[Level: Beginner]

Of course we can choose to play games, watch youtube or facebook to ‘kill’ some time, but if you really want to ‘save’ some time, why not improve your drawing skills!

Here are the 3 things that you can quickly do.

1. Gesture Drawing

   Pixelovely’s Figure and Animal Drawing Training Tool
   You need a both good instinct and memory to be able to draw quick gesture drawing. At the same time drawing quickly allows you to draw more, this means you’ll get to be exposed to a lot of images that will automatically become your visual vocabulary as you draw, especially when your artistic instinct is well attuned to your need, you brain will easily absorb them. Very useful if you want to improve you drawing from imagination. The link above allows you quickly draw something, you don’t get to choose which to draw, but it’s better because it’ll force you to just draw.

2. Life Drawing

   Whether it’s life or still, just draw anything you can see. You can draw your own hands, own feet, people, objects…  The advantage in drawing life is that you get to see your subject in different dimension, studies have prove that your memory retention improves when you observe from life than on paper or 2 dimensional view. Only rule is not to be picky and just draw. The more you think, the less time you have, the less likely you’ll want to draw. Do a random blindfold pick, and draw it! The principle above still applies too, except that you won’t necessarily be in front of  computer, and that doesn’t stop you from drawing.

3. Chaos Drawing

   If you are feeling like designing something, try scribbling some shapes or line and make something out of it. Just like guessing the shapes of the clouds in the sky, you can do the same with your scribbles or doodle. Don’t try to make out what you have in mind, instead make something that you see, there’s a difference there. This exercise can be really hard for some people, most probably because the lack visual vocabulary to guess. Let me explain that further, you can’t see an emu if you haven’t seen one before, this is why visual vocabulary is important. So the wider your visual library is, the more things your can see.

The point is to stop looking around and just do it! Make use of what you can find immediately, this is also one of the best way to kill procrastination. And more importantly, the more you draw, the more you grow.

[Level: Intermediate]

I used to believe that one first needs to be a master before thinking about popularity, so I literally locked myself from outside and just do what I want. When I learnt about marketing, my whole perception about this changed!

Do you know there are more moderate quality product out there that are equally or more demanding than the best product in its category? Think about a more famous product, you can almost guarantee to find a higher quality, similar product, yet it is less known.

So will the best quality product triumph in the end? The answer should be obvious.

I’ve conducted personality test against artists, and the results unanimously show most artists to have introverted personality. This is the gift, as well as the curse of an artist. We are connected more through our work, but less through people in which makes artists naturally bad at marketing themselves. While all these famous product that we know, market themselves like no tomorrow.

No, I’m not trying to say that you shouldn’t do your best in art. But if you were like me, you might want to rethink about how you should build up your name. Which is essential in building your career, as what we usually hear, it’s not how many people you know that matter, it’s how many people know you!

Here are some common mistakes that we artists like to do but preventing us from marketing ourselves naturally:

1. Don’t Like to Socialize

   No one will know remember who you are and what you do, even if you are just a moderate artist, talking and connecting with people will increase the chances of people knowing you. Go to events, get out from your comfort zone and talk with people, if you don’t know what to talk, focus on what you can help for others. Every first few steps are not easy, but you can begin to ‘run’ after a few trial and error.

2. Love to Compare Our Quality

   We often think we are the best, when we see other artist can be potentially better than us, we’ll try our best to find mistakes. Just to prove that if we are able to find some mistakes, we are better. It’s ridiculous to do such thing, it not only jeopardizes our opportunity to connect with other artists, it really brings you no benefit other than self gratification. Let’s learn to support, motivate and congratulate each other.

3. Not Good at Expressing

   As artists, we cannot escape from getting opinions, critiques and reactions from others. Learn to be patient, and respect their opinions, doesn’t mean that you have do what they say. So learn when to take things seriously and when not. If you can connect well with your audiences without letting your ego take over your emotion, you will get better impression from them. Chances are people will talk about how good you are, words of mouth can be your the best marketing media, you don’t want to blow those chances.

Whether you are a concept artist, illustrator, newbie or someone who wants to learn art, I’ve collected some tutorials from the net hoping that it could help us artist to easily find what we need. Even thou the list is kinda small now, but will continue updating it. I’ll make sure that the list is as quality as it can get so you won’t waste any time clicking one.

Click here to go to the page.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

[Level: Beginner]

I used to brag how fast is better, while it is certainly is true for some reason, but it doesn’t mean that being slow and enjoying every moment you can spend in art is worse. In order to gain speed, sometimes you have to sacrifice something. Or, you simply have to be better! Below are some common exercises that can help you become faster at painting.

1. Learn to Use Limited Value to Convey Structures

   Every form can be simplified into the basic values, you can work with 3 – 5 tones to show the structure convincingly. If you can, try to avoid smudging and blending. The purpose of this exercise is to prevent yourself from going back to the color picker and brush setting, so you can better focus on painting the structure and really understand how light effects on it. Once you get the hang of it, you simply do not need to guess how to render the object, you’ll be painting believable structure naturally.

