Notes For Art Students & Aspiring Artists

*59 pages, Available as .epub

These notes supplement the videos in my series Notes for Art Students. They are intended to give art students and aspiring artists an understanding of the thought and creative processes that are relevant to all aspects of the visual arts. The notes can be dipped into at random.
 
Nothing can equal the freshness of a watercolour that has fallen on the page without the guidelines of a preliminary sketch.  To paint directly takes courage, all the more so when the figure is involved.  But the end result is worth the sacrifice of acres of failures en-route.
In terms of drawing materials, anything goes. Toulouse Lautrec and Auguste Rodin at times resorted to brown wrapping paper. I often resort to the only materials at hand: a ballpoint pen and a couple of sheets of photocopy paper. Indeed, I feel more liberated on sheets of newsprint than I do on the finest all rag watercolour paper.
My struggle with the landscape gained a painful inch today.  Rather than driving off in search of a grand subject, I put down my sketching stool outside my own front door.