Getting started

So I'm feeling that an art blog is in order. For the last few weeks I have been doing some extra study into digital painting and just in working with colors in general. For those who know anything about my art history, you know that just plain-old gray pencil is about all I've even been good at. And I am good at it. At least I like to think so. You also know that I am far more practiced at drawing people then anything else. Portraits of peoples' faces, to be more specific.

Another thing that we all know about art is that it takes FOREVER to get really good at anything! D: Learning to draw portraits as well as I have has been something that I've been working on for 12 years. whoa. 12 years?! That seems so much worse when I write it down. BUT. The good news is that after all that, I'm feeling pretty confident with those.

SO. here's the hope: That learning to paint or just learning to use color will be more or less like learning a 3rd language. Learning to draw photo-realistic portraits was language number 2. The one that takes forever and tons and tons of hard work. The 3rd language, color, will also be hard work, but hopefully less like 'forever'. That makes scene. :3 That should work right? right. ...i know. whatever makes me feel better right? XD


Getting started.

One of the biggest weaknesses I've found I have in this area is my tendency to work on all the detail of one spot before working much on the rest of the picture. Honestly.. now that I think about it, I have no clue how I've gotten away with this for as long as I have.

A very helpful part of the art process is to work on the image as a whole from start to finish. I've always been good about sketching up a skeleton (body guide lines) and the general line art of the whole image, but I fail to continue the gradual detailing process after that.  Because of this, I imagine that learning to do this with color (since I never learned it in the first place) will dramatically improve my pencil stuff as well, and that is very exciting. Thankfully, I'm still quite impressed with my pencil portraits, but recently I've started noticing consistent flaws (such as a somewhat flat looking nose) and that means it's time for more improvement.

My plan for getting started is to work on speed paintings. I plan to give my self 1-2 hours a day to paint up a full color picture. That idea behind these speed paints is that in order for it to look any good at the end of 2 hours I will have to have worked on the detail of the whole piece in steps all together. Otherwise the end result after only 2 hours would look VERY unfinished.

So for the next while here, I will be using this blog to record my progress and findings. I will post my new speed paint every day along with any comments on the piece and what I learned from it. Here's to getting started! :D