Trad Art: Tools of Your Trade Week

Hello everyone, I am happy to be able to post another article as part of projecteducates Traditional art week. Today's painting is inspired by autumn, its coloring and tutorial will present an easy technique, very suitable for beginners and those, that want to just relax and play around with color - in my opinion. I hope you'll enjoy!

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Let's go over the materials. The list is pretty simple, you'll need a watercolor paper (I prefer 100% cotton paper for this technique, but make your paper at least 300 gsm, so that it can withstand a lot of water and layering), watercolor paints either in tubes or pans, watercolor brush (it should be soft enough and hold enough water), masking tape (important!), paper towels (also important, in watercolor technique paper towel often saves the painting from ending up in trash), water in a jar and a sea sponge. You can try any kind of sponge, but see what kind of texture it creates first, it should be something irregular.




When the base layer dries, mask some tree shapes with masking tape, again make sure that the tape sticks properly. I used the scissors to cut some edges of the tape to get some variation between the shapes. You can also cut the tape in half to get thinner tree shapes.



2. Now that you have all your trees masked, it's time to put down some bright colors. Since you are painting mostly foliage, there is no need to focus on clean and perfect wash of paint, just use a lot of water and let the colors bleed naturally. You can use a bit of table salt to create some bonus texture if you want. Let everything dry properly, before getting rid of the masking tape.

I used Pyrrol red, bright orange, neutral tint for the most part. My paints are Daniel Smith and Schmincke Horadam.




3. You can see that since I used rough paper with high texture, some of the paint bled under my masking tape. At first I thought I will scrap the painting and start over, but then I thought it's natural for birch trees to have some kind of dark imperfections on their trunks and kept on painting.

When you remove the tape, the tree trunks are flat. Grab a smaller, handy brush and add some darker paint around the edges to create shading and an illusion of roundness. With a small brush, paint a few strokes on the trunks. And here is when the fun begins. Grab a sponge, dip it into bright paint (not too thick) and stamp some foliage around the trunks. This is where you can really let your instinct tell you, when to place it, what color it needs to be to achieve balance, and just have fun.



4. Let everything dry and lastly, there is still need to Autumn here and there, I used neutral tint paint again, I like how dark and mysterious this shade is, yet not black and dull. In the end, I decided to experiment and mix media a little, grabbed some colored pencils and added white lines around some trees, a bit of extra texture and details. And I am very happy with the result! 




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VIDEO TUTORIAL:


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If you decide to try out this technique, let me know how it went - I am always delighted to hear your feedback 

 

It has been a wonderful week and we would like to thank to all the artists, who were kind enough to put their time and efforts into all the content, that has been created for this week. We really appreciate!!!

    

Here is a recap of all the articles presented this week:

Monday 27th:

 Intro by GeorgeXVII
 Portrait Sketch Challenge by TheGalleryOfEve

Tuesday 28th:

 Portrait sketching practices by jane-beata 
 Hands and how to handle them by Kiki-Tayler

Wednesday 29th:

 Discovering GothicNarcissus by GeorgeXVII
 Light and Colour in Photomanipulation by ImaginaryRosseArt

Thursday 30th:

 Making Eyes Pop using Photoshop by Ulysses3DArt
 Figure Drawing Tips + Tricks by Strooitje

Friday 31st:

 Traditional collage tutorial by chidori-art


We hope you enjoyed these articles and learned a thing or two during this week, and we are looking forward to another one, sometime in the future

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As you might have seen, we hosted a portrait sketch challenge this week, where everyone was a winner, because no single winner is chosen! Indeed, this was all about participation, which means everyone who participated and followed the rules will win 300  !

We are so happy to see how many people decided to participate! Your sketches are all so lovely! 

So without further ado, here is a feature of all the entries that followed the rules and thus are "winners" ! 


