Hello you lot and welcome to Day 22, we’re so close now, let’s try to finish strong.
Today’s house is haunted by shadows, which doesn’t sound too bad but actually turned
out to be one of the creepiest so far I think.
I’m also really happy today to be partnering with Skillshare to bring you 2 free months
of premium membership on the site, but we’ll get to that a little later.
So our topic today comes from X Mermaid who asks my resources for learning the fundamentals
of art.
It’s a question I get a lot, since I’m always pushing the importance of the fundamentals,
people wanna know where to start.
First of all, it might help to create an outline of these ‘fundamentals’.
Jon Grimm from the Artist’s Block channel recently put out a video with a general list
of essentially the laws of art, so that would be great to refer to, I’ll leave a link
to that video below.
You can also google it.
I’d spell them all out here but I think that seeing the list in front of you would
be a lot more digestible.
But we’re talking about things like colour value, line and form.
Once you have a general list of the elements that go into a piece of art, see which bits
you feel you need better understanding of.
It might be all of them, it probably will be all of them, since not many of us know
everything there is to know about tonal value or anything else.
But see which things stand out at you the most as aspects of your work that really need
improving.
Then, what I would normally do is search up on YouTube to see if there are any videos
that will explain that topic to me, say it’s colour theory.
YouTube is a great first stop, an easily digestible sort of introduction to a topic.
I also find I benefit, not just from video demos or 5-minute tutorials, but from actual
classes.
So if you guys have been here for a while, you know I’ve enjoyed Skillshare before,
it’s my go-to really for really getting an understanding of something new, being taught
by an expert or professional in their field, and being able to submit assignments and communicate
with people learning the same thing.
I’ve got really into using the app on my phone, you can save your classes and learn
offline so you can literally squeeze this in anywhere in your day.
If you don’t know, it’s an educational site with thousands of classes on almost everything
you’ll ever want to be taught.
I personally have used it for video editing tips and social media marketing to stuff like
creating sellable art for society6 and finding your voice as an artist.
I’ll have that society6 class linked below since I get so many questions on just that
and I found it really useful for ideas of what I’ll be doing after inktober stops
taking over my life.
So as I said, I have a link below where you can get 2-months of free premium membership,
after that it’s $10 a month, if you like it, if you find that that kind of learning
environment doesn’t work for you, you can just cancel after the free trial.
Speaking of free stuff, there’s also a huge library of art books online that have been
scanned in and turned into PDF’s available for free if you just search for them.
The books of Andrew Loomis are a great resource for many artists, as old as they are, they
have some of the most valuable and well-explained information in them.
I’ve realised, for me, I do prefer to have a physical copy of a book, I find it much
easier to take in information and I’m much more likely to read it, but I thought I’d
let you know about those free online books for people who can’t be splashing out on
art books or maybe do find it easier to read on a tablet or computer.
They’re just a google search away.
We all learn differently and take on information best in different ways, so I’d recommend
using a combination of ways to learn so books and videos and classes.
Decide on a topic to start with; colour or composition or linework, and then find and
consume information on it from different sources.
I find that once I’ve learned something new, I always want to then try it out myself,
and that’s how we learn and develop as artists.
I hope this answered your question Mermaid, thanks so much for watching guys, I’ll see
you soon for
the next one.
Bye!