Can you recognize a tree when you see one? I'm going to take a wild guess and say you can. In fact, you can probably recognize a familiar face among hundreds of people. The amount of visual information we see every day gave us the confidence that we know what things look like, and that can be dangerous for artists.
Read MoreConnect and merge your shapes
Our eyes can trick us! When we look at a scenery or a finished painting. Our first glance is the overall shape of the scenery. However, when we look at our reference and start painting, our eyes start to focus on individual things. Our eyes have very narrow focus. When we look at something with just a tiny bit of depth, everything else around it quickly fade and blur out. Because of this, many students paint a scenery or portrait with many separate elements. They also tend to put too much emphasis and details in places that are not as important.
Read MoreDon't loose sight of your priority.
I am constantly living in between prolific artists and people who are busy with their lives in general. As an artist, I follow other artists on social media (Facebook, Instagram). And it is not unusual that I see some artists sharing new beautiful works every day. While I am happy to see new artwork from them every day, the little voice inside of me almost always ask me "look at them, they paint way more than you do, what are you doing?" However, I know for a fact that some of them are able to do so because they have more time then I do. Many of them are single, they don't have 3 kids, and they don't have other works. I on the other hand do.
Read MoreDelicate brushwork
Brushwork is a very personal part of the artist. In some way, it defines artist's work and style. To paraphrase what Mr. Zbukvic said in one of his lessons. "If there's anything that sets one artist apart from another, it's the calligraphy. It cannot be taught, and shouldn't be taught." And I agree completely. An artist's brushwork is an extension of his intuition, his/her natural response to the form and shape with his/her hand. However, I think this is still worth talking about because one of the biggest things my students struggling with is brushwork. These are some of the most common issues I discovered. I want to share them with you and also talk about how to remedy these issues:
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