         
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 <da:thumb id="799258626"/> <da:thumb id="799604071"/>   <da:thumb id="799716861"/>
 <da:thumb id="799662808"/>     <da:thumb id="799838164"/>         

Please be patient with the prizing as it comes from communityrelations and can take up to 4 weeks 

Hello everyone and welcome to my entry for People & Portraits week here at projecteducate. I was tempted to include a watercolor tutorial (my usual stuff), but instead I opted for something more challenging, hoping this might be helpful to starting artists in particular

This article will be about the best portrait sketching practices for a starting artist. As a painter, I fell into a trap of spending twenty hours of painting to one hour of drawing and this cost me a lot. Painting is fun for me, moving water across the paper, playing with pigments, detailing with tiny brushes for ages is a great way to relieve stress. Drawing, on the other hand, demands more focus, thinking and planning, there is a great deal of technicalities that often makes me want to put it off to a time when I have full energy available. 

However, the importance of being a skilled drawer is undeniable, even when your main focus is painting. Even when not using lines in your work to communicate, your initial sketch must be as perfect as possible - its a skeleton of your painting and you can have the most beautiful textures in the world, once the proportion or perspective is off, the painting will miss the connection with the viewer.

With that being said, I noticed that my drawing skill lacks and this year I challenged myself to draw daily, as much as I can but for a minimum of two hours. I bought a few books, watched some video lessons and found a few methods, that work very well. I want to share them with you today.

1. Keep it small

My first tip is to downsize. Unless you are in a life-drawing session, it is convenient to make smaller thumbnails for two reasons. First one is time - when starting out, you will benefit from drawing 4 thumbnails in about 20 minutes much more than if you were to spend those minutes trying to do a larger drawing. 

Exploring four different subjects makes you learn faster than exploring one. Also, the more time you have to create a sketch, the more caught up in details and insignificant things about the subject you get. 

2. Keep it simple

As an exercise, I would suggest avoiding details in your sketching practices. By details I mean mostly individual hair strings, lashes, drawing eye browse as individual hairs etc. Your sketch should provide a very simple statement, in its rawest form. If (in the future) you wished to explore the subject in a more elaborate drawing or painting, only then it would be a good idea to spend more hours on detailing. In the sketching process however, the "detail trap" can cause you to lose your focus and get you off the point quickly.

3. When in trouble, turn it upside down

Have you ever experienced the proportion problem? (I do on a regular basis) It's the moment when you just can't get it right and the whole thing looks seriously off. The problem can sometimes be solved by turning your reference picture upside down and trying to draw it this way. By turning your reference, you force yourself to only evaluate shapes, angles and sizes without your brain attaching meaning to stuff. You will be surprised by the results, seriously, give it a shot

4. Keep it regular

I still have to point out, that only regular practice can help you really improve your drawing skills. The good news is that regular or even everyday drawing doesn't have to take long. The best idea is to make a daily practice that fits your schedule, 20 minutes is more than nothing and in my opinion, if you break that down into already suggested 4 thumbnail studies, this can work miracles. If you have two hours however, even better! (But don't spend them drawing lashes, seriously...)

5. Practice plus knowledge makes perfect

Practice makes perfect only so far. Hours of practice, if you have time to spare, can surely help, but unless you know what you are doing, your time spent practicing might just be ineffective. Sometimes it is needed to study for a bit to be able to "level up". Anatomy is one of the most fundamental things to learn when it comes to portrait sketching, and the internet is full of written and filmed resources to learn. Find the medium that makes it easiest for you to learn (for me it's video, might be a book for you) and give it a few hours, every month.

Some resources you might consider checking out:

 

Drawing references for practice (site lets you set your own interval to change photos to sketch):

line-of-action.com/

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   Do you have your own portrait sketching practices that work?

   Share them with us in the comments!

                                          

I am excited to be joining Community Week at projecteducate once again I will try to be short and eloquent (though I will surely fail at both), because - let's face it - a written article / tutorial keeps falling behind videos as an educational medium. Be honest, would you rather watch a video or read about the problem you are currently researching? And if the choice is to read, what would convince you to dig into one article over the other? In other words, what makes a tutorial / article readable?

In this article I will try to address some of the things, that might either encourage or discourage readers to engage and learn from your tutorial / article.

                                          

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1. Setting a goal

When you choose a topic for your tutorial / article, establish a goal that you want to accomplish with it, or a thought / information you are trying to communicate. Also, imagine what kind of person is this tutorial for, who is going to read it. Make this as clear as possible.

