TinyPilot

Hi All...

I have started wondering about how I should use all the art books, training movies and similar I have purchased in the recent years.

For some reason I have gained a VERY bad habit of collecting all kinds of resources, but I don't really use 'em. I like to buy stuff, love to flick trough books and watch an awesome Gnomon DVD from time to time.

I have collected 1000's of other assets - brushes, reference images, pdf tutorials, online bookmarks. These are organized in every way possible including tags, folders etc. But again the joy right now is collecting and not using the materials.

So I am really just curious how you guys and girls are using your creative resources.

Do you read the books several times?

Do you try to test all exercises?

Do you sketch like a maniac the minute you see some wise words in terms of art creation?

Etc..

Oh and I hope you all enjoy the summer

I have been searching high and low for various creative training movies. I don't mind to pay for the movies but would prefer that they could be downloaded instead of mailed.

I am looking for creative training movies and not really interested in tech / software movies like the ones you find on Lynda.com and similar places.

Right now the only ones I know of are:

Gnomon DVD's
Massive Black DVD's
Digital Art Tutorials (not tried those yet as they don't look as good as Gonomons and Massive Blacks)

Anyone know something nice?

Landscapes, Nature, Enviroments, Characters or similar. Ultra realism not important...

All links are appreciated.

Hello All Fellow Artists...

Long time no seeing. I have been busy with a lot of stuff so I haven't been drawing a lot lately.. But recently I have dived into the manual way of working instead of digital and so far I really enjoy it

I have some questions that could probably just be answered with "Practice, practice and practice". But I will ask anyway and hope that someone is able to give some hints or a way they practice / master these issues...

Pencils, sketching and lines is where I have one of my "God I suck at this" moments way too often. A sketch normally starts out nicely for me, but after 10 minutes my lines become muddy, without life and in general way too busy to see what is right or wrong. I have a hard time trying to figure out when to make those "Very Visible" decisions and when too keep it almost invisible. I feel that making bold clearly visible lines "confirm" an important line in a sketch, but suddenly I want all lines to be like that and it becomes ugly, boring etc.. I have tried with different pencils, cotton gloves and paper, but no matter how hard I try I always end up with an outline that looks even and boring all around. So my question is really this - how do you manage to keep drawing/sketching very light and still maintain some sort of vision of where you wanna go. And when do you dare make those final "heavy" lines and where?

Size of drawing also gives me problems. I want to make small cute sketches, but again the first problem becomes even more visible. Should I just skip all the small stuff and work big? Again how do you manage to keep an overview of small sketches, so they don't become one big heavy mess?

Most of what I draw is small characters with cloth on... Lately I have tried to figure out if there are some rules about drawing the right lines for joint overlaps and cloth folds? I can definitely see when it's wrong, but I am just wondering if there are some good "simple rules" to follow when trying to draw joints and folds with a couple of good lines? Or is it really a matter of looking what everyone else do and just doing it until you can't forget it?

Hope someone will share some thoughts on this...

Enjoy the day
Thomas