Learn to… Art!

Drawing with Charcoal

Feb 21, 2010 Drawing Leave a comment

If the pencil is sturdy, reliable and precise, charcoal is like its wild counterpart: bold, daring and dramatic. Blacker than any pencil and rich in texture, drawing with charcoal is an altogether different experience.

Don’t get me wrong: charcoal is a versatile medium and you can achieve extremely sensitive, realistic drawings using it. There is just something about taking up that messy stump of charcoal that frees us to get big, expressive and gestural.

Types of Charcoal

Charcoal comes in a few different forms. You can get pressed charcoal that comes as a compressed stick. These can be hard, producing a grayer shade, or soft and very deep black. The softer the charcoal, the easier it will be to smudge. This is the kind of charcoal that will get your hands, your paper, and quite possibly your clothing and face dirty.

This pressed charcoal also comes in pencil form. This can be useful for detailed drawings because you can sharpen it to a fine point. It’s also much less messy!

A third type of charcoal is willow or vine charcoal. This comes in the form of an actual branch: it’s long, cylindrical and wiggly. Willow charcoal is very soft and produces a delicious dove grey. It has one of the nicest textures to draw with, but is also very smudgy.

Why Charcoal?

Charcoal functions in much the same way as a pencil. You can draw, shade and blend. But there’s something psychologically different about using charcoal. It allows you to get more expressive and work bigger without getting caught up in the details. Charcoal sticks especially, because they don’t have a fine point, can force you to focus on large shapes and general contours.

 What to Draw

You can draw and shade anything in charcoal the same way you would a pencil. Charcoal also lends itself well to more expressive types of shading like hatching.

My favorite thing to do with charcoal, though, is gesture drawings. Charcoal is perfect for making the large, sweeping strokes needed to capture a gesture.

It’s always nice to have a variety of drawing tools to choose from. The pencil is perfect for detailed renderings, but when it comes to expressive drawings I always reach for the charcoal!

Please share your experiences! Do you prefer pencil or charcoal? Does it depend on what you’re drawing?

No Compromise!

Feb 17, 2010 Art General Leave a comment

When it comes to our art practice, it’s easy to make excuses. Do any of these sound familiar?

• It’s too expensive.
• I don’t have room to store it.
• No one would ever buy it.
• I don’t have the right materials.
• I wouldn’t know where to start.
• I don’t know how to do it.

I remember an exchange I had with one of my professors in University. I was just starting to explore abstraction in painting and wanted to add some kind of linear element to my work. I really wanted to use oil sticks but didn’t have any, so I was going to use paint. My prof just looked at me and said, “if you want to use oil sticks, then use oil sticks!”

Duh!

I’d been compromising my creativity, making excuses. I didn’t have oil sticks, I didn’t want to spend the money to get them, and mostly I was too lazy to do the two hour bus excursion to go get them.  I was willing to sacrifice my art for convenience.

That moment has stuck with me ever since.

You should never compromise your art practice for convenience. Obviously, we all need to work within boundaries that are practical for us, but that doesn’t mean always doing what is easiest.

The most common compromises seem to be about size, money, sales and skills.

Go Big

If you want to work big, work as big as you can! Don’t worry about storage or whether or not anyone will buy it. You don’t make art to store it, or even to sell it. You make art to make it, so make it the way you want. Making big art can be a very liberating experience, especially if you’ve never tried it before.

The Money Issue

If you can’t afford it, maybe take a look at your finances and try and find other areas to cut back. Or take a few weeks or months to save up what you need. Most art supplies are infrequent expenses anyways. Once you purchase a set of paints, for example, you’ll only need to replenish as you run out. The first expense is usually the biggest.

Selling Point

As for selling… make the art first, then worry about finding an audience. I am a firm believer that there is a market for everything; it’s just a matter of finding that market.

Know-How

If you don’t know where to start, or don’t have the knowledge to do what you really want to do, my advice would be to jump right in! Take a course or a workshop, read a book or find some resources online. There is information everywhere that can help you learn new skills. Don’t let a lack of knowledge or skill limit your art. I’m a huge fan of trial and error. You’ll learn the most by playing around and making mistakes.

The bottom line? No compromise!

Do what you want to do, the way you want to do it. Don’t let yourself get away with making excuses. Your art practice will benefit and you might be surprised at your results!

Digitally Fix Your Art Images

Feb 14, 2010 Art General, Promotion and Exhibition 2 Comments

So, you’ve followed all the tips for documenting your art, but you’ve still ended up with a less than perfect image. Don’t worry, it happens. Luckily, if you’re documenting using digital photography, you can use your computer to enhance your images.

The important thing to remember when doing this is to not get carried away. You want to get your image as close to the original as possible, not make it look better than the original! This works best when you have already done everything possible during the photo-taking, and then only have to make minor digital changes. In my experience, the more altering you do on the computer, the grainier your image can get. So remember: small changes!

