hi my name is rae and i've been doing art hack videos since 2016. and at this point
i have tested pretty much every type of art hack under the sun we were talking good ones
all around i would say this worked out beautifully we're talking not so good ones
oh it's working oh it's working and ones that i don't even know why they're called
art hacks to be honest with you because they don't help at all so here we go
oh and out of all the hundreds maybe even thousands of art hacks and tips and techniques
that i've tried today i am going to show you guys the creme de la creme of art hacks these are art
hacks that i actually use these are actually helpful and fit into the technical definition
of a life hack as in a technique that is designed to make your life easier if you've been following
me for a while some of these art hacks you might have seen a million times on my channel because
they're just that good and some of these other art hacks are completely brand new life-changing
the moment talented brilliant incredible amazing show-stopping spectacular never the same and to
make this video even more helpful i encourage literally every single person watching this if
you know an art hack no matter how big no matter how small put that bad boy down in the comment
section below let's make this whole entire comment section this whole entire video like nothing but
useful art advice i want every type of artist to be able to find something useful out of this
video and of course not to be too shy about it i always get shy asking but if you haven't
subscribed please subscribe and without further ado here are my art hacks all right so for this
very first art hack we're gonna talk about a technique that i have used so much on my channel
it helps save time it helps you create muscle memory it's just all around it's life-changing
and this of course is the chalk method now let's say you have a photograph you have a drawing and
you want to transfer it onto a new piece of paper what you're going to do is get your photograph
that you printed out or your drawing that you made and you're going to get yourself some chalk pastel
any kind of chalk will work and all you do is rub chalk all around the back of your photograph
or your drawing and once it's completely covered in chalk what you're going to do is flip it back
around and you're going to directly trace the outline of your photograph and get down your
proportions or whatever you're trying to work on and once you're done following the lines
there you go you transferred your outline onto a new piece of paper now for this next art hack
this is one that i found i think it was last year when i found this video and like an art
hack video i did and by the way for all of these art hacks if i found them off tik tok
or like from another youtuber or whatever i will credit them down in the comment section down below
but this art hack my guy i found it last year i believe and i have not been able to shut up about
it so usually really cheap acrylic paint it's not necessarily the best it can be transparent it can
be streaky and just all around it doesn't give you that saturation that you want out of paint
so the solution to that is cornstarch literally all you do is get a little bit of cornstarch you
add it to your cheap acrylic paint you don't want it too thin because it won't do anything you don't
want it too thick because then it'll kind of like flake off you want kind of like a nice toothpaste
texture and just like that it makes your paint look like a thick body heavily opaque paint i
don't know what kind of other worldly magic is inside of this cornstarch but the difference that
it makes with acrylic paint is night and day for this next art hack i get asked all the time about
how i blend my oil paints how i get them to be so smooth and the answer to that drum roll please
makeup brushes regular paint brushes they're kind of rough they add like a
lot of weird scratches in your artwork so what i do is i go in with a completely dry
fluffy makeup brush and i just ever so lightly dust between the two oil colors just like with the
lightest little touch and let me tell you makeup brushes blend like no other art supply before in
fact just to make my point even more clear on the bad side of this demonstration i ended up
fixing it with a makeup brush just to show you how well it works even under like bad circumstances
for this next art hack this is one that i had to end up teaching myself because at the time
in college i was too poor to do anything else so whenever you're working on art piece especially
if it's charcoal which i love your blending stumps can get very dirty very quickly what i
like to do is get my blending stump and just ever so lightly erase it directly over an eraser it'll
take off a mass majority of the junk on it and for me personally i keep repeating this entire process
literally until that blending stump is like disintegrated and it's just like shreds of paper
this next art hack is going to be dedicated to my super super super old school watchers the hack is
is that water-based markers are basically free watercolors so i believe it was back in 2017 i
did the one marker art challenge and what i did is i got just regular crayola marker
and i collected some of the ink inside of a palette and literally all you do is just get
some water diluted a little bit and just like that you've turned your markers into watercolor
i'd like to dedicate this next art hack to all of my digital artists out there i feel like
because you guys are all so chill i feel like you guys always get left out of art hacks but no not
today i want to include you whenever you're doing digital art you don't want your hand to rub all
over the screen and get like whatever junk is on your hand onto your screen and basically interrupt
your entire drawing process you don't want that so instead of spending ten dollars on a digital art
glove you can make your own for free what you're gonna do is get the cheapest one dollar felt
glove that you can find you cut it from the thumb all the way down to the second finger right here
and literally you're done that's all the steps to this and it works just like a regular glove except
better it was free for this next art hack this one goes out to all of my dollar tree lovers out there
which by the way i am devastated by the fact that they raised their prices from one dollar to now
125. absolute chaos straight to jail i hate it but anyway if you have a dollar store near you it's
most likely that they sell either poster board or poster board sheets and what people don't realize
is that those sheets are actually really good quality art paper what you're gonna do is get the
paper and it has a shiny side and a matte side flip it over to the matte side i like to go in
with some sandpaper and just lightly sand off the top layer just to create some like uh texture that
way your like art supplies will stick to the paper and this technique is great if you're just trying
to save on money or you just live in a really small town like i did that didn't have access to
really nice high quality art paper again for this art hack this is another one that i had to figure
out in college when i couldn't afford anything in your sketchbook if you make a drawing with
charcoal or graphite it gets all over the place it gets on your hand it gets on the other pages
of the sketchbook and just all around it's a mess so normally what you would use is a spray called
fixative or is it fixive i can't remember right off the bat basically it's a spray that locks