   
   By Craig Mullins

2. Learn to Use Color Palette

   Personally I’m not a fan of color palette, but for exercises purpose, it not only helps you to understand which color scheme to use, but also helps you to memorize the colors. Study paintings with great colors to build your own set of palette ‘vocabulary’. After doing it much, you could just pick any colors you want, and will know what colors suit and look the best. No more guessing and making the wrong choice.

   

3. Smart Layering Usage

   I often heard people suggest to use as much layering as possible. While it offers huge advantage in flexibility, the more layers you have the harder for you to control, since you would have to click the layers you want to paint every time to make that changes in that particular layer. Versus just a single or few layers, you don’t have to be bothered doing that as much, it’s a trade off really.

   For practices and personal art, I tend to use the single layer painting concept, which emulates the traditional way of painting. But for professional work, I’ll keep the layer as few as possible and organize them by naming. If you do that, and if you are using Photoshop, you can use the Move Tool and right click the element you want to paint and select the layer you want from the menu. Especially useful when you have tones of layers. You can group layers too once you find that the list is too long.

   

4. Use textures

   Texturing is known to add details to your painting. However use it wisely, take care of the perspective especially and use the right texture. You can easily find texture at Google Image but don’t forget other site like Picassa, Flickr and other textures site. Download and keep those you use regularly too, to save the time surfing for the same image. Note that texturing can only make your painting more detail, doesn’t necessarily gives you the best painting, but saves your time to paint it. Use it to your advantage, even a painting can be use as an overlaying texture.

   

5. Use custom brushes

   The function of custom brushes is almost similar to textures. Generally our painting subject doesn’t go far beyond to what we usually paint, so I’m not particularly fond of huge collection of brushes, although I must admit I do tend to have quite a number of brushes. But the point is, if you do not know how to use all the brush, it can only hinder your progress in picking and choosing the brush you want to use. Bottom line in this is, build your own set of brush that you can really be familiar with. If you have the right brush set for you painting, it can really save you the time to look for the right texture since painting manually does offer you a whole lot control.

   

6. Customize Your Workspace

   Set shortcut keys as well as how you workspace looks like. Don’t let something distract you from painting. When I learn digital painting, my workstation was a 15″ laptop, and in order me to get the highest possible surface to paint, I set shortcuts to photoshop Navigator, Layers, Color picker and Brush Setting. That way I can hide and show them whenever I want. If you can get a second monitor get it, it saves your effort to switch between windows just to looks at some reference. You don’t have to follow what others do with their workspace, the most important thing is it works better for you.

   

7. Use references

   As much as I don’t encourage myself to use reference in practices, because it blinds my weakness and covering my armature, yet I can’t stress it enough with the right reference, you can be so much accurate and more faster at painting. Just don’t let it control your art, which means if you have to fit your art to conform to the reference you have, the reference is controlling you. You can study the reference for it’s anatomy, lighting, structure, wrinkles or anything, but don’t copy it exactly. It’s not wrong but if you think about the long run, just how many references can you find to make the art that you want, exactly? Do yourself a favor, and build the right foundation.

   
   * Obviously not a painting, but shows you some idea to use reference to create the art you want.

These are a combination of good armature plus tool mastery, if you haven’t yet known about the 2 stepping stones that stopping you from creating the art that you feel you want, I highly recommend you reading ‘The Secret of Drawing from Imagination‘.

* This tutorial is specially dedicated to LiewJJ!

[Level: Beginner]

This article will be a lot deeper than those you can find online, but if you want to understand why sometimes we can’t achieve what we want, it will explains you the two stepping stones that you will need to leap over in order to create whatever art that you desire, successfully. No matter it’s a painting, drawing, sculpture, you name it.

Let’s give a quick glance at the diagram, this is a general process of making an art. It mostly starts from any idea or concept generated from our brain which then manifest itself to the final result through execution, painting, drawing or any form of art. For example, when you want to draw a pink elephant, you visualize it and then draw it on paper.

The red parts in the diagram are the two things that preventing you from making the exact result that you want. Namely:

1.  Armature -The base that holds your vague visual to be more tangible
   You can also call this the skeleton of you work, like animals, their skeletons are the main frame that holds the structure together; In portrait, the grid is its armature or skeleton; In environment drawing, the perspective lines are its armature; In another words, it’s the knowledge or template that simplify the complex image in your mind, so that you can easily transfer and translate that thought onto paper or your choice of media.

   Our memory doesn’t allow us to take so much information in one visual. This is our workaround to this problem, simplify it so you can reconstruct it. How to simplify it? With the right armature of course.

2. Tool Mastery – Skills that you need to control your tool the way that you want
   This is self explanatory, the only thing that I want you to understand is, there is a difference between what shape you want, versus how to make the shape you want. The previous being the armature, and the later being the tool mastery. So long you understand the difference between then it’s fine, you may skip the example below.

   For some concrete example to make it more clearer, using color pencil and crayon gives you two different feel and look, however if you can make the gradient or the color that you want, it makes no difference what medium you choose. This is your tool mastery, using the tool you want to the way you want. I used to hear people saying, become one with the tool, I hope you now understand what it really means.

