Practice Makes Perfect

I remember back in college, we had a speaker come to talk about being a professional artist. One of my fellow students asked him what advice he could bestow on all of us. He said that if you would like to be good at something, then you need to practice it all the time. If you'd like to be better at drawing hands, then keep a journal just for hands and draw in it every single day. This wasn't necessarily profound advice, but it still managed to have a profound effect on the students who heard it. Many of us went out and purchased new sketchbooks and used them to better ourselves on whatever subject we felt we were lacking in.

Now, years later, I am finally putting this into practice again. I'm not focusing on a particular subject matter, but I am forcing myself to sketch something each and every day. There are no rules as to what the sketch has to be about, but typically I give myself only about 30 min to create it. Some days I'll be inspired to create something from my head, while other days I'll be short on ideas and will therefore devote my sketch time to observing something around me. I expect that some of these sketches will be good and some will be downright terrible, but I'm not going to allow myself to focus on these things. I'm only focusing on the act of creating and allowing whatever comes of it to remain as it is.

My goal with this is to keep the creative juices flowing so-to-speak. I would like to make sure that I continue to grow as an artist each and every day. So ensuring that I am creating something each and every day (no matter how small it may be) seems like a good way to do that.

I'm calling it my Sketch-A-Day Series and have added 5 sketches so far. I'm looking forward to adding each days' piece as they are finished.

Here are some of my sketches so far...

 

March 20,2014- A sketch I did while at work on my birthday.

 

March 21,2014- A concept sketch for my next painting

 

March 22, 2014

 

March 23,2014- some sketches I did while attending a musical concert at my church

 

March 24,2014

What do you do to keep yourself in tip top shape? If you could give advice to someone wishing to pursue your line of work, what would it be?

Mermaids On My Mind

Last April, I discussed some concept sketches that I had done for a client who wanted me to do a painting of her two daughters as mermaids.  I realize now that I never posted the final decision that my client made nor the final painting that was created for her. Sorry about that!! As always, life seems to get in the way of my good intentions.

Here is the final painting that was created for her.

Perhaps it's because of my work on this painting, but it seems as if I'm stuck on mermaids right now. Here are a few more mermaid pieces that I've created since then...

 

'Mermaid with the Golden Tail'

watercolor

 

 

 

Mermaid Necklace

                                                 
             Handpainted polymer Mermaid Barrettes

Do you ever find yourself getting stuck on a theme? What concept or theme have you gotten attached to? Children? Portraits? Landscapes?

Hope that your week is going swimmingly...  ;)