I am a visual artist from Geraldton, Western Australia and have just joined up. I'm new to this emulation games thing and only joined up basically because of my Grand kids and me trying to understand what they are on about and have some fun with them on the pc. They All love to play in my studio and I have painted them all a particular painting of their own except for the littlest one who is three, she just asked for a Tinkerbell Painting, so I suppose once I have finished the competition paintings I'm currently working on and this mural commission I'll paint Tinkerbell.
I am an Art Teacher in Victoria, and I think it is great that you are doing a special painting for each grandkid. Hope the youngest likes her Tinkerbell when it is finished. I do a lot of craft/art with my kids, the most recent was Splatter Art shirts for them, which ended up with us all covered in paint, LOTS OF FUN. Also great that you are trying to get to know them in their world and also introducing them to yours, it broadens both yours and their horizons. Good Luck
Hey, that's pretty cool! I wish I had a grandparent like that. Or something, you know. I like using my hands and working with clay. But we have to drive a long way to get anything good, so all I can do is just use my mechanical pencils and whatever paper I can get my hands on. Not that I don't like pencil and paper. I've been working on drawing proportionate children that don't come out looking like they're actually the legal age of consent... Faces I'm perfectly fine with, but getting the ribcage the right size is incredibly difficult for me.
I love scratchboards, felt tip markers, really inky pens, mechanical pencils, silkscreening using autocut film, and oil based paints. Also, I hate drawing horses. They are the worst.
I usually carry a sketching pad around with me to draw, I usually draw in a cartoony/anime style of random things, but sometimes my doodles end up hugly abstract or random, I enjoy art alot.
I am now an architecture student, so basically, I draw all the times. I usually draw some surrealic sketches, but sometimes they all turned out ugly. Sometimes I ran out of idea of things to draw. Do you guys have any tips for situation like that?
What olliebot above me said. But since you love doing surrealic sketches, you might also get ideas from this: http://al.chemy.org/ This is a nice freeware that lets you mess around with different tools to make random sketches. It basically lets you "brainstorm" for ideas as you interpret the random shapes you generate. The below for example is something I created and then thought: Hey, that looks like an evil queen, that's something I could paint!
I was also wondering if anyone does any random things with paper, besides origami...Stuff like taking old magazines, newspapers, brochures or any of those that involve organizing the dimensions of each picture into a coherent theme and taking the time to make a collage really simple. I was really bored one day and I thought I might as well take the time to decorate all of my empty boxes (because they are so plain) and shoeboxes just for fun. When I started to do this I noticed that just the pictures themselves are better to use than anything with words in the picture. As long as the words don't get the viewer distracted, it's suppose to be all pictures. Who doesn't?
What i usually do is make a background make some kind of blob and just start refining features until i feel the pic is done
