It’s #ThrowbackThursday!
Here I am with my high school art teacher, Nancy Branca, winning some kind of prize for a painting of made of Stockholm, a place I'd never been to.
My mom had taken photos of Stockholm while on a trip. I made her photo into an acrylic painting. The real prize was my mom liked the painting so much she had it framed and it still hangs in her house in Leadville.
I still remember a lot of Miss Branca's advice about art, which I’ve detailed below:
Stand back from your work .
When you’re getting deep into a piece, try stepping back from it to see it from a distance. You will see new things and ways to improve the piece very quickly. With digital art, you can zoom out and see how it looks.
If you’re working from a photo, add small changes so that your piece is more personal.
It’s fun to make art look as realistic as possible, but it’s also fun to add your own flourishes and start developing a style. Cameras and photography kind of made hyper-realistic painting into more of a moot enterprise. Painting hyper real is great, but chances are good that your audience also wants your personal touch too.
When you draw, look at the thing you are drawing as much as possible.
It’s good to look at the model or object you are drawing and let your hand work while you are looking at the model. Looking at the page is ‘okay’ but try to look at the model as much as possible. Your brain will move your hand so that you follow the object whether you look at your hand or not.
There were a lot of other fun moments in high school art class, where I made fan art of Keanu Reeves and drew a lot of pictures from Victor Hugo novels for some reason! And, there’s so much advice that I didn’t list above, too.
I hope you enjoyed these tips from my art classes of days past!
Ra, more art!
Related blogs:
The importance of Personal Work
Who wrote this:
