Life And Drawing With Tracer

Post-processing Ted Seth Jacob's thoughts from the last episode. Read it in text here: https://aktracer.medium.com/ted-seth-jacobs-vs-leonardo-da-vinci-representational-art-vs-symbolism-which-is-better-4ee9316d0406

Ideas from the book “Drawing what the eye sees” by Ted Seth Jacobs.

Link to Schaefer Arts video, highly recommended: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zx-0cV8aug Link to Barindoma https://www.instagram.com/barindoma/

This episode documents everything that is going through my mind as I am doing my new Selena painting. I share my experience with making prints of my artwork, what worked and what didn’t. I cover some of the big things I got from my coaching with Matt, how I developed a strong work ethic, making a statement as a realist artist, some fresh observations from Bouguereau paintings. I usually do one weekly piece and you will be able to map most of my Instagram paintings posts to a podcast episode and learn behind the scenes stories and process of how those paintings came about into being.This series is going to cover things such as the brushes I use for each painting and the techniques, teachers and philosophies that influence me while doing the panting.

This part 2 of my Process covers the 4 fundamental concepts in painting that help me create a traditional oil effect in Procreate. You will learn about the brushes I use, how to create the thick oil paint effect and how to prepare your canvas without having to import a photo of a real canvas.

Welcome to my upgraded process. The one stop episode on all you need to know about my current process. This is part 1 of my series of episodes on my upgraded process in drawing and painting the figure. Starting from my Margot Robbie painting “Date night at the waterfront”, I have made great leaps in my style and naturally, my process changed too. This part 1 covers the drawing aspect of it, greatly influenced by Anthony Ryder. Anthony Ryder’s method is a step by step logical approach to drawing. It starts with blocking in the outer confines of the drawing and ends with the rendering of the inside forms. Tony’s book and his videos on Renaissancelifenow.com have really helped me in making beautiful drawings that are an end in themselves yet serve as the perfect setup for the next step i.e painting in Procreate, for me. Once you get your grip on this method, it will enable you to draw traditionally or digitally and I highly recommend reading Tony’s book. That is really the foundation to this episode. Some pictorial instruction is also available for free at theryderstudio.com

Welcome to the year 2020! In this episode I share some things I learned from the past decade as an artist. This is a macro level view of some things that happen to you as an artist, maybe you felt these things too and now we’re together on the same journey! I also cover a technique of combining the underpainting with overpainting using clipping masks. This is the same technique used in traditional oil painting but with a digital twist for efficiency and speed and better edge control. I follow up on the blind contour technique that I discussed in the last episode and share a way to get better proportions. I explain how to really better use the blind contour technique. The episode ends with a message for you for the decade of 2020!

This episode is a follow-up to the previous episode. I talk about what happened after the coaching call with Matt. You do not need to listen to the previous episode to follow the things in this episode. I learned a new concept, this is a perfect technique for figure drawing. While a portrait likeness is more about the angles technique, a figure might require a more free flowing organic approach. It can also help you draw the hair in a portrait better and get the stiffness out of your drawings. The name of the technique is blind contour. I also talk about how to separate out the concepts of drawing vs painting in your brain, painting is a different skill set, and if you’re thinking of advancing from drawing into painting like me, I think this short episode can help you.

I complete one year at DTO this month and I’ve grown so much in my drawing skill. I am in the middle of my biweekly coaching with Matt at the moment. I took a one month coaching with Matt before this in March of 2019 and it really boosted my learning process. This is a great episode to learn about the coaching experience with Matt. I talk about my process for my latest Taylor painting titled ‘The Archer’. It’s an approach where you start off with a textured base, great for traditional, mixed media style digital effects. Finally I talk about what I’m upto this week, what I want to learn from Matt in the phone call to come and some plans for the near future in my coaching. You can learn more about the coaching at https://members.drawing-tutorials-online.com/coaching/

We start the first half of this episode with some basic few things you need to know to be able to draft almost anything in perspective. Drafting is easier than you might think and I suggest resources to learn this. The second part of the episode is a difficult but very practical suggestion to make your artwork more professional. I often look back at my artwork and wish I had spent more time on it. This could be a solution.

Link to the 10min cardio workout routine. Contains 5 exercises. https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health/10-minute-cardio-workout-you-can-do-home-ncna851566 In this episode I talk about how I regained my seriously dry eye problem with better diet and workout. My dry eyes prohibited me from doing any kind of traditional drawing completely. This was due to a year of bad eating build up on my body. This got much better with the mostly cardio based routine I got into. I also share some very useful books meant to bring back the balance of one's body and provide relief to unbalanced shoulders, back, joints etc.

