today’s Image is the watercolor I completed last week and mentioned in the last OrbisPlanis art blog on Choosing the Right Blues for Painting Skies and Water. I told you how I selected the blue for the big sky in this painting. I also want to mention when you paint daytime skies, you need to make the horizon a lighter color that gradually deepens as it reaches the zenith. This will make your skies look natural. My painting is a view from the balcony of a condominium on Mustang Island on the Texas ‘Riviera’ coastline.

About the online videos...believe it or not, I occasionally read my own blog, and the other day, I was reading the Scrolling News gadget at the top of the blog. One of the stories caught my eye. It was a blog from the Indianapolis (Indiana, USA) Museum of Art, and it was about several art museum partners that were recently added to a website called Art Babble.

For some reason, the name Art Babble made me want to click on the link to find out more. The blog said there were 10 new partners on Art Babble and “a whole new batch of art videos to check out.”

This also got my attention, so I followed the link to their website, artbabble.org. It’s an easy-to-use site with the tagline, Play Art Loud. I looked around for an ‘About’ tab or something that would give me an overview of what the site was about. I didn’t find one, but it was no problem to just explore.

What you’re drawn to first is a revolving marquee that previews the current videos available. I scrolled through the images and clicked on the one called Research in Progress: Van Gogh and His Contemporaries. You go to a 7+-minute video about a curator at an Amsterdam museum who is restoring a Van Gogh painting as well as some Impressionist paintings of the era. She talks about some of the x-ray and UV light techniques used to find clues about the history of the painting. Interesting.

The video was informative and made a good first impression of the site. The technical quality was good, and it was long enough to watch online without becoming boring. If this is the caliber of the other videos, then I am looking forward to watching more. I don’t know how often the list of videos is updated, but I guess that’s one reason to visit often.

You can sign-up to be member and open an Art Babble account. It's easy, especially if you already have a Google (or Yahoo!) account.

The tabs at the top are relatively self-explanatory. They are links to all their videos (I suppose), and you can browse by Series (which gives you a preview trailer); by Channel (which list topics you may be interested in, such as Abstract Art); or by the name of the Artist.

There’s a section with News that looks to be contributions from members. There’s a Featured User Profile where a selected member provides a quote and his or her favorite three videos.

It's on Facebook and Twitter, and there’s a column with Tweets that mention Art Babble.

There’s a What’s New section with links to a different set of videos from those in the revolving marquee. There’s also a Video Quotes section, which I think is quotes from members about a video they’ve viewed, but I could be wrong.

I like Art Babble! It's interesting and educational, and I plan to visit it often.

Cheers!