When drawing or painting, try to work from the top corner opposite your dominate hand to the lower corner of your dominant hand.  I’m right handed so I SHOULD start my drawings from the upper left and work across and top to bottom right.  Also, you could use a piece of paper or a dowel rod to rest your hand on if you need to work an area that has already been worked on.  This would keep me from smudging my drawings as often as I do, and possibly keep me from dragging paint everywhere.    I won’t go into how this came up this week, just trust me.  How’s that Beatle’s song go? IIIIIIIIIIIII should’ve known better….

Hello Peoples!

Very little has been accomplished at the studio for the last couple of weeks.  First, I went out of town with the Day Job only to come back to a mountain of end of the month paperwork.  THEN my bride has her gall bladder thingy, and since she’s down, I’m staying home to help with the kiddos.  This past week, I did make it down to do the drawing class, The Artistic Biker Live!, and Midnight at Oasis.  By Saturday, we had decided she could pretty much handle anything except picking Boy2 up.  That freed me up to take Girl2 dancing Saturday afternoon.  So, Sunday, I rewired the bathroom and the outlet for the refrigerator in the studio.  That SHOULD stop all the circuit breakers… breaking…  during the streams.  I bought quite a few other nifty items to clean up the wiring a bit, as well as some tools to finish out some of the trim work in the gallery. Things should start rolling pretty quickly now.  It’s really quite exciting!

This time of year we are ALL severely limited on fundage so we may be building with used pallets.  If you would like to help with that, you can go to artisticbiker.com and look for the DONATE button on the right side column and donate what you can.  If you can’t do that, please share this newsletter with everyone you know to help get the word out.  That helps more than you know.  Or better yet, Click Here to Join! artisticbiker.com/membership and help promote the arts in rural Oklahoma.

If you have any announcements you would like made in the newsletter or tweeted about incessantly, drop me a line and I’ll toot your horn for ya.  ;)  There were no announcements this week.

I’m going to keep the same password for a while so the password is: arting

The Classroom site is http://www.ustream.tv/channel/oasisgalleryok

Drawing Class: Negative spaces.  Drawing what’s not there to emphasize what is.

The past classes are moving into the Pay-per-view side of ustream and on artisticbiker.com as well. $2 lets you view them online at Ustream, $5 lets you download them at artisticbiker.com, and a $10/month membership gets you unlimited downloads from the site.

Click Here to Join! artisticbiker.com/membership

Share this with everyone you know!

Thank you

I have not tried this one yet.  I believe we will try this and the marble trick Thursday night during The Artistic Biker Live!  Jerry’s Artarama has a tip listed for painting with bubbles.  You make colored soapy water with dish soap, water and food coloring.  Then you blow through a straw to make bubbles and capture them on your page.  When it dries, BUBBLES!  Definitely have to try that one.  If any of you try it, send me pictures!

Hello Peoples!

Thank you for all of your kind wishes and prayers while my beautiful, young bride was going through her ordeal.  About this time (midnight) a week ago (Sunday) she was hit with chest pain that went through her back and up her shoulders. It took her to her knees.  She managed to get my attention and I immediately took her to the emergency room.  Her gall bladder was full of stones, was swollen and surrounded by fluid.  The doctors couldn’t tell all that in the ER.  It had just happened so her white blood cell count was still relatively low, and the cat scan didn’t pick up anything that small.  The ultrasound the next day did and we scheduled surgery.  She is at home now and has been all week in recovery.  I have stayed home with her.  We hate each other now.  :)  Neither of us can wait to get back to work and some sort of normalcy.  Hopefully, that means art classes, The Artistic Biker Live!, and Midnight At Oasis too.

This time of year we are ALL severely limited on fundage so we may be building with used pallets.  If you would like to help with that, you can go to artisticbiker.com and look for the DONATE button on the right side column and donate what you can.  If you can’t do that, please share this newsletter with everyone you know to help get the word out.  That helps more than you know.  Or better yet, Click Here to Join! artisticbiker.com/membership and help promote the arts in rural Oklahoma.

If you have any announcements you would like made in the newsletter or tweeted about incessantly, drop me a line and I’ll toot your horn for ya.  ;)  There were no announcements this week.

I’m going to keep the same password for a while so the password is: arting

The Classroom site is http://www.ustream.tv/channel/oasisgalleryok

Drawing Class: This week, let’s take a look at foreshortening.  What do you do when the thing you want to draw is poking out straight at you?

The past classes are moving into the Pay-per-view side of ustream and on artisticbiker.com as well. $2 lets you view them online at Ustream, $5 lets you download them at artisticbiker.com, and a $10/month membership gets you unlimited downloads from the site.

Click Here to Join! artisticbiker.com/membership

Share this with everyone you know!

Thank you

This week’s tip is a two-fer since you didn’t get a proper tip last week.  One of the things I have been focusing on during my 5 minute nude series has been foreshortening.  If you’re not familiar, foreshortening is how things look when they are sticking straight out at the viewer.  Imagine the finger pointing in the old Uncle Sam recruiting posters.  Two things make foreshortening difficult when working from a photograph. The first is that photographs flatten the image.  Especially with digital cameras, photographs look for a common light element and will blunt the shadows and highlights of a foreshortened object, just barely blurring things that are not on the plane of focus.  This can be corrected to an extent by using a long range lens when taking the photo, and most pros do.

The other problem is your mind.  You expect to see certain shapes when looking at an arm, leg, nose… You are programmed to recognize these things and will easily see the patterns even when they are not there.  You’ll have a tendency to draw the thigh muscle, for instance, even when it is actually obscured by a knee cap.  You can disrupt these patterns by turning the photograph and your drawing upside down.  Not only will this help you to draw what is actually there, but it will give you a chance to check the balance of your composition as well.  However, compositional balance is a topic for a future tip.