My longest episode till date. A great 30min episode packed with artistic philosophy about the truths every old master knew about in drawing, uncovered by Robert Beverly Hale in his book and lectures. This book was a very important book for me, probably the most liberating book, because now if I learn these truths in the next 5 years, I can do whatever I want, invent my kind of ideal proportions, the ideal female face, clothing etc. knowing that it’s going to be sound draftsmanship. Hale teaches you how to get from the student level to the artist level in a very practical and tangible approach, and of course I discuss several of these points. I want to buy a skull model. I share the best model I could possibly find after about 3 days of full time research. I mention my vision for my new channel @bvgvrv which is about portraits of academic females exclusively, also including modern celebrities represented in that fashion. My first portrait is up and I share my lessons. In the major second half of the episode I talk about how to select muted colors in a life drawing situation and a progressive rendering technique in Procreate that works the way academic artists use charcoal. All my episodes are independent and do not require prior listening to the past episodes. This is an important episode you don’t wanna miss. Let’s get started.

Marking up your reference is a great way to kickstart a reliable process of getting a likeness. No I’m not talking about tracing. If you could design an optimal custom and unique grid for each image in particular, how would you go about doing it? I offer up some ideas to think about it because it's something that has really worked for me in the past working digitally as well as traditional. Marking up the images encourages you to think in a structural way, think about the anatomy underneath and still get the proportions accurate. Of course it requires you to have the skills to transfer the measurements and I recommend you do that with hand-eye co-ordination.. One of the most valuable skills an artist can possess; measuring with the eye and getting a feel for proportions. The more you draw correctly, the more it puts you on the right path to free yourself from the training wheels eventually. I also mention some really great free anatomy resources you don’t wanna miss.

I mention some implicit shading observations I've noticed from teachers like Gerome and Anthony Ryder, mainly from what they do, not what they say! I've seen a ton of tutorials and I wonder why no one has ever mentioned them before. Plus I review Anthony Ryder's recent video on renaissancelifenow.com

I lost several pounds in a week by changing my diet. No I didn't do an exceptionally crazy diet, I just was eating really unhealthy food and I curbed that and I got immediate results from it. Really amazing stuff, I share my process behind that and my simple workout routine. Most of the rest of the episode is about things I learned and the fails I had in the long process of doing my first drawing of the new series. I talk about texture, importance of using tools that are very basic, and most importantly trusting your gut.

10 quick digital painting tips that I would give myself today.

I recently lined up my best paintings next to Bouguereau paintings and this sparked a series of observations about how professional and consistent he was and in what ways I could improve. No. There are no mistakes in a Bouguereau painting. And that's the tone of this episode. I've been sick with fever and cold and I'm back with this short 10min episode. Maybe it will spark some ideas about improvement!

This episode is almost entirely dedicated to the free 3d software Daz3d. Technical aspects of the software to get you started and also how to create your own body morphs. We also discuss basic 3D terms like rigging and what various maps for displacement, bump, normals, etc. do. If you are even slightly interested in the possibilities of Daz3D or plan to try it, this is a goto episode. Look up the artist Shannon Maer if interested. I am @aktracer on Instagram

I talk about what prompted me to not bring my latest Margot drawing to a full completion, I have an important lesson to share with you from this drawing. Then I talk about some of the major leading online educational platforms for art education and the best lectures to look out for on each of these. -skillshare, artist's network, gnomon workshop, new masters academy, schoolism I also talk about the new platform 'Artstation Learning' which they call it the new Netflix for art. I share some details about the lineage of George Bridgman and his teaching method. If you like Andrew Loomis and Norman Rockwell, you will like their teacher George Bridgman.

A lot of the most successful thinkers use whiteboards. They force you to think and organize your thoughts into visual form. Whiteboards help you constantly keep your most important dreams and goals on top, the things that matter the most, the things that make you happy, so when the opportunity to convert those into reality strikes, you grab it! The more whiteboards you have in your room, the better of a thinker you become. I also talk about the new Bargue textbook alternative, this book is a tenth of the price of Bargue and was released just this March of 2019.

I start off with an inspirational quote by my Instagram friend @drawingbyivy on how important it is to follow your dreams and I share some drawing tips that are applicable to traditional drawing and digital. The second half is about the 6 compositional elements that Bouguereau used for his storytelling mechanics. I talk about the attention element and also how you could make one element dominate by altering the other elements of the picture.

I talk about the mistakes I made in my latest Billie Eilish portrait process. I talk about a few points from the critique I got for it from Matt. In the second half, I talk about what really worked for me in my Margot Robbie portrait vs the Billie portrait. Some great points discussed. Both of these paintings can be found at @aktracer on Instagram https://instagram.com/aktracer

In this podcast I share my process for the painting RED in audio form. I made it a point to eliminate redundancies with the episode titled Process as much as possible and try to bring something new to the table. The progress slides complementing this audio will be up at https://aktracer.com/red