Did you ever wonder if there was a single thing that could differentiate professional artists from amateur artists? Apart from the getting paid part, of course, which I assure you is not much of a differentiator. One of the most significant differences between painting as an amateur/occasional painter and painting professionally/full-time is the amount of exposure you have to your art materials. There is a full order of magnitude of increase, enough that it requires the professional painter to exercise extra care to keep themselves and others from harm. You hear the words “toxic” and “toxicity ..read more

Everyone knows that picture made with a pencil and paper is called a drawing, whether it's a scaled technical drawing, a loose sketch, an architect’s rendering, or even a scribble. But what is the actual definition of drawing and what part does it play in painting? In this blog post I go in search of answers to these questions and attempt to establish better understanding of drawing. On first glance, this may seem like a waste of time—I know that even a child can make a drawing with a pencil and paper. In fact, you may be wondering why I’ve bothered to write about it. You only need to search f ..read more

For almost the entirety of my painting career I have used digital photography to capture my reference photos. Even when painting in plein air, I've always taken a camera with me. I find that reference photos are much more useful if I can get them close to the way I want my paintings to look (I've never been much interested in doing it the other way round). The problem is that image processing with software like Photoshop and GIMP can be complicated, time consuming and difficult to replicate when doing all but the most basic things. But that changed when I discovered GIMP plugins, and I realize ..read more

On more than one occasion, I have mentioned that you can get great benefits from processing and adjusting your reference photos before you start to paint from them. In this blog post I want to introduce you to a sample automation script for GIMP (which I will hereafter refer to as a plugin) and show you how to create others like it that can perform incredibly powerful image manipulation with just a small amount of code. The benefits of this are twofold: you can do repetitive, complex image manipulation very quickly, and by having these operations in a script you can repeat them at any point in ..read more

A maquette is a scale model that is used by sculptors and architects for preliminary studies. Although they are not often used by 2D artists (at least among the ones that I know), they can be a useful tool in some situations. Because I have played around with modelling software in the past, I set out to test the idea that a virtual model created in the Blender software application could be used in place of a physical model. Blender uses a mesh of nodes, edges, and planes in combination with textures, virtual lighting, and a virtual camera to render an image. It is easy to learn to do some basi ..read more

Did you ever wonder if there was a single thing that could differentiate professional artists from amateur artists? Apart from the getting paid part, of course, which I assure you is not much of a differentiator. One of the most significant differences between painting as an amateur/occasional painter and painting professionally/full-time is the amount of exposure you have to your art materials. There is a full order of magnitude of increase, and it has significant implications for the care you must exercise in order to protect yourself (and others) from harm. You hear the words “toxic” and “t ..read more

Everyone knows that picture made with a pencil and paper is called a drawing, whether it's a scaled technical drawing, a loose sketch, an architect’s rendering, or even a scribble. But is that a good definition? What part does drawing play in painting? And what do we mean when we look at a painting and say, “good drawing”? In this blog post I go in search of answers to these questions and a better understanding of drawing. I know that with a pencil and some paper literally anyone could make a drawing. Even a child can do it. So, you may be wondering why I’m doing so much handwringing. Here’s a ..read more

For almost the entirety of my painting career I have used digital photography to capture my reference photos. Even when painting in plein air, I've always taken a camera with me. Early on, I realized that reference photos became much more useful if I could get them closer to the way I wanted my paintings to look (I've never been much interested in doing it the other way round). The problem is that I found image processing software like Photoshop and GIMP to be complicated and time consuming when doing anything other than the most basic things. But that all started to change when I discovered G ..read more

On more than one occasion, I have mentioned that you can get great benefits from doing some processing of your reference photos before you start to paint from them. In this blog post I want to introduce you to a simple automation script for GIMP (which I will hereafter refer to as a plugin) and show you that you can do incredibly powerful image manipulation with just a small amount of code. The benefits of this are twofold: you can do repetitive, complex image manipulation very quickly, and by having these operations in a script you can repeat them at any point in the future without having to ..read more

I nearly made the mistake of writing an extremely long-winded post about putting together a new artist’s statement. Then I realized that it had somehow become an obsession and it was going nowhere; the more I wrote, the harder it became to understand. You will be pleased to learn that I scrapped that idea and instead I will just put my artist’s statement here together with some notes that describe how I got to this point. I hope it makes for a better read and is still useful if you need help with writing one of your own. You can always read this in conjunction with my previous article. The bre ..read more