Art In A Busy World

  Saturday April 3 at 3PM will be my next live stream. The set up will be like last time where I had the reference up on the screen but the part of the screen showing the demo will be larger than last to give a clearer view of what I am doing. Also I will be demonstrating from one reference image the entire time giving us all a longer time to finish the image. I will spend some time talking about paints, paper and brushes before I begin to paint. I have been working with gouache since High School. I first saw the medium used by artist in one of my favorite artbooks at the time, The Studio. The book featured the works of Catherine Jeffery Jones, Barry Winsor Smith. Michael Kaluta and Bernie Wrightson. During my High School years at the High School of Art and Design I also had an instructor who worked in gouache. As I learned more about illustration I saw that a lot of early illustrators worked in either gouache or Casein (a medium very similar to gouache). Today I still enjoy using the

Watch and learn from my demo or grab some paper and pencils and draw along with me from the reference provided. Saturday March 20th on my YouTube Channel at 3PM EST.

Initially we were on lock down in NYC when this Pandemic hit. I was furloughed and even though New York isn't on lockdown now I am still furloughed. During that time I got a lot of sketching done and collected those sketches in two books available on Amazon. In this preview I flip through the pages to share my sketches and since I am still on Furlough I hope some might be interested in picking up a copy. Links below. Sketchbook 2 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08RRJ8XNW Sketchbook 1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BBX4BN4

 Rebelle3 is a great software made by Escape Motions. At $89.99 it's not to expensive. The only thing you would have to be sure of is that your computer is able to handle the software so I would recommend having more than the minimum requirements before you purchase the software. The great advantage in this software is that the brushes do a great job at mimicking the real thing. In this case it is the impasto look of the acrylic brush that I show in the video below. If you are interested in the program you can find it here  https://www.escapemotions.com/shop   

Not to long ago I upgraded my computer. It was not able to run some of the graphics smoothly although my computer met the minimal requirements when I purchased them. Some worked better than others but I also ran an recording software to record the progress of my painting and this slowed down the computer even more. At first I upgraded windows to 10. That helped for a for some programs but others like Rebelle required more from my computer. So I upgraded my CPU from an i5 to an i7, I put in a new graphics card (NVIDIA series 10) and finally added 8 more gigabytes to my RAM bringing it to a total of 16 gigabytes. This all seemed to have done the trick and with my computer up to speed I am able to run my programs without any hiccups. Below is a video from my YouTube channel in which I am working on Rebelle 3 with a lot more freedom then I had previously.

Starting in May of 2018 I made a commitment to keeping a schedule of sketching/painting daily. I worked a 9 to 5 and on my lunch hour I would close the door to the room I worked in and began to sketch. At the same time I may or may not have sketched early in the morning before coming to work and late in the evening when I got home but that hour was always dedicated and set apart for sketching. I kept to that schedule like a religion. They were just doodles at first. Mostly from imagination. Then after awhile I started to collect reference photos either taken by myself or purchased online. I also looked around for websites that had royalty free photos.   The consistency did more than to help me get better technically, it also made me want to test and push things beyond what I was comfortable doing. It made me confront the weakness in my drawing as well as my tendency to rush to the finish instead of slowing down to observe and learn. If I was not committed to drawing everyday