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Why Artblagblog?

Having spent my life doing other things than art I have recently, at age 50 decided maybe this is something I want to revisit. To lose myself again in self-expression, mixing and drawing painting and creating. I looked into taking some courses, but time, financial commitments make this difficult. So…I am just going to blag it… and blog it while I blag. So as this is fresh in my head, expect some blog posts about acrylics, which is probably my favourite medium and one I understand reasonably well. I’ll also post some of my digital art on here.

A little bit more about me at this stage: I am a psychologist, coach, musician and songwriter. I am a deep thinker and a pragmatic idealist and I have drunk deep from the cup of experience and life. Although I do not ‘believe in god’, I would describe myself as spiritual. I’ll be posting snippets of ambient music here for everybody’s enjoyment, so watch this space and check in from time to time, to watch the journey unfold, and maybe inspire you to create and make changes in your life to pursue your passions.

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Learning Art on an iPad?

I have been looking for a way to bolster my drawing skills which have become very rusty over the years. I found a couple of great websites for drawing tutorials with many free resources. You find a review of them here.

I stumbled across this as I was considering upgrading my phone to an iPad Pro using my phone only for texting and calling and avoiding the waste of time of Facebooking simply because I have my phone on me at all times. The question was so ‘what if I could learn how to get the basics of drawing using an ipad?’

The sites are

Drawabox

Drawspace

and Proko

They all offer slightly different things, and some of the content in Proko and Drawspace is paid for, but seems to offer good value. Proko also offers materials for live drawing which may appeal.

It would save paper, space, whilst also digitising my learning. How much would any skills I acquire transfer to real media?

So now I have an iPad and I intend to post my creations online here. Watch this space.

I’ll be starting with drawabox, so expect some boxes first of all.

🙂

 

Materials 101 -part 2

Just spent £100 on buying some supplies. Some more acrylic tubes and some bigger brushes, sponge brushes cardboard and paper plus some technique books that seemed relevant. With the materials I already have that’ll come to about £150 including charcoal, pencils, some felt tips and sharpie markers….Next time I will get wise with buying in bulk online. Note to self find out what professional artists buy – more improtantly where they buy.

This should get me started trying out a couple of techniques I have seen folks using online.

While I am waiting for a time slot to unpack and get paint over my fingers, here is a photoedit done with an app.

 

 

Materials 101

To be an artist one needs some materials to work with, so perhaps step 1 is to buy the right materials. Moving away from represetational drawing and paint and looking at you tube videos gives me an idea what materials I actually need here.

My shopping list (work in progress)

Big bottles of acrylic paint

glaze

fixer

Scrapers and odd surfaces for making effects

  • large brushes,
  • small and large scrapers
  • palette knife

cardboard

canvas

plastic tarpaulin