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"*jealous*
I wish I had an ability to draw faces! You're very good. :-)"

You can. Go look up a woman named Betty Edwards. She taught at Long Beach State, where I attended, andshe taught courses for the non-artist to develop artistic skills - which evolved into a series of books, the first being "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain". She would take people with zero artistic ability, and by the end of the semester, would have them drawing beautiful portraits and still life. She's wonderful, she's done amazing work with her students, and she's a GREAT resource for those that want to try art, but think they have no ability. (Her core idea was, from talking to her, is that anyone can draw what they see, it's a skill anyone can learn.) If you have ANY urge to try your hand, go pick up her book (or if you're really lucky, and she's still teaching, take her class.)

For those in this thread who wish they had half of Kinkade's talent - you DO. Kinkade uses similar techniques to create his paintings, that are exactly like Bob Ross (Happy trees). There are sweatshops in Hong Kong and mainland China that will crank out one of his paintings for you, in your hands with the paint still wet, in less than an hour, it's really not hard to do what he does. It's very simple - use a formulaic setting, like a cabin, don't worry about such finicky and silly things like perspective, and load the canvas up with blobs of green with smaller blobs of reds and yellows and violets. Viola! You have a Kinkade. Kinkade has no real talent with brushwork or pallette knife, his use of color is clumsy at best, and his draftsmanship is abysmal. His "skill" is loading up the canvas with so much garbage, the eye cannot focus on anything, and you get the "cotton candy" poofy effect. It's taking advantage of information overload and the absence of an actual composition to create an "effect". It's not art, it's special effects - and not very good ones at that.

In fact, you'd probably get a lot more enjoyment and pleasure from trying to do this kind of art yourself (and investing in the canvases, paint, and brushes), than dropping $400 on a $1 print.

Me, I'd buy a Frankenthaler print. I'm not a fan of her genre, but there's a serenity to her work that I love. I grok her. At least she stuck to the traditional canvas/paint genre, and did'nt vear into the ridiculous "found" art, or the contrived ox hearts in vials.