Who here's a visual artist?

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Who here does visual art? What styles, material and techniques do you prefer to work with?

I like painting, but mainly do acrylic, watercolor, or mixed media. I'm a bit intimidated by oils, but I am trying to get into egg tempura.

I do a lot of drawing and sketching, and I like to use graphite, charcoal, pastels and crayons (the traditional artist type, like the waxy kiddy type). I have been experimenting with frottage techniques and scratching (I use an exacto knife to create different texture on the paper and then rub over it, or I scratch over the rubbing).

I'm a big admirer of the works of Ernst and Klee and ther unorthodox techniques. I also love the abstraction of Mondrian (whom I'm convinced was AS) and Kandinsky. And Twombly and Rothko. A lot of my stuff is very abstract or surrealistic, but I can do more traditional, objective art. I often feel confined by strict techniques, even though I can do realistic portrait drawing (my painting technique is not so advanced, as I'm mainly self-taught). I want to develop some of my own unique techniques to work with, which is why I always try to experiement.

I can't draw or paint worth a ?#@$% - but I do like to manipualte objects to make art - recently I've started pressing flowers and working them into construction paper abstracts . . . I also do crochet, knit, and quilitng - but this is not your grandmother's type stuff - I come up with an individual design for everything and use colors I like and styles that are very abstract . . . I just finished a 30 square knit piece for my best friend - it took about 300 to 310 hours and is made of red fuzzy yarn - there are 15 different designs and the whole thing put together looks like a piece of modern art - it is great . . .

My favorite artistists are Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol - though I like Van Gogh a lot - mostly becasue he was either bi-polar or autistic - and I'm both . . .

I love Pollock. My first painting (outside of the silly junk I did in art class in school) was an action painting a la Pollock. A friend, who had a BA in Art, and I saw the movie Pollock and then went a bought some canvases, latex paint and brushes. LOL. We did the paintings out in a parking lot next to my friend's apartment. I have the painting on my wall now - it looks really cool. I was so impressed with how it turned out, I got inspired to do painting more. Before that i stuck to drawing - I was scared of using color, and felt safe using monochromic schemes. LOL. That's such an Aspie hang-up to have.

I think Van Gogh was AS. AS with typically intense Aspie emotions. I love seeing his work in person - it's like I can see how he put the painting together, how it felt for him to paint or draw the piece. That's also how I feel when I look at a Klee, Ernst or Mondrian. It's almost like having someone pull on my arm, like they're trying to get me to paint the picture I see. It's rather weird, but I take it as a sign I ought to paint.

i like to do a lot of computer art, computer graphic design.

when i listen to a great song for the first time i can see the music, and i get images in my head. that helps me in my art.
does that happen to you?

I like to do viberant sketches and drawings, and I enjoy using coloured pencils.

I'm into 2-D art, mainly drawing and some painting. I haven't had a great deal of opportunity to paint much though I've done some. I'm intending on going through the painting classes offered by my university, especially to learn to work with oils even better. I've mostly used acrylic and with one painting I used a mixture of oil and acrylic.

As for drawing, I hate using the "expected" graphite art pencils. I actually prefer using a mechanical pencil to any of those, hehe. But I enjoy using charcoal pencil as well as conte pencil and regular conte, too.

I've gotten more into using mixed media and on a recent piece I used India Ink and fountain ink and pen (actually, I used close to a whole well of fountain ink -- just on the one piece).

I'd really like to get back into using color pencils. Currently I don't have any. I really love to use the Prismacolor pencils. But of course they cost an arm and a leg for a good range of colors beyond the regular rainbow spectrum.

I've never been into 3-D art. I find I don't have too much of a talent in that nor a love for it. I've usually kept to the more traditional 2-D forms: drawing and painting.

I used to do computer art with Photoshop, but have fallen away from it. It actually helped me a lot in getting used to using color after 25 years of sticking to monchromic stuff. LOL. I did some cool stuff, but much of that is lost or the files were damaged. Now I don't have a PC that can run Photoshop, and I alsono longer have free access to the software, so there's that obstacle.

