Painting is easy. You push coloured muck around until it looks right.

[Toni]

Nice!

I have no 'drawing' talent.. .at.all. Like so many, my skill level stopped increasing at age 5.

My wife started painting acrylic on canvas.. Abstract / Impressionist stuff. She's been at it for only 3 years or so, but last year she sold one of her paintings at a gallery.. for like a friggin lot of money. I was amazed... mostly because I don't "get" abstract art. My own failing.

I AM a darn good woodworker, though. So I support my wife's hobby by building her canvases. I use some pretty heavy weight cotton duck that she picked out and I get by the roll. I fabricate the stretcher arms from basic lumber stock. I can make any size canvas, up to 12 foot by 12 foot. She generally asks for 4 x 3 or 2 x 3. Very large format stuff.

She paints on canvases that would have cost over $200 to buy, that I built for around $30 in materials.

Technically, they are "strainers", not "stretchers"... but they are Archival Quality.

It's an interesting question: who gets discouraged and why?


Like you, at about age 5, I had a babysitter who was very good at sketching with pencil and paper, plentiful supplies. Instead of being discouraged by her talent, I was inspired and wanted to do what she did. I did a fair amount of sketching, pen and ink, pencil, charcoal, etc. for quite a number of years. Not much painting: that took money and that was always short supply.

I haven't really done much for...years. Partially, it is time constraints. But also: my husband, under the strain of too many worries and too little sleep as a grad student worried about spending money on art supplies and also used to tell me that artists were crazy--his grandmother was an artist and was crazy....Now, his grandmother wasn't actually crazy as far as I can tell, but she was very ego driven and dramatic, as were many members of that branch of his family. Two things are interesting to me, for different reasons: His step-grandfather was also an artist and my husband never referred to him as crazy. BTW, he loved both his grandmother and step grandfather and had a good relationship with both as far as I can tell, although they were gone by the time we met). The other is that my husband's words actually discouraged me. That surprises me still. No amount of criticism from anybody in my life discouraged me from doing something I loved to do. But my husband's words, coupled with serious time constraints (full time work plus baby) and budgetary constraints did seriously limit my artistic endeavors. Why? I honestly don't know.

I'm under no illusions that the world lost an important artist when I stopped. But I did lose something important and I'm not sure why my husband's opinion had that effect. I mean, I don't change how I dress or cook or what music I like because he doesn't like it. Why art?

I don't know. It's just an interesting question about why one stops something one might otherwise continue to do because of some external catalyst...

 

[ruby sparks]

Nice!

I have no 'drawing' talent.. .at.all. Like so many, my skill level stopped increasing at age 5.

My wife started painting acrylic on canvas.. Abstract / Impressionist stuff. She's been at it for only 3 years or so, but last year she sold one of her paintings at a gallery.. for like a friggin lot of money. I was amazed... mostly because I don't "get" abstract art. My own failing.

I AM a darn good woodworker, though. So I support my wife's hobby by building her canvases. I use some pretty heavy weight cotton duck that she picked out and I get by the roll. I fabricate the stretcher arms from basic lumber stock. I can make any size canvas, up to 12 foot by 12 foot. She generally asks for 4 x 3 or 2 x 3. Very large format stuff.

She paints on canvases that would have cost over $200 to buy, that I built for around $30 in materials.

Technically, they are "strainers", not "stretchers"... but they are Archival Quality.

It's an interesting question: who gets discouraged and why?


Like you, at about age 5, I had a babysitter who was very good at sketching with pencil and paper, plentiful supplies. Instead of being discouraged by her talent, I was inspired and wanted to do what she did. I did a fair amount of sketching, pen and ink, pencil, charcoal, etc. for quite a number of years. Not much painting: that took money and that was always short supply.