2. Length

Make it short and sweet, but informative. In my experience, written tutorials often contain a lot of unnecessary and long sentences, that could be trimmed without losing the essential information. Nothing discourages more than a wall of text. Nobody has time for that anymore.

Make sure that everything you include in your tutorial strongly relates to the point you are trying to make (follows the goal you set for your tutorial in the first part), and is written in a way that you think your goal audience best understands.

3. Visual variety (within text)

Use bold to distinguish essential information from the supporting text. This way, even an extremely impatient person can scroll through your tutorial and get the most important info just from reading bolded words. This also serves as an overview of what a reader can expect from the tutorial. Based on the information carried throughout the bolded parts, the reader can make a decision whether this information is what they were looking for and if its worth reading thoroughly.

Also, split the text into smaller, more digestible paragraphs. Use color and letter size to distinguish titles from regular text. Create heading for each part of your tutorial, if possible.

4. Captivating imagery

 

The more interesting and high-quality pictures you can include, the better. If this is your own tutorial and you are making the pictures by yourself, some of the most basic tips would be to use daylight to photograph and edit the pictures to be as nice and clear as possible. If you are using someone else's pictures, make sure to ask the permission beforehand. Also, if it's possible to include the video of the process, this is the most amazing way to demonstrate some approaches or techniques, in addition to your writing.

Just like with text, make sure all the included images and videos strongly relate to the point. 

5. Opening and ending

An inviting introduction to any written tutorial / article is a must, in my opinion. It doesn't have to be longer than one or two sentences, but it helps the reader to slowly transition from whatever they were doing before to focusing on your topic. I like personal touch in the beginning of my articles, feel free to include why you personally want to write about this topic. The reader can then imagine you as a person behind the writing and that is always a good thing.

Same applies to ending, always include a short wrap-up and it's a really good idea to ask questions directly to your community. It will create engagement and more feedback and it will also encourage people to reach out to you. 

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 EXAMPLES OF READABLE AND INVITING TUTORIALS / ARTICLES

Exploring pixel art by Yuukon is the kind of "short and sweet" article, that communicates a lot with using just a bit of text and images. It invites to read, promises fun time in just a few minutes.
Offsite poetry resources by WhiskeyDreamer makes a great and very readable resource even without images, this is possible thanks to the neat and organized structure of the text as well as using headings and paragraphs with bullet points.
Anatomy of the human face by NykolaiAleksander stands out mainly thanks to beautiful images provided and carefully executed by the author, thanks to these article clearly communicates a strong point before you even start reading.
Artist's Toolbox: Social media by Astralseed is short but clear regarding its point, with a particularly visible ending, that invites the reader into discussion, which gave the article more community engagement than average.

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I hope this article helps you to create or tweak some really amazing and easy to understand tutorials! Lastly, I will ask YOU a couple of questions and I would love if you write your thoughts in the comments!

   Do you have a topic you always wanted to write a tutorial about, but never actually did it?

   What is the hardest, most challenging part of writing an article / tutorial - for you personally?

                                          

Hello everyone!

From May 27th - May 31st, projecteducate will be running a People & Portraits Week, and we will need YOUR HELP to pull it off.

"People and Portraits" includes many different things and for this week we welcome not only Drawing and Painting with all relevant mediums (traditional or digital techniques, including photomanipulations and 3D art), but also Photography and Artisan Craft.

All art styles are welcome. Whether you'd like to share knowledge about your favourite approach in general, or go into detail about how to execute something - we'd love to hear from you!


Here are just a few ideas:

• Articles about specific techniques, traditional or digital
• Color mixing process
• People & Portraits photomanipulations / 3D art
• People & Portraits photography
• Artisan craft - People & Portraits
• Anatomy (face, figure)
• Tutorials and Walkthroughs
• Challenges or Contests
• Art Features
• Constructive Critique sessions
• Chat Events

If you are interested in contributing, please send a Note to projecteducate with your idea, including 'People and Portraits Week' in your Note's subject line.

We will get back to you as soon as possible!