I enjoy art quite a lot. I enjoy looking at art, learning about art and creating art. The creating part is what I’m having difficulties in. I have a lot of different interests in art. I love watercolor, oil and acrylic painting but I have more to learn about using each medium. I have a good amount of practice with graphite drawing but I’m sure I need improvement. I especially love drawing the figure. I’d really like to produce digital illustrations using Photoshop and Illustrator. Pixel art is just so awesome I want to create my own but it’s time consuming and I think I need a better grasp of art concepts to come up with anything decent. I think, because I have so many interests in art, I have a hard time improving in any of it.

I think the best way to improve each skill, I need to dedicate a week for each. One week I’ll concentrate on graphite drawings and then I’ll dedicate a week to watercolor painting. You get the idea. I’ve found a way to improve my figure drawing skills by doing 30 second gestures of poses at Posemaniacs everyday. I’ve done plenty but I think I still need improvement. However, I started strong and drew everyday, now I draw when I remember to or have nothing else to do.

I’d like to say I’m passionate about art but if I don’t bother finding time for it (there’s never NOT enough time) then I’m not really passionate am I? I’m not exactly a driven person so I definitely need to find the motivation.

Are you interested in creating different types of art? How do you find time for each? Is dedicating a week good enough? Please share your tips and experiences.

Below is the first result. As you can see, I didn’t put enough paint on the block. Plus, the paper I used is for watercolors. Unfortunately, I don’t have any decent printmaking paper. Anyway, I quite like the resulting texture. Delicious.

Next, I decided to try this thick, handmade paper and it didn’t take the paint very well.

Even though neither of these came out the way I wanted them to, I still like the result — mostly because of the textures.

Have you been experimenting with art, writing, or something else? Are you enjoying it?

A couple years ago I bought a 4×6 Speedball linoleum block to play with but totally forgot about it. Well, just a couple days ago I found it and decided to take a stab at it. Two (not very serious) injuries later, here’s the result:

See it at my Deviant Art gallery.

My carving was kind of sloppy and I slipped a couple times, which resulted in two tiny stab wounds on my right thumb. I may have carved too hard — I don’t know. Here’s a shot of the block:

Despite hurting myself and having difficulties with carving, I’m doing this again. For now, I’ll experiment with this block using different colors and possibly adding new textures. Fun!

A Question For You

What have you recently started doing that you haven’t in a long time? Did you feel a little rusty?

For day 73, I continued working on the logo for my husband’s ceramic business. He sat down with me whilst I worked on this so I had a lot of input from him. I may tweak it some more but he asks not to make any major changes. If you’re interested, you can see the sketch and grayscale version.


I recently watched Lost in Austen and I loved Mr. Bingley. So, I decided to paint him for practice. Below is from days 95 and 96.

Tweaked the previous Shizucor logo. I tried to see what it looked like with no gradients and without overlapping letters.

On day 100 of the daily365 challenge, I thought I’d continue painting Mr. Bingley. I will finish this someday!

I had sketched out the alphabet based on the square. For day 101, I started drawing them in Illustrator. I’ve only gotten as far as “K” but I will continue working on this just for fun.

Throughout this week, I’ve been focusing on pixel art by creating a mushroom house. I’ll post my pixel progression this Monday.

If you’re taking part in the daily365 challenge or just create art on a regular basis, share a link to your favorite piece(s)! I’d love to see them. :)

Before I discuss my blatant failure in this challenge let me show a few of my creations.

daily365 Logo

Me as a Teen

Painting the Eye Practice

See the rest of my digital creations at my daily365 gallery on Deviant Art. My sketches on paper have not been scanned.

My failing to continue this challenge is not a mystery to me. I know exactly why I’ve stopped:

I lack motivation.

Maybe I’m not passionate enough about designing or drawing everyday but I really do enjoy doing both! I can’t say, “I’m too busy.” I do have work and daily chores to do but I’m not short on time.

You, dear creative reader, may be able to help me. What do you do to motivate yourself to make art for you? Your input and advice is certainly appreciate!

This year, I occasionally created something for fun and practice but I feel like I need to do that more often! For 2010, I’ve decided to do 3 different things:

• Participate in Project 365: I’m no photographer but I still enjoy snapping pictures.
• Draw something everyday
• Design something everyday

Ideas

• I’d like to improve my knowledge of anatomy so I’m going to draw a body part for a whole week once a month.
• Draw a small object from life
• Draw a pose from PoseManiacs.
• A popular suggestion: Design a typography poster using a quote.
• I love Jessica Hische’s Daily Drop Caps and I love pixel art so I’m planning on creating small pixel letters (hopefully) as beautiful as Jessica’s!
• With regards to web design, I’m thinking of designing a business card site in different styles like grunge, minimal, retro and so on.

Those are just a few ideas I have in mind. Please help a girl out and suggests some design and drawing activities!

Resources

If you’re taking on this project but have no idea what to do, by all means try my ideas. Below are a few websites to help and inspire you:

• 101 Projects for Artists and Illustrators by Dani Jones.
• Illustration Friday: Every Friday a one word topic is posted for participants to illustrate. Fun!
• Done Daily Design Workout: This was for 2008 but this is a good place to go to for some ideas.

Are you going to challenge yourself to create something everyday? Have you done something like this before? If so, how successful were you in keeping up?

Canvas size:

Exactly 150 width x 50 height

Colors:

Exactly 8

Other requirements were no transparency and no animation. The theme was music – we had to pixel someone listening to music. I thought creating an image of a belly dancer was perfect. It’s kind of a self-portrait because whenever I listen to belly dance music, I start dancing – even in my chair. Plus, I have aspirations of becoming a performer.

Anyway, here are the different phases:

I really have to thank the talented pixel artists at Pixelation for the development of this piece. I received plenty of feedback about anatomy and colors. The best feedback I got were edits of my piece by other artists. The edits allowed me to see the possibilities and drawbacks of my version. Well, enough blabbing! Here’s the final version:

I learned something about color usage in pixel art. I didn’t think to use the colors for the flesh in other parts of the piece like the flourish. This also applies to using colors other than flesh tones on the body like the purple and pink hues.

This practice really fueled my determination to give pixel art another try. The experience and new information I have will allow me to create better pieces in the future! Look out!

We were supposed to create a logo using our PJ usernames and were restricted to 32 colors, and a max height of 100 pixels. I was quite inspired by this masterful lettering by Alex Trochut. I basically started with a square and formed the letters within the box. I’m pretty happy with the letters, except for the “R”. I’m not quite sure how else to draw it, however.

First, I started in my sketchbook drawing from a photo of me, scanned it to Illustrator and created the line art with the brush tool and the white arrow tool. Finally, I colored it in using Photoshop.

• My picture
• Sketch
• Line art
• Background came from =cloaks at DeviantArt