To make the art that you have in mind, or from imagination, you must first conquer these two obstacles. For more information on how to identify your missing armature, stay tune for the next updates or you’ll see the related post below when I’ve written and posted it.

Merry Christmas everyone, God bless and prosper!

* This tutorial is specially dedicated to TazAndMe!

[Level: Intermediate]

This is a simple case study to show you how 80-20 rule can simply evolve to 60-30-10 rule in your composition.

1. Let’s first look at how the value distribution is plotting the graph in the luminosity channel. If you have yet understand value distribution, I suggest you understand that first before continue on. You may find the related post below, look out for 60-30-10 rule blog post for its brief introduction if I have not yet written a topic about value distribution. Or use the search function at the side and find ‘value distribution’.

2. The mid tone that I use is only approximate 60% so this graph maybe incorrect. However the thing that we wanna look here is the deviation of this graph against the 80-20 rule graph. There really isn’t much difference, even the painting itself. You don’t need me to convince you that it’s easy to translate to a more detail painting without losing the composition armature that you have built.

3. What I did with this image was leveling the peak of the dark value and the first peak of the light value, thus the result you see. You may want to ignore the color here, I should have remove the hues, it’s making a huge leap in visual. So, consider this without any color. The luminosity channel is showing you what again looks like the above graph, but as you can see, the deviation is multiplied from the last. It’s showing stepper depression, translating the graph into English, it simply means more details.

4. Now this is the same exact detail as the last, but with the correct placement of the value, which mean those are the greys you see in the final painting, without the dark and light values. Essentially, it’s just the squashed version of the last graph. I’m showing you this because of the next graph, please read on.

5. Notice when you add the remaining values, the graph is just a stretch version of the one’s above. If you look at the 3rd graph, you can almost see the similarity. Which entirely mean that the composition rule here hasn’t change much at all!

The conclusion that I wanna share to you for this case study is that, it’s easy to make the progression from 80-20 rule to 60-30-10 composition rule. This could mean two things:

1. If you aren’t comfortable with 60-30-10 rule yet, stick with the simplify 80-20 rule. You’ll naturally make the progression soon, and it’s possible.
2. Drawing a 2-tone-sketch, which could also be a black and white sketch, is fast. If you could produce as much 80-20 sketches, you would have higher chances of getting  the best composition for you painting. Very useful for practice and experimenting for the very reason that it’s, fast.

We are cursed to love art.

We are blessed at making art.

We do anything in the name of art.

We selflessly devote ourselves to make art.

We are willing to sacrifice for art.

We will never give up on art.

We only talk with art.

But if you want to be rich as an artist…
- Insert your solution here -

Learn business! The art of making money!
Without the knowledge, how can you possibly maximize your profit!?

[Level: Intermediate]

Some of you probably have heard of the rule of third, triangles, Fibonacci spiral, golden ratio, symmetry, radial composition and etc all of these common composition rules are closely related to the arrangement of the subject or the elements of a painting.

This uncommon 60-30-10 rule is a bit special, because it’s about a painting’s value distribution and not so much about the arrangements.

What is value distribution? I believe this topic deserve a topic itself, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s just do a brief introduction.

Try to break a painting’s value into 3 tones, you get light, medium and dark value.

If you have good “artist’s intuition”, you can feel the balance of the value distribution, too much or too little of some value is just not right. Normally using the 60-30-10 rule, which means applying 60% dark, 30% medium and 10% light on your canvas or the reverse, can give you the best balanced look.

To round up this rule, here are some painting examples from my best inspiration, Craig Mullins. 60-30-10 rule can also be applied in color distribution, spacing or just anything you feels right, remember to rely on your “artistic intuition”, rules are not meant to be followed blindly!

* This tutorial is specially dedicated to ReneAugustus!

Here it is, the final illustration. The rebellious tyranid Ymgarl!

Warhammer 40K – The Tyranid Outcast

And the wip shots.

[Level: Beginner]

Cardinal Richelieu at the Siege of La Rochelle, Henri Motte, 1881

How many times have you felt mad, or absolutely unhappy when somebody gave you critiques? And you ended up in a bad situation that you had wished only if you were calm enough and did not engage with the argument in the first place. First of all, I need to let you know why it’s not entirely your fault.

Think of it as a war, as much as people would like to help you to improve, not everybody knows how to do a proper critique. What they are wielding are sharps swords and dangerous weapons, most people did not realize that, and it’s no wonder why people can get hurt easily.

So how do we protect from ourselves then? Our patience is similar to our defense wall, the higher it is, the harder it will get breached. In real war, you wouldn’t wanna be outside of your wall, but enemies are smart. They lure and provoke you out, in order to get you in defenseless and vulnerable position.

I’m not implying that people want to attack us, but the fact that we are being lured out from our defenseless position exposes us from attacks, that’s when we lose control.

 ”The lesson here is to build your wall as high as possible, don’t let yourself in defenseless position. It’s important to find a friend that can support you because you don’t want your dream to be crushed before you get to the level you want.”

For my next post, we’ll discuss about how to give a proper critique to others, so that it feels supportive, rather than offensive.