Your talent with hair is what caught my eye and brought me to your blog. You paint hair very well.
I love to use dry brushing for my painting projects - furniture and the like. I'm not an artist like you - you are very talented.
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thanks; I used to struggle so much with hair; for some reason my mind just couldn't grasp how to render it properly, I was always too focused on the details and it would end up looking pretty bad; finally it "clicked" that I only need to focus on the shadows and highlights and then put in the detail and things started to get much better for me!
Yeah, dry brushing is quite fun and can look really good!
I genuinely believe that you could be doing what I'm doing with enough practice in this area; I am self taught. I plan on making a video series where I can go much more in depth with all my techniques and the things I have learned over the years.
Maybe. I've tried painting and I suck....seriously. I have a brand new set of acrylic paints, brushes and good paper. I just can't do anything with it. I tried some youtube videos. I want to paint bc I like to think I think like an artist. Maybe that's why I use my camera. That's art too.
I'll watch your videos. :)
Photography certainly is art too!
I feel very confident that before you can paint you have to be really good at drawing (and when I say really good I am actually referring to drawing theory - proportions, perspective, value, etc - because those are the requirements to making great art no matter the medium). In general, using a pencil is easier than using a paintbrush in the sense that graphite is easier to control than paint and so mastering those foundations is easier to do with graphite. Once you have reached a solid understanding of those things - and have put the practice into each of them - then moving onto paint is surprisingly easy. Of course, there are still a lot of nuanced things you have to learn for each medium. But I was surprised how "easy" it was to move to watercolor even though I had never painted - but it was very clear to me that my years of drawing was what enabled me to jump right into watercolor and still have stuff at least look half way decent lol I am far from a master at watercolor and I have a long way to go still!
Anyway, I think you'd be surprised to find that if you focused on improving your drawing skills your painting skills would also immediately increase. Lastly, something that I learned with watercolor and I imagine would apply also to acrylic is to limit the number of colors you are using. Do some monochromatic paintings and then limit yourself to just 2 or 3 colors and stick to those colors until you see the progress you want to see. When I did this for watercolor it immediately paid dividends.