A Free Guide to Pencil Shading Techniques for Beginning Artists, from Network, is chalk full of shading techniques to help you take your art to the next level. Shading adds depth, character, and emotion to your drawing. Shading is what differentiates an amateur drawing from a fully expressive piece of art.
It’s the materiality—or, for many, that’s at least part of it. The buttery rich feel of oil paint moving across the surface can be a siren song for a painter.Bernard Chaet, a notable artist and Yale University professor, took a keen interest in the physicality of oil painting throughout his career. His book An Artist’s Notebook: Techniques and Materials continues to have relevance for readers today.
No Studio? No Problem!There are people who can sleep anywhere — in a car, on a couch, even standing up. I’m not one of those people. And it is the same for when I find the time to make art. I can’t just plop down and do it anywhere. It doesn’t feel right, and I get distracted too easily by other stuff.
8 Steps to Your First Rose PaintingArtists who want to grow their flower-painting skills can learn a lot from painting what Katie G. Whipple calls “floral portraits” — studies of single blooms, painted from life, petal by petal.With this approach, you slow down! You observe the beautiful nuances of a particular flower, truly seeing it as an individual work of nature.
What makes an artist an artist? Certainly, we are unique individuals with our own creative impulses and drives, but we do have so much in common. So step away from the canvas, put the paintbrush down, and see how many of these “signs” apply to you! It’s a fun list sent to me from pictureframes.com, and I chuckled out loud over a few of them, so I thought I’d share them with you.
Silverpoint styluses abound in various types, and can often also be used with gold tips for goldpoint.What is silverpoint drawing?Also known as metalpoint, silverpoint is an ancient technique in which silver wire is applied to paper with a stylus in the same manner as a pencil. The gauge of wire used is somewhat determined by an artist’s preference.