As far as photo manipulation software goes, you can get as simple or as complicated as you want. Most computers come with basic software that allows you to adjust brightness, colour, contrast, etc. All I’m using is the Windows Live Photo Gallery and Microsoft Picture Manager. I’ve also used Corel Draw and the Gimp (a free download). A program like Photoshop isn’t really necessary for the kinds of change we’ll be doing.

Here is our first image, direct from the camera. The problems with this are that it is very gray, there’s too much space around the drawing, it’s not square to the frame, and it’s not quite grayscale.

Rotate

Our first course of action is to use the rotate option to make the edges of the drawing parallel to the edges of the picture frame.

Crop

Next, crop the image to the edge of the drawing. This is easiest, obviously, if you’re working with a square piece of art. Some pieces, like my  abstract paintings, have irregular edges. In this case, you’ll want to document your work against a plain, neutral background and crop to just outside the edge of the art.

Saturation

Saturation has to do with the intensity of colour. With a black and white drawing like this, the lighting can actually change the colour. I like to reduce the saturation to zero, making the drawing completely grayscale (no colour).

Brightness

The next thing we want to do is get the values closer to the original. In the actual drawing, the lightest areas of the dog’s fur actually show the white of the paper. You can see how dark and greyed this image is. The first part of this two-step process is to increase the brightness, making the fur lighter.

Contrast

Our last step is to increase the contrast. This will make the darks darker, and the lights even brighter. Contrast is the option to be most wary of, as it’s easy to get carried away (for me at least, because I love high contrast!). It also has the  most potential to ruin your image, so go slowly in small increments.

Now we have an image that is much more faithful to the original drawing. Instead of being dull and grey, there is a range of values from the white fur to the black eyes.

Size

I just want to quickly mention the size of your images. When storing your images for documentation, gallery exhibitions, and promotional use, keep them large. If you’re e-mailing your images or loading them onto your website, save a smaller version. Your site will load faster and you won’t overload people’s inboxes!

If you liked this article, take a minute to check out my entire series on gallery exhibition proposals, or sign up for the newsletter!

Artist Fan Pages on Facebook: Re-visited

Feb 10, 2010 Art General, Promotion and Exhibition Leave a comment

About four months ago I started my fan page on Facebook, and wrote about the who, what, where, and why of fan pages for artists. I also promised an update  on the progress of my fan page.

Well, I can’t say that my fans have sky rocketed, sales have taken off and I’m now a famous, world-class artist.

I can say that I currently have 86 fans. Most of these are my friends and family, who are also my Facebook friends. A lot of them, though, are people I don’t know. People who have found me through their friends, through Twitter, or through this blog.

This is cool becuase it gives me access to people that I wouldn’t know otherwise.

I use my fan page as sort of a catch-all for my art related activities. I post my best blog articles on there, my latest portrait commissions, my recent abstract paintings, deals and promotions, art classes, workshops… anything I think people might be interested in.

The beauty of this type of marketing is that you never have to feel bad about promoting yourself; your audience has already expressed their interest in what you’re doing and given you permission to include them in your marketing efforts. The only people who are fans are those who want to be fans.

Also, while my fan page hasn’t generated a huge amount of sales, it has facilitated a few commissions that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

One of my worries about starting a fan page was the amount of time it would take to manage it. So far, this has been a non-issue. Because I share most of my work and news on this blog and my other websites already, all I need to do is “share” the link on Facebook. A fan page actually requires very little work.

Benefits of Facebook Fan Pages

• easy way to reach lots of people
• not a huge time commitment
• exposure to people you don’t know
• free marketing to an already interested audience
• opportunities for new clients/commissions
• networking
• keeping in touch with clients

Still on the fence? If you’re already active on Facebook, a fan page is definitely worth the small amount of effort. Try it out and see what happens. If you want more info, read Fan Pages for Artists.

And if you’re on Facebook, come join me at my fan page!

Learn to… Art! Has a Newsletter!

Feb 7, 2010 Special Bulletins Leave a comment

Cast your eyes to the right of the screen and scroll down below the Popular Posts section and you’ll see it: the newsletter!

All you need to do is enter your e-mail, then check your inbox for the confirmation link (don’t forget to check your junk folder just in case!).

What’s in it for me?

 Well, you’ll get updates about the best and latest info on the blog, you’ll get juicy tid-bits from the rest of the web that you won’t see on the blog, you’ll also be the first to know about upcoming promotions and/or giveaways, as well as you will recieve info about my work and exhibitions.

What if I already subscribe to the RSS Feed?

These are two totally different things! The RSS feed lets you see the blog content (the articles, etc) without actually visiting the blog site. The newsletter will be entirely separate of the blog and contain information and resources that you won’t find on Learn to… Art!

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