I do get a lot of ieas from listening to music. Sometimes visual, and sometimes it's poetry or prose (but that's another thread). I've been known to listening toa song over and over until I can ge tthe idea sketched out. I also liek to just improvise ona sketch pads while listening to music, and then go back and look at what I did a few days later. I often see things differently and then take what I see and develop a painting or drawing out that.

I love conte crayons and charcoal. I use various brands of charcoal pencils too. I have a big pencil box full of various pencils - charcoal, colored charcoal, graphite, water-soluable graphite, etc. - including the standard drawing pencils. I used to not like those so much, but have been using them more recently. I prefer the Faber-Castell ones. The lead in them tends to be a consistantly good quality. I too use mechanical pencils a lot more often than those, especially just for sketching. But for underdrawings I prefer a traditional drawing pencil becasue you can get them with hard lead to draw very detailed but lightly. And theFaber-Castells erase away more cleanly too - another plus.

As for other graphite, I like those woodless graphite pencil, the graphite "bricks" and graphite powder. I use graphite for frottage, my "scratching" and mixed media, where I use it with acrylics, watercolor, ink etc.



I do very lttle with ink that isn't mixed media. I espeically like using India and fountain ink with watercolor. I got that idea from Klee. I have a ton of ink that I got to use with my airbrush, but I give up airbrush. So I need to use the ink for something!



I have the full set of Dewant (or whatever the exact name is) colored pencils, and I remember they weren't cheap. But when I discovered Conte crayons, I stopped using colored pencils. Then I *lost* my $90 (retail - I paid $65) full set of the Contes in my last move (they simply disappeared! My stomach still cramps up thinking about!), so I've made some use of my coloer pencil set. I haven't been able to afford another full spectrum set of Conte, so I have to make do a few 12 crayon sets. I have the neutral, portrait and landscape sets, which sort of cover much of the spectrum, expect violets and purples.

I don't know if Dewant is better or worse than Prismacolors. I have only used Prismcolor's charcoal pencils and water soluable graphite pencils (which are kind fo cool).

That Conte is expensive unfortunately. So sorry to hear about your $90 loss.

When you talk about the woodless graphite pencils, are those the ones which are essentially a stick of graphite in pencil form? If so, I love those and they are so soft and spread so nicely. (Though they're also used up very fast, too.)

I've been getting back into art more and so as the months go by I'm going to be adding more and more to my media stock. Right now, it's terribly limited: charcoal pencils (black and white), vine charcoal, conte pencils, woodless graphite pencils, india ink, and what's left of the fountain ink. Very limited indeed but not so limited as to not make something of them.

Next month, along with some other supplies, I'm going to be buying an electric pencil sharpener because the charcoal pencils are a b***h to sharper with a manual one and I am too clumsy to be trusted with a knife to sharper them, hehe.

The electric sharpeners work surprisingly well and quite quickly, too. I think I'd prefer them to the knife even if I weren't clumsy.

I draw (freehand w/pen & paper) mazes, made a few hundred of them since I began in 1988. For past year, local website has carried my weekly maze.
Draw mandala-type abstract symmetrical stuff with markers. When I had to paint, in college, I only used acrylics never oils. Dislike getting messy, dirty hands & out of control methods of delivering pigment-I need "neat" materials. Have to narrow my options ahead of time, or else I'll be too overwhelmed with indecision to create. Don't have an idea in my head of the finished piece, only know how to make things up as I go along, incremental steps. Having a goal prevents me from reaching it, but if I'm just doodling there's no pressure. If I've no notion of what it's supposed to look like, then mistakes aren't fatally discouraging. Don't have high opinion of my artwork-I like it, but can't believe others when they praise it.
Art-very convoluted & touchy subject for me (former art student), which is why I don't "go there" in conversation.

