A teacher can not help a student without knowing the students thoughts or concerns on how to improve in their art endeavors. There needs to be some form of communication between the two individuals. Draw-N-Paint can not address each and every need about art instruction and for those needs I encourage you to seek an art instructor located near you. Also there are so many other on-line web sites with forums that can be viewed already having answered most of these art related concerns.
One thing Draw-N-Paintcan do is to make this web site more user friendly to you in using Grid Drawing Pattern sets. Draw-N-Paints’ web site is designed to use Grid Patterns with on-line art lessons. To teach and help young in art artist to learn art techniques using pencils and then progress to the point of drawing and oil painting without Grids. You may have a comment or a concern about the Draw-N-Paints’ web site programming that you would like to see added or changed. For these types of web site related matters please feel free to express your thoughts and concerns on Draw-N-Paints’ blog. I will address these as soon as possible. Things are a little rough working a full time job, if the recession doesn’t take it away, along with taking care of my wife who is disabled and has gone through more major operations then people have fingers and toes put together.
All comments are monitored before publishing to remove any unfavorable degraded material that has nothing to do with visual arts. This is a family site for young and old, my site and the Almighty God is watching.
A wonderful new learning tool that’s capturing hearts and minds of reading people throughout the learning world is the e-Book. Currently for me life is very busy and demanding but soon there will be artist e-Books available on Draw-N-Paint. Please be patient and I assure you that you will be happy that you came back to check on their progress. These e-Books will cover graphite drawing, color pencil drawing and oil painting techniques that I have experienced over my art years. Each e-Book will cover a specific art subject such as painting a flower, barn, favorite pet, sunset and so forth. This may be a lot to swallow but there is a concept to also make each e-Book interactive in each e-Book’s own kind of way. I’m sure your not going to be disappointed and I know your just gonna love these e-Books.
Lets start with focusing on box image number ONE to the right of this paragraph. If you where to draw it, it would appear simple to draw because it is simple and why may that be? Think for a moment and say what was the first thing that popped into your mind as you looked at it. When you first looked at this image did a thought similar to box or square register in your minds eye? If so you have just experienced an example of the logic portion of the mind kicking in and locking out the creative part.
Now lets make things a little less simple and look at box image number TWO to the left of this paragraph. It’s the same square as box image number ONE but turned one hundred and eighty degrees. Now did you draw what you see versus locking into this image as being a box or square as quickly as the first image? More than likely you did have to think little about why this image was turned in such a way just a bit. Ah, the beginning of focusing in on something different that we are not accustomed to. The mind had to discern the locations of the lines for each of the box edges.
Hopefully your seeing an artist drawing concept beginning to form. In actuality by refocusing your thought patterns your retraining your mind to see as an artist sees things. Over the years of schooling the historical and mathematical areas are usually the dominating ones. Creative advancement in the areas art needs to be pursued by each individual as an extra activity.
Focus on distance and space between and in drawing elements. What do we mean by this? A hint was given when we turned box TWO one hundred and eighty degrees. The lines them selves became more interesting in our mind and the registering of the image being a drawn box was not the first recognizable attribute.
And here we introduce the image of box number THREE. It’s a square box again but with an added element. You need to draw it. When drawing it focus on the inner box and where it resides within the larger box. Take a piece of paper and pencil and draw it before moving on.
I’ll wait.
Did you think about the distance or location of the smaller box in relation to the bigger box without thinking that it was a box? How far was the outer edges of the smaller image to the edges of the lines on the bigger image? Notice I started to use the term image and not box. Migrate your thought pattern in that direction and you move from the logic side and open up the creative side of your mind. Yes it is a box but if your going to see as an artist sees you need to put what the image is on hold until the drawing is complete.
The whole importance in this drawing exercise is to help understand to focus on distance between elements or as some call it negative space. Don’t focus on what you can identify so much but what you can not.
Let’s move things around a tiny bit in the next two illustrations. Draw these two illustrations and while doing so look at the distance of the smaller images in relation to the larger images that they are in.
Practice these examples but when doing so don’t focus on so much what the shapes are in each box but focus more on the distances of the lines of the shapes are from the outer box. If you focus too much on the shapes you begin to lock into the logic side. Then the thought process slows down because you already know what it is. Your no longer creating. It’s a good little drawing exercise to check your focus.
