Art Tips: Studying From Life Disclaimer: I promise to try not to turn this into a “the old days were better” reminisce, and hope to make a solid, relevant point by the end! Having gotten into this whole art thing around 1995, I’m old enough to have witnessed the critical years of art’s transformation from a predominantly analog activity, to the now-ubiquitous digital nature of mostly everything. Yes, making art digitally was a thing in ‘95 (Myst and Toy Story were both huge early inspirations...
3 months ago • 4 min read
Art Tips: Anatomy & Figure Drawing I’ve done a great deal of life drawing in my nearly 25 years of art-journeying. I firmly believe that life drawing (or figure drawing) plays a big role - consciously or not - in setting your art ‘ceiling.’ There is so much to the figure drawing process: gesture drawing, capturing a sense of life and movement, building simple forms, building more complex forms, fitting things together, lighting all those forms, etc., all of which come together to represent...
4 months ago • 4 min read
Art Tips My next YouTube video (stay tuned!) demonstrates a kind of process I’ve been playing with lately. Simply put, it involves not doing any planning, and just jumping right into the final. This sounds counterproductive - and for many it probably would be, so please don’t take this as objective art advice. But there’s something to consider here. If you have the basic initial direction figured out - and you have a good grasp over the fundamentals - and you trust your own instincts - then...
6 months ago • 3 min read
Art Tips: Edges Of all art’s fundamentals, probably the most fascinating to me is edges. At first, the beginning artist learns about edges in their most simplistic form: a round object (like a ball) has softer edges in its shading, while a sharper object (like a cube) has harder edges between its tones. This is a good starting point: you can begin to observe the different qualities in how abruptly a form changes direction, and apply the appropriate edge to it. Great!But edges don’t end there....
7 months ago • 4 min read
Art Tips When I work with students who are more advanced in their learning (that is, they have a grasp over the fundamentals and can apply them consistently), the area of art that becomes available to develop is the concept of Lost & Found. This falls into the category of style, personal aesthetics and taste - which places it beyond the realm of art fundamentals. What is Lost & Found? It’s what you choose to show the viewer explicitly, vs. what you leave merely implied. The key word there is:...
8 months ago • 3 min read
Art Tips You are probably already familiar with the concept of a ‘palette’ (it’s simply the selection of hues you have to mix with.) With traditional media, choosing a palette is among the first considerations. And traditional palettes are often limited, for a number of reasons. You may not want to squeeze out every color onto your mixing surface, because handling all those mixtures can get complicated. Or maybe you simply don’t own every color, so you’re stuck with the paints you’ve got....
9 months ago • 3 min read
Are your bold colors enhancing your work - or overpowering it? Art Tips If you read my newsletter (thank you!) I assume you also know what my paintings look like. Which means you know that color tends to play a big role in them. Indeed, the compliment I receive most about my work (thank you again!) is about color use. It might strike you as ironic, then, that I actually start my paintings very gray, and only add saturation significantly later in the process. And even when I do add saturation,...
10 months ago • 3 min read
Is simplification the goal - or just the beginning? Art Tips As an art teacher I’m always trying to examine the cliches of art education. Here’s one everyone’s heard: ‘Simplify! simplify! simplify!’ On the face of it, it’s good advice: it asks us to think initially about the bigger structure of something, enabling us to capture a subject quickly, and get started on the right foot. But what I don’t love about cliches is there is often more to extract about the idea - things that go ignored...
10 months ago • 3 min read