Yeah those ones. There are ones I use that have a light vinyl-ish finish on the stem so you don't get graphite on everything, but I use the other unfinished too. I also have these bulky, unfinished hexagonal ones by Faber-Castell that I can't find anywhere now, but they're messy. I have to keep them in a ziploc. But they're nice. i'm down to my last two. The little bricks/bars aren't good for detailed drawing - mainly for shading large areas, very think lines and rubbing.

I tend to gravitate toward messy medias - graphite, pastels, crayons. LOL. I don't know why that is. I have to use a canvas dropsheet for even drawing because I make such a mess. I get it all over me too - I have clothes that I reserved for doing my art so I don't mess up my while wardrobe.



It varies a lot how much time I can spend with my art, but I'm bad about "collecting" media and materials, far more than I need or use. It helps though when I do have time for my art - I have more than enough to do what I want! LOL.



I haven't looked into getting an electric sharpner for any of my drawing stuff. I use a seperate hand sharpeners for my graphite, color and charcoal pencils, or I use sand paper/rubbing to get a sharp point. Not surprising that an lectronic sharpener would would with charcoal, though. The fatser you sharpen it, the less time you have to break it. LOL. I know how big a pain that can be - I have some charcoal pencils in my box that I can't use because they break when shaprened. I think they're too old maybe - I've had those particualr ones for a very long time now. [/quote]

I wish I could go out and collect some media right now. But, alas, I'll have to wait till next month. Not that that's far away at all, but too far away from the moment.

Can someone help me ?

Im training to become a web designer/developer which means I will someday need to dabble with computer art and graphic design. Thing is, ive got loads of ideas in my head but when it comes to getting down on paper/computer i havent got a clue where to start.

Ive tried to learn Photoshop and Fireworks but im getting a kind of mental block. I think the main problem is that i dont have any art experience and its kinda hard to get stuff from my head into real life representation without the knowledge and technique of HOW TO DO IT ! !!

Does anyone know good tutorials for the complete noob ? Not just technical tutorials on how to use Gfx apps but also with a little bit of art learning.

HELP ME ! !

I am pretty broke right now too, and I'm in Houston visiting. In Houston that's awesome place called Texas Art supply ( texasart.com ), where you can get a lot of things at cheaper than retail prices. It's always a huge temptation for me when I go in there.

I was there Saturday to get a few things, and was looking at the pencils. The Derwent set I have is the 72 studio pencil set, that lists about about $105, but I got it there about 6 years ago, so it was around $70-75 then. It's like $78 now. But I really don't like Derwent studio - they're rather waxy and are hard to shade with. They kind of build up on the paper, not unlike wax crayons. So the color on the paper becomes slick. It's a serious drawback.

I picked up a couple of Prismacolor ( in the store you can buy them in singles, every color. They also sell the singles in boxes of 12), just a sanguine and a sepia. I was working with them yesterday and hot dang, they're fabulous! Now I wish I could get a set. I know I can get the smaller sets where I live, but it's all list price. At Texas Art they're cheaper, but still a pretty penny. Check this out - I was looking this enviously:

http://www.texasart.com/store/view/001/ ... se-Set.htm

They also make "art sticks" that look like Conte's crayons, but I didn't get any of those. I'll likely run by there and get some before I leave if I have any money left over.

This is basically how I "collect" stuff - I have been buying a little here and there over so many years the stuff has collected. Every once and a while I splurge on really expensive stuff.

God that's gorgeous. And expensive. Prismacolor has gone up even more since the last time I bought one of their larger box sets. I coulda swore it had around 90 pencils in it but I notice they've only got 72 and then the 120. Or maybe I'm hallucinating, hehe.

But I loved those pencils. An entire paycheck...

Yeah they're pricey. That set is expensive (and gets less a discount at Texas Art) because of the fancy schmancy box it comes (complete witha color chart - dang I want it! LOL). I looked at the prices for the other sets, and you can get those for 30% off at Texas Art, and the set