down the graphite and the charcoal on the page so it doesn't smear all over the place
but if you're in college and you're making tons of different sketches all the time it
can get expensive to do that so in college what we ended up doing was using hairspray
if you want to lock in your sketchbook in place i'm telling you guys hairspray is where it's at
this next art hack isn't necessarily an art hack per se it's more or less a traditional painters
technique i'm going to show you three things the first one is my makeup concealer this is what it
looks like on a white piece of paper do you see how dark it looks in comparison to the white
and if i put that exact same concealer on a black piece of paper do you see how bright
and white it looks in comparison but if i was to put that exact same concealer on a gray
neutral piece of paper it's gonna look accurate to thine skin color so that's why a lot of artists
tone their canvas gray so they can accurately see what colors they're accurately working with it
seems like a really simple technique that doesn't seem that important but trust me it makes a world
of a difference when it comes to painting now i actually saw this next one on tick tock literally
a couple of days before i started filming this video something that i didn't know and
there's a huge chance that maybe you didn't know is that you can actually clean your kneaded erasers
i didn't know you could do that i never thought to wash my eraser but you can apparently so all
you're going to do is get your dirty kneaded eraser put some hand soap on it and just lightly
wash off all the dirty stuff and for this hack you got to be careful not to
like squish your kneaded eraser because then it's going to get soap inside of the squishy
stuff so every time you rinse you then squish it to bring out more of the dirty stuff and just
repeat the process until it's completely clean this next tip is something that i feel so strongly
about i considered actually making an entire video on this one specific thing and that is how to take
pictures of your artwork correctly and obviously someone like me i have a professional setup where
i can take pictures inside but i would argue that you have one of the best lightings of all time
the sun so immediately you can see a difference from when you take your pictures inside under a
ceiling lamp versus the sun which casts no shadows it gives off a perfect neutral light and it
accurately portrays your artwork in fact i know so many artists who sell their artwork professionally
a lot of them they don't even use their professional setups they go outside and take their
pictures just because it is that accurate next up we have an art hack that i wish i would have
known sooner if you have a paintbrush and it's full of dried acrylic acetone removes the paint
let your paintbrushes soak in acetone for a while and eventually the paint just
glides off i'm actually kind of mad now like how come i didn't know this now for this next art
hack this one i feel like might be kind of well known but maybe not but i just wanted to include
it just in case it's not well known and this can go for either water-based markers or alcohol-based
markers so whenever you have a marker and it's kind of dried out or maybe it's not very smooth
anymore and it's kind of like on its last leg what you can do is get some alcohol and all you do is
literally just re-wet the tip of the marker let the alcohol soak in a little bit and you can use
it way longer than you would have originally like do you see the difference there it's incredible
um miss chloe roseart if you're watching hello there how you all doing shout out to you because
you're where i got this from sometimes painter tape just doesn't work like it's supposed to paint
can get underneath it sometimes the tape messes up it just doesn't do what it's supposed to do
so what you're going to do is either get a white clear gesso or a really cheap transparent white
paint and what you're going to do is put that transparent paint down first let it dry and
then go in with the color that you were going to go in with and i swear to god when you use
a primer first it makes the painters tape work 10 times better and this is just a hack that i'm
never not gonna do because it works so incredibly well now for this next art hack this is one that
i have been asked literally i would say probably every single day since i started uploading on art
youtube and that is how i blend colored pencils and the secret to blending colored pencils is a
white colored pencil i don't know what is inside the prismacolor white colored pencil but it blends
any two color pencils that you want and as much as i love the karen dosh colored pencils
i still have to use a white prismacolor even when i'm using those like 200 colored pencils because
white prisma colors just blend that well now for this next art hack my secret is using white out
all my drawings and paintings so let's say that i am drawing an eyeball and i need to put a white
highlight in the eye to make it look reflective well instead of using colored pencils or a white
pen i use white out and the reason i like whiteout is because it's oil based which means that it'll
stick on top of literally anything you want and not just that but you can actually chip off
white out it's like paint that's removable it's incredible for this next art hack this is another
one that i did that went absolutely crazy viral i think on my youtube short channel it got like
i can't even remember like 10 million views or something like that it's crazy basically whenever
you're coloring with a crayon usually you get that weird blotchy crayon texture you know what i'm
talking about but if you want it to look a little bit more smooth what you can do is get your crayon
pressed kind of hard on the area that you want to color you get either your fingernail a coin or in
my case one of those like pottery thingies i don't know what they're called and you just scrape off
the extra wax off the paper and let me tell you whenever you do this it leaves such a beautiful
smooth fully saturated coloring page it's crazy like it doesn't even look like crayon anymore
now for this next art hack let's say you have a green color and it's too dark but if you add
white paint to it then it turns it into like a weird pastel green which you don't want
so instead of using white paint to lighten your artwork what i'm going to have you do
is use a neon paint when you add neon paint not only does it lighten it but it keeps that
original color and it's just a good way to get a more accurate color to what you want
and lastly this brings me to the final art hack whenever you're shading an artwork with a pen
no matter how small the fine liner is it's still gonna be super duper dark so my solution to that
is literally a ballpoint pen if you get a ballpoint pen and slightly turn it to the
side and just like ever so slightly drag it across the page i swear it gives the most beautiful light
light gray shading that you're ever gonna get it's really nice for very subtle shadows
and i think it's because the ballpoint pen ink is full of filler and it's not like as
intensely black as a fine liner pen i don't know it just works really good for shadows well
there you guys go those are all of my personal all-star art hacks and if you
want to see me test even more art hacks i'll leave a playlist right here if you haven't
subscribed please be sure to do that happy drawing and i will see you guys next video bye