Because you can't always get a model when you need one.

Or maybe because you're bothered by all that pesky skin covering your model.

Posmania: "Posemaniacs is a site offering 3D, rotatable figures in a variety of poses for drawing. It has a program that chooses random poses and gives you a time limit to draw them and a perspective editor that makes guidelines for one-point perspective.

Though most of the site is in Japanese, the Google translation is pretty understandable.

from Metafilter.

Also recommended are Practical Anatomy and if you perfer your anatomy more abstracted here's a great collection of sculptures.

I love street art.

Finding an unexpected piece is so exciting and can evoke a small or provoke a thought.
I would so do it if I was more comfortable with the risks. I am enamored of artists who put their art out for people to find. Some do it in big ways like you can see at http://www.streetartview.com which uses googlemaps to find streetart.
Others do it more subtle like Kim at http://queen-of-arts.blogspot.com/ who leaves little stones with messages for people to find.
It's all good.
Trying to figure out how I will do this.

What should you paint today?

I say to just ignore this and paint what speaks to your heart. But just in case you wanted to know....

Selling Paintings: Which Subjects Sell Best?: "All painters know that some subjects sell better than others. Whether these are subjects you want to paint and whether you should be painting specifically for the market are two thorny questions. Only you can decide whether you want (or need) to paint with a view to selling as much as possible, or whether you can focus on painting subjects you choose. Of course, if your favourite subject happens to be the same as the market's, you're sitting pretty.


According to a Art Business Today survey in 2003*, these were the Top 10 best-selling
subjects for paintings in the UK:


1. Traditional landscapes.
2. Local views.
3. Modern or semi-abstract landscapes.
4. Abstracts.
5. Dogs.
6. Figure studies (excluding nudes).
7. Seascapes, harbour, and beach scenes.
8. Wildlife.
9. Impressionistic landscapes.
10. Nudes.

"

Wikipedia Color Resources

From the always great linesandcolors.com


There are lots of color resources on the web, for artists, designers and others, but an often overlooked one is Wikipedia, the venerable user-edited online encyclopedia.
Whatever you may say about the reliability of the information on Wikipedia (or from Britannica, or any other single resource, for that matter), I rarely consider a source like Wikipedia a place to end a search, but, like Google, a place to begin one.
Though not specifically an artist’s resource, Wikipedia’s color related articles are numerous and varied.
You might find it interesting to start with their “List of Colors“. The list includes a lot of non-artist colors, like “British Racing Green” and “Psychedelic Purple”, but the familiar artist pigments are there too. Links for those lead to articles with information about the pigment, including source materials, history, chemical composition, lightfastness, typical use, hazardous qualities, color system numbers and sometimes more.
Some are grouped; Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Orange and Cadmium Red all lead to a single entry for “Cadmium pigments“, but some have more extensive and interesting listings, like the history behind Ultramarine.
There are articles about Color Theory, Color Vision, the Color Wheel, Complimentary Color, Primary Color, Hue, Saturation and many other related topics.
Though hardly an exhaustive resource on color for artists, it does seem a valuable resource to add to your virtual palette.

Snowed in & can't get to the museum?

Google to the rescue!

Explore museums and great works of art in the Google Art Project: "One of the things I love about working Google is that you can come up with an idea one day and the next day start getting to work to make it a reality. That's what happened with the Art Project—a new tool we're announcing today which puts more than 1,000 works of art at your fingertips, in extraordinary detail.

It started when a small group of us who were passionate about art got together to think about how we might use our technology to help museums make their art more accessible—not just to regular museum-goers or those fortunate to have great galleries on their doorsteps, but to a whole new set of people who might otherwise never get to see the real thing up close.

We're also lucky here to have access to technology like Picasa and App Engine and to have colleagues who love a challenge—like building brand-new technology to enable Street View to go indoors! Thanks to this, and our unique collaboration with museums around the world, we were able to turn our 20% project into something you can try out for yourself today at www.googleartproject.com.

You’ll find a selection of super high-resolution images of famous works of art as well as more than a thousand other images, by more than 400 artists—all in one place. And with Street View technology, you can take a virtual tour inside 17 of the world’s most acclaimed art museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA in New York, The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Tate Britain & The National Gallery in London, Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Officer and Laughing Girl, Johannes Vermeer (The Frick Collection, New York - U.S.)

Here are a few things you can do:

• Dive into brushstroke-level detail: On top of the 1,000+ other images, each of the 17 museums selected one artwork to be photographed in extraordinary detail using super high resolution or “gigapixel” photo-capturing technology. Each of these images contains around 7 billion pixels—that's that’s around 1,000 times more detailed than your average digital camera—and a specially-built “microscope view” uses Picasa to deliver thie images at amazingly high resolution. You can zoom in to see Van Gogh’s famous brushwork [link] or watch how previously hard to-see elements of an artwork suddenly become clear—such as the tiny Latin couplet which appears in Hans Holbein the Younger’s “The Merchant Georg Gisze.”

The bedroom, Vincent van Gogh (Van Gogh Museum)

• Explore inside the museums: the Street View team designed a brand-new vehicle called the “trolley” to take 360-degree images of the interior of selected galleries. These were then stitched together and mapped to their location, enabling smooth navigation of more than 385 rooms within the museums. We also created a new clickable annotation feature, so you can jump from being inside a museum one moment to viewing a particular artwork the next. Once inside an image, an info panel lets you read more about an artwork, find more works by that artist and watch related YouTube videos. Gallery interiors can also be explored directly from within Street View in Google Maps.

Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy—with a view on Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus”

• Create your own collection: With the “Create an Artwork Collection” feature, you can save specific views of any of the artworks and build your own personalized collection. Comments can be added to each painting and the whole collection can then be shared with friends, family or on the web using the integrated goo.gl URL shortener.

We’re incredibly excited about this project—it’s our first step toward making great art more accessible, and we hope to add more museums and works of art in time. So whether you’re a student, an aspiring artist or a casual museum-goer, we hope the Google Art Project gives you a fun and unusual way to interact with art—and hopefully inspires you to visit the real thing.

Posted by Amit Sood, Head of Google Art Project
"