Obtaining photo references for art subjects can be quite timely and costly when your subject matter is in another country or state. It’s nice to see individuals in the photography field understanding the dilemma that this places many visual artist in. You ever needed that right element to include in a drawing or painting and where worried about copyright issues? Take a look at some of these publications and what they have to offer! Artist Photo References
Over the years of many artist lives they have used tools to help them draw a particular art subject that they have had in mind. One of those tools is a grid pattern overlaid on an image that their rendering. Grids help to take an image apart by breaking the image down into smaller pieces so that it is easier to draw or paint the image. You can learn a lot about drawing more realistically or making your drawings appear more like your art subject by using a grid overlay pattern. You come to understand how negative space plays a part when using your artist visual eye. After a short time you can see how to discern distances between lines, shapes and shadows. You do need to be careful because you could find yourself bonding more closely to your drawing and spending more time on art then other important things. Ahem.
Hundreds of artist have explained how to use grids in different ways. Draw-N-Paint will also explain the grid use in a Draw-N-Paint kind a way. We will also point out other resources where you can acquire more information on grid drawing. One such place is from artist Betty Edward’s and in her book “Drawing on the Artist Within”. Her grid concept is different then the one used here on Draw-N-Paint and I’m sure you’ll love reading about it.
A pretty oil painting that has a unique characteristic about it. When a light is placed just above the “Glowing Iris” painting to shine down upon it, the Iris flower will appear to have a glow around itself. The warm glow then radiates outward into the sky area and lower landscape.
The vision of the “Glowing Iris” is to capture the viewers eye in the lower left portion of the painting on the pathway where it meets with the stem of the flower. Your focus is pulled along the pathway as the path moves into the background and fades some. As the curving path reaches upward towards the sky and your eye moves along the same route. The top pedals of Iris flower is where your gaze comes to rest and as you take in the warm relaxing glow around the flower. In time the rich darker lower painted pedals demand your attention and down the stem your focus goes to start the visual journey all over again. It is a visual loop with artist oil painted colors.
The painting of the sky area was done using colors Cobalt Blue, Halo Blue, Crimson and Indian Yellow. It is Indian Yellow which gives a warm glowing effect around the Iris flower. If you are painting a similar sky painting remember that keep the yellow oil paints from the blue oil paints is necessary in keeping sky area from turning green. In this painting Crimson was used as a barrier between the Indian Yellow and Blues to avoid wrong color variations. If your an oil painting artist, color techniques using Indian Yellow can be found in the home workshop painting DVD video by artist Byron Pickering entitled “The Wild Sea”.
I had a wonderful informative three hour instruction course with a large number of other interested artists today. From the art marketing side of things I kind of compare myself as an artist on a super highway with lots of posted signs, exit and entrance ramps. Today’s artist marketing presentation helped me to focus on getting on the right highway in order to make my art work financially successful. Oh it’s a gonna take a lot of driving but at least now I can eliminate the wrong turns and focus on a bright sunny Sunday drive. For those artists out there looking for Artists directions on the visual art marketing highway I suggest you say hello to Wendy H. Outland by visiting her site “WHO”. And yes, lets not forget I am a Professional Artist.
It’s about starting from the beginning, making small pencil marks and letting them flow across a sheet of artist material to compose an art work from our minds eye. It’s about learning to see a form of space once again that we lost sight of in our early schooling years. It’s about opening up the creative side of the mind which was replaced and locked out by the logic side of the mind. It is about you and letting yourself out into the world to see that no one, not anybody else has what is inside of you. It is You can Draw and Yes You can Paint. It is Draw-N-Paint
Draw-N-Paint takes the visual arts learning process to the beginning. Starting with the drawing of simple forms we look at how these small forms are part of large forms or images. Some of these forms are squares, cones, triangles and circles. We learn how to measure these forms with a well known tool called a grid. Then we build on the visual art knowledge we have gained by adding new artist techniques each day to what we have learned to draw as realistically as we can.
After the graphite pencils come the artist oil paints. This is were we take the images we have drawn, place them on an artist painting canvas and create an oil painting of our own. We go through each step of the painting process from start to finish. From the blank canvas to one filled with color.
So find what it’s like see as an artist views the start of an illustration and then builds on it. See how to focus on simple forms within a picture that is either on a photograph, in your mind or where ever and then make it real. Welcome to Draw-N-Paint.
it, it would appear simple to draw because it is simple and why may that be? Think for a moment and say what was the first thing that popped into your mind as you looked at it. When you first looked at this image did a thought similar to box or square register in your minds eye? If so you have just experienced an example of the logic portion of the mind kicking in and locking out the creative part.
