Cheap DIY Holiday Decoration

Inexpensive ways of decorating jars, candles, and more for any holiday season. Many of use buy lots of decorations and crafts materials and forget them in a drawer or just use them once. This short video will jumpstart your imagination with a different approach to using your materials. Great for home, office or as a little way to make your gifts prettier.





Music: "Deck the Halls B" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

DIY cheap canvas panel alternatives

Cheap, light and a great way to recycle and use the materials you have around. They will help you to go past the fear of messing up a good and expensive canvas panel when trying new techniques. 

Hope this video jumpstart your creativity and help you come up with more ideas to create your own canvas panels or painting surfaces. If you don't have canvas fabric you can use a few layers of a thinner fabric layered over your substrate or a thicker fabric and simply prepare it the same way I did here. 

There are other ways to create nice and inexpensive painting surfaces. Check some of my other posts for more ideas:

Painting surfaces: Art wood panels and how to prepare them for painting

Chipboard art journal

Digital portrait study and speed up video

 Here is may realistic digital study portrait, drew with Manga Studio 5x. I wanted to keep it within a one hour frame, but still went 5 minutes over. This was a great exercise to do and it was fun to learn a bit about how the program works and what I can do with it.

For reference, I used Rembrandt's Portrait of Haesje van Cleyburgh. There are many issues glaring back at me in terms of resemblance, but I am happy with what I have accomplished with the program so far.


Here is the speed up video, enjoy!!

Painting surfaces: Art wood panels and how to prepare them for painting

Art wood panels were used by the Old Masters, before stretches canvas appear and are still use by some artist today. They are a nice, although sometimes an expensive alternative to paint on. I found they are also a good option for painting studies and practice; depending on the medium used, both sides can be used saving money (as long as you find a cheap alternative) and space in your home .

They are also great for finished pieces, but I would recommend a good quality wood and careful preparation for that. It is important to seal and protect all the wood exposed surfaces.

Painting  on panel is a gratifying experience and proof to be a good support for different styles of painting. As long as it's surface is prepared with the appropriate medium (pastel ground, gesso, watercolor ground, oil ground, etc) it is a very versatile support. Also, the possible shapes are a great jumpstart for the artist creative imagination.

It is always interesting and gratifying to explore different art supplies and mediums, and so it is with different painting surfaces.

Here is a quick video briefly showing how I prepare my panels for painting and some of the other alternatives I have found to the most expensive art wood panels in the market.

Watch me paint a bit while I review a new canvas notebook and new brand of acrylic paint

Check out this speed up painting while I review Cottonwood Arts canvas notebook and a new brand of acrylic paints, Twinkle Verse The Essentials (available in Amazon).

Final faces for the 29 faces challenge

These are way overdue, I finished my 29 faces challenge a few days ago. I decided to practice with small faces, trying to focus just on the shadow shapes. It was challenging for me to work this size, because it forced me to look at shapes and I kept trying to go for details. A very good exercise though, it helps to teach observation and to work from large shapes to smaller ones.

 Faces 21-26

Faces 27-28

Face 29

I think I will keep doing this as warm ups as well as to teach my self to observe and have patience.

I really enjoyed this challenge, and I am planning to enter again next time. Click on the link above if you want to know more about it.

Growing in the imperfection

I have been having a hard time giving value and recognizing my quick and experimental sketches as something important and worth showing. Just because they don't fit the mental image I have of how I wanted it, doesn't mean they are not good. Nor the fact that I was just experimenting and playing around and things didn't work out as I thought they would.

Warm ups for figure drawing

 

 

Every little sketch, word, musical note, sculpture that is created, regardless of our opinion on it been successful or not, is worth something. It mark a step closer to our goal, to the final product, to something maybe even better than the first image we have of it in our heads.

Hand studies

  

That is the reason why I decided to start counting the faces I am making or struggling to make as part of the 29 faces challenge, regardless of how much they represent or not my best skills and art. This is not easy, I feel raw, exposed and vulnerable. Why? Because I want to show you my best, I want my art to touch you in the best way possible. And it is with that thought in mind that I am showing you the not so perfect, because I want to inspire you to practice and keep moving forward regardless what your art is; I want to grow in this artistic endeavor with you.

Faces #16 & #17 (Distress and Tombow watercolor markers)

Face #18 (Inktense blocks on Stillman & Bin Beta Series Sketchbook)

Face #19 (art journal page in progress)

Face #20 (Study for future painting)

Not everything is perfect, we are not perfect, but there is beauty in the imperfect and the possibility to grow. Looking at how we progresses in our respective arts is very rewarding and fill us we pride and even more motivation to continue honing our skills and craft.