Originally uploaded by ms. stephanie brown

Love everything this lady does, in this image a woman eats cherries. Slightly creepy but very cool.

Hands, Faces
Originally uploaded by robobop

I had friends in college who used to fill their sketchbooks like this. Me I preferred to work on clean pages, how could I tell what went with which sketch? Or is that the point?

To name a fear is the beginning of power over it
Originally uploaded by pageofbats

HOLY CRAP I love this person's work. Head over to their flickr page and look at everything, so very awesome.

Social media is no joke especially for artists. I have seen
artists create HUGE online presence for themselves through twitter, facebook, youtube
and ning. 2 artists who stand out beyond most others are Gary Reef and Jared Knight,
add to this mix a variety of mixed media artists like Suzi Blu, Tam “willowing”,
and the Moores and suddenly you have 
opened the doors to artists who have learned how to use blogs, youtube,
facebook, twitter and ning to create massive audiences for their art.

Through these social media sites these artists sell online
classes, in person workshops, have regular chats, hell I think Jared Knight
posts more TwitVids of anyone I’ve EVER followed combined, link to Etsy shops.
Think Jessica Doyle who sells prints of her original works, does a large amount
of illustration work and sells her originals via Etsy and blogs and buzzes on a
regular basis.

Artists can’t stick their head in the sand about social
media it’s here and it can make a HUGE presence for the artist, boost sales and
make sales in ways you may never have thought of before. When I leave the
workforce in 2011 to pursue my Grad School dream I hope that at least partially
I’ll support myself via my social networking sites and Ning.

Why am I on this rant? Earlier today I posited the question
MassArt VS RISD for my grad school. I posted this via FB and Twitter. When I
posted it to FB I had a group of RISD grads chanting RISD! RISD! RISD! While,
one lone MassArt undergrad said she loved it there. (She was also my former
student whom I sent to MassArt and continue to be friends with.) Now with FB
you could say it’s biased by my friends list, I have more RISD grads on my list
than MassArt grads. Thinking of this I posted the same thing to twitter. This
is where it gets interesting.

Within minutes of the posting I had a host of interesting
answers from several people across the country. Some of my regular twitter
friends* commented and of them, every single one said the same thing RISD.
Within a half hour I had a faculty member tweet at me RISD. I made a tongue in
cheek comment and he tweeted back at me. (you see this is how TWITTER works.**)
By the time I got home a former RISD student had tweeted at me. Get this: not
one comment from MassArt, period.

So I searched for MassArt while posting the question, is
MassArt on twitter, do they check for the tweets that mention them? I found
MassArt and followed them. A couple hours later they responded, asking me what
I was looking for. I wanted to tweet back at them; you kind of missed the point
and the boat.

My thought for the day is that if an artist isn’t on social media
pimping their work they are MISSING the boat and the point just like MassArt
did today. If an artist doesn’t blog, facebook or tweet they should. The same
for institutions like colleges and universities. Every institution SHOULD have
a social media person checking FB, twitter, etc every couple hours for people
like me positing questions to the masses. Then they should interact.***

Continue reading →

motivation
Originally uploaded by alshepmcr

I've asked this of myself and others, but if you read the description on flickr you'll understand what the image is really about. I lvoe that this has more meaning than just the first read.

heal
Originally uploaded by petalthrow

Lovely art journal entry in pastels, which I don't normally like much, but in this image they work quite well.

ArtisticBiker AKA Johnathan Manning puts together a weekly UStream show that you can watch live and chat with other viewers and him on Thursday nights. You can see it here.

After the show he puts together a video and puts it up on Youtube. It's like a condensed version of his hour long show. You miss out on all the great chatter but you still get to see him make art, which is always great stuff!

One of the great things about Johnathan is that he experiments with his materials. He uses cheap acrylic paints, cheap brushes and a variety of sketchbooks to make his art. He dabbles with spray paints and adds a lot of passion. Throughout all of his videos and UStreams you can see that he loves and is passionate about art.

This video demonstrates his experimental nature and it's great! 

2005
Originally uploaded by lessherger

In this image I'm working on 5x7inch 140lb Strathmore coldpressed watercolor paper. On the left side I peeled a label off a Maine root bottle and glued it in. I then scribbled on it with a permanent marker; probably a sharpie or sharpie clone.

I wrote on the page about how my parents are up at the crack of dawn and how my partner and I are on "city time" meaning we like to stay up until 1 am and sleep until 9, my parents like to say that the day is half over by the time we get out of bed. I used a permanent ink to write the entry. On the left side I used some watercolor. I also glued in a pocket that flips down and holds some more journaling on loose paper.

On the right side I used watercolor crayons to get the intense colors. I put them down very thick and used a waterbrush to blend them.

I could be all that you needed
Originally uploaded by princessoftheworld

I think that sometimes the most simple pages are the most inspiring.

I've been watching some videos on youtube of first year drawing student's sketchbooks. Sigh. They fill me with regret. I've written about how I spent much of my first several years of college slacking. Lots of personal growth not so much academic or artistic. My 1st year sketchbooks were seriously lacking in care and effort.  I'm pretty sure my professors were equally as frustrated with my lack of effort. That is not what this post is about. This post is about practice and sticking with something.

Previously (here) I wrote about how I got pissed off about my lack of skill in drawing noses and so I drew noses every night for a couple of weeks. It seems that I need to get frustrated with my art to work on it with any depth of effort. Most of the time, I skate through on my natural talent for color, color combination and composition than any effort. (This is the sort of shit that pissed off my art teachers in high school and my professors in college. Do you know how many times I've heard the phrase, "If you'd put forth just an ounce of effort…")

I've been drawing my sort of realistic but kind of off faces for a few weeks now, I've added a few to my art journal here and there. They all looked… The same to me. You could say that I have a style but really that style is lack of effort. I want a face so I look to my memory and draw a face that is strikingly similar to every OTHER face I've drawn in my life. Maybe the nose is a little different, maybe the eyes a little different…. But it's the same. What I needed to do was add a few more faces to my memory bank so I could draw from it a series of more faces. A series of different poses, eye shapes, lip shapes and different shading effects. So I've been going through image on flickr* and drawing, drawing like crazy, just like I did with the noses.

I'm working in one of my large jotter notebooks filled with inexpensive resume paper. 25% cotton, 24lb and with a laid texture. I'm working with 2 pencils the first is a 0.5 HB lead and the other is a 0.9 2B lead mechanical pencil.

Here you can see how I'm working with these images. First I lay in a rough  and light outline of the face and interior of the face. I start by working around the nose area, add in the eyes then lips. I then lay in the lightest area of shadow.

With the second image here you can see that I then go in and add the middle darks and darkest areas of tone. It then tighten up the details. I'm not working super light with my pencil. I consider these sketches so I'm not looking for perfection, more of a good sketch of the person's face. I'm particularly looking to capture the eyes, nose and lips well.

This was one of the first pages I worked on in my quest to add to my bank of mental image:

I hit my drawing stride somewhere in the image to the far right of the side view. I then drew the eye detail. You can see how I've become more confident just in these 4 images.

This is another page where I start out rough. I've been forcing myself to work on tough views of the face and the full side view is tough indeed. I then chose another tough view and an overhead from an angle FB self portrait. I hit my stride with her nose. 

In short you can see in just these few image how  I've been training my eye to SEE the image and training my hand to render in the  wished manner. It's been a lot of work I've been working hard on this, devoting about an hour a day to these drawings. I'm rough and out of practice but hte progression in just a few hours is heartening. I'm getting confident that I can pull from my memory a face that I can use in my art without too much trouble. Practice is what is making the difference here not some innate talent.

*because I knew I was going to show these images on  here I looked for images that were tagged with creative commons and NOT all rights reserved. I DID NOT keep track of them because for the most part, they do not look enough like the original to worry about anything. I often just picked a feature out to focus on, eyes, nose or lips. In most cases I notice that the camera washed out my lightest lights with the pencil.