I keep my oil pallet much more limited than my acrylic pallet when I paint. Acrylic paint dries too quickly to pre-mix a pallet so I put out lots of colours and keep the mixing to a minimum, not so with oils…just a few colours on my pallet is enough and then I can mix up as many tones as I want from those on my pallet before I start painting, and then mix between those colours as I’m working Such a lovely way to paint…
There’s many DIFFERENT ways to paint a PORTRAIT…
…and there’s as many ways to share that knowledge to an audience. Even the Loomis method, a method for drawing portraits invented by Andrew Loomis in the early 20th century, can be applied to the process of portraiture in many different ways once you understand it.
Every-time I prepare a lesson I work through the process that gets me to what I’m trying to achieve to figure out the best way to transfer that knowledge, and every time I do that I learn new ways to do the things I’ve done before and in doing that I create lots of little works…some of them I keep, some I sell and some I give away…. 😊
Expressive drawing…
…is the kind of drawing that expresses emotion through the marks (charcoal, pencil, pastel or paint marks) rather than the actual subject drawn. Whether gestural and strong contrast or gentle and tonally subtle, the work speaks more about the artist than the chosen subject, so much so that exactly the same subject can be drawn many times and each drawing look wildly different.
Same subject, different day.
an artist on social media needs to...
…create actual art as well as post art on their chosen platforms. I figured that live-streaming the process, that is recording the painting part of art making and sharing it on social media in real time, does both of those things simultaneously and allows me to be both economical with my time and generous with it. So I’ve set up a duel streaming system where I paint live in my studio while I record and post the session live on social media and anyone watching can interact in the comments section. I can do this via some apps which i’ve purchased and am learning how to use, and in a way those apps are like what galleries do - they are part of the “middle man” - that place between the artist and the public - that place where people gather and experience. That other place, the gallery, is also important because you can’t see artwork as it really is on social media, and art is an important experience in real life.
Social media allows artists have more opportunity and control over their own exposure than they’ve ever had before, and that’s a good thing I think.
This is a very interesting time for artists.
I’m pRetty happy with my efforts…
I’ve spent the best part of last week (the first week of the school holidays) working on my website which was what I planned to do. Now that I’ve done that I can put extra effort into painting things that will build my store as well as work on other commitments, like commissions and preparing upcoming workshop/courses. My ongoing plan is to structure my days/weeks into a work schedule and stick to it…and that’s it! That’s my exciting project of the moment - building a well structured, time-managed-organised-existence to create in.
sincerely,
Cat
Today i met one of the locals…
…on a walk with the little bitch Bubbles, and then I went home and painted him for a live stream on Twitch.
I’ve attempted to embed the link to the video in the word “process” situated below my finished painting. If it works I’ll be happy but as I write this I realise that it’ll only work for 2 weeks because the twitch app deletes videos after 2 weeks unless you manually highlight them but if I do that after posting this it’ll be a new link I suppose…which I can tweak later if I remember.
One of the locals
Watch the process
When i first started pOsting on redbubble…
13 years ago I could only make the card products. It took me a while (because I was so new to computer speak), but after much frustration I discovered that my files were too small for creating any other products, so I invested in a decent camera.
Then it took me a while to figure out how to use that and set the image resolution to large.
Since then redbubble has introduced a plethora of new and wonderful products to put artwork on and some of them I couldn’t work out how to fill with an image when I could see that other artists were filling them and mine were not. Yesterday I discovered “resizing”, where you rework the dimensions of the photo files to fit the template snd I can now fill them. Yay!
I’ve been in this art…
…thing for a long time. Since the 1980s I’ve been creating and selling some kind of art work or service. My most recent endeavour has been tutoring/teaching my own and other aspects of the craft at a local art school and have been fortunate enough to have received my own training from an expert in this field and for that I am deeply grateful.
My next project (apart from actual art projects and ongoing tutoring commitments and skill building), is to strengthen my social media presence, work on building my website and create some kind of coherence between all of my accounts and projects so I can work more efficiently. I have the tools and now I need to learn how to best use them.
So this is the beginning of that ^^^