I haven't really done much for...years. Partially, it is time constraints. But also: my husband, under the strain of too many worries and too little sleep as a grad student worried about spending money on art supplies and also used to tell me that artists were crazy--his grandmother was an artist and was crazy....Now, his grandmother wasn't actually crazy as far as I can tell, but she was very ego driven and dramatic, as were many members of that branch of his family. Two things are interesting to me, for different reasons: His step-grandfather was also an artist and my husband never referred to him as crazy. BTW, he loved both his grandmother and step grandfather and had a good relationship with both as far as I can tell, although they were gone by the time we met). The other is that my husband's words actually discouraged me. That surprises me still. No amount of criticism from anybody in my life discouraged me from doing something I loved to do. But my husband's words, coupled with serious time constraints (full time work plus baby) and budgetary constraints did seriously limit my artistic endeavors. Why? I honestly don't know.

I'm under no illusions that the world lost an important artist when I stopped. But I did lose something important and I'm not sure why my husband's opinion had that effect. I mean, I don't change how I dress or cook or what music I like because he doesn't like it. Why art?

I don't know. It's just an interesting question about why one stops something one might otherwise continue to do because of some external catalyst...

Short response: You should definitely take it up again.

Start modestly. A few pencils and some paper.

Or get a free or cheap app for your computer. I've recently started sketching and drawing that way.

It's therapeutic and rewarding, no matter what the results.

 

[ruby sparks]

No need to push muck around these days:





Those were done on my second-hand (and therefore old and cheap) ipad. Images reduced to very low quality to get them to post here.

And if you want to cheat (as I did below) you can import a pic or pics to trace from, combine, play with and delete after.

If your device has a camera, you can also snap a scene and use that to draw/paint over. I don't have a problem with 'cheats' of that sort. Canaletto probably used a camera obscura, ffs, which for its time was pretty much exactly the same procedure.




Drawing/'painting' on a computer device isn't just non-messy, with no set-up and clear-up time, it's portable, easy to do corrections (using undo button or discard button if it's going wrong, in which case you can revert to a saved one instead of starting again) and best of all it's quick, and you can do short stints while on a train or in a waiting room. It's also a doddle if you want to do another version (perhaps in different colours or with modifications or 'special effects' or whatever) of one you've already done (just by saving the old one first) so you can do versions of related pics, maybe for hanging as a 'set' in small, cheap Ikea frames on your wall. Most modern printers will produce acceptable results on half-decent or even just plain ordinary printing paper. Framing your pics can suddenly make them look a lot better (especially if you sign and date each one with a 'real' pencil).

Copies ('limited edition copies' if you want to number them) can be given to friends and family as presents and are much cheaper than a bought equivalent, and more personal, especially if you, for example, do a scene near them or one of their pets. Once, I got a pic printed on a coffee cup for someone.

Also, you only need one implement to draw with, not several (not even an eraser, since they're on the app). I tried an expensive stylus at first and it was a disaster. Too many bloody functions, and the bluetooth connection to my device led to a brief delay between my drawing a line and it appearing, which made things next to impossible. After that, I bought cheap styluses (about £2.50 each) and they're great and last a long time. They have the rounded soft tips, but can do fine lines if you select fine lines in the app. Zooming in and out is great for doing detail.

I still go oldschool and sketch and doodle in pencil or pen too. If I remember, I like to carry around a very small sketch/notebook and a pencil, in my car or my man bag or whatever, or I have one sitting handy in the TV room, because most of what's on tv is crap, and brain-sapping, and not as relaxing an activity as it seems. Ditto for surfing the net. I often come away with nothing much to show, even intellectually or in terms of personal satisfaction, for the time spent.

 

[Kharakov]

lol... you carry around sketchpads for art... I scribble equations on mine.

 

[Bomb#20]

lol... you carry around sketchpads for art... I scribble equations on mine.

<Two strangers meet in a Paris bar, dispute the nature of beauty, and challenge each other to a creativity contest. They scribble madly on scraps of paper for a moment, then compare results...>

Picasso: But, that's a formula!

Einstein: So's that.

- "Picasso at the Lapin Agile"​

 

[Kharakov]

lol... you carry around sketchpads for art... I scribble equations on mine.

<Two strangers meet in a Paris bar, dispute the nature of beauty, and challenge each other to a creativity contest. They scribble madly on scraps of paper for a moment, then compare results...>

Picasso: But, that's a formula!

Einstein: So's that.

- "Picasso at the Lapin Agile"​

But that's a joke!