Doing art (again)
When I got into drawing a few years ago I found that I had a serious discipline problem when doing stuff on my own. In a way, I still have it. Back then I tried to tackle it by enrolling a formal art school, thinking that giving money for it would force me to keep up the pace, and while it did just that for the duration, the momentum didn't exactly carry over beyond school, and the classes did not live up to my expectations as they relied too much on individual effort to emulate and not enough on transparently explaining the techniques.
I did a whole lot there, but kept feeling it was not enough, and, seeing as how I was a total beginner, I sucked and felt I wasn't progressing fast enough.
The works I did back then were posted here, on the old web, and I still have them on me. We mostly did charcoal techniques and I took photos every time.
Two years ago (has it been that much?) I started drawing (again) every day on paper. I brought those sketches with me here in Ireland and have since scanned them, although the quality is what it is and not all of them are presentable because of it. I don't have a scanner so I was at the mercy of the girl working at the photocopying service. I kept this up a couple of months, but life intervened, I suppose. Work obligations intensified, which ate up both my time and energy, and then I changed jobs and had to deal with that and moving to another country... and now I am here and trying again.
I bought myself a Wacom graphics tablet, a Cintiq model, to do art digitally (yet again), but getting back into it is slow. So I've decided that the time for half measures has passed and tasked myself with drawing or painting every single day. Vesna got me a small sketchbook for when I'm not near the PC using the tablet and I challenged myself with a daily sketch as well. My current software combination is GIMP and Corel Painter. I started to doodle two weeks ago so it tied in nicely. Since I'll probably have some insights along the way, I'll try to assemble them in tips for myself in the future when I forget (I will definitely forget), or for whomever finds them useful. In a way I intend to document the process of learning to do art. I'll be posting my discoveries here so you can expect that kind of articles as well.
I have an old DeviantArt account that has been collecting dust for some time now so I decided that I'll keep updating it and not just start over. On a side note, DeviantArt uses the oEmbed API and Vesna did her best to get the results to display here. I had to provide her with an updated JSON list of the latest artwork that I'm parsing on the server with a simple cron job. We have our fingers crossed that this time the drawing and painting will kick off. You can see it displayed here, but mostly on the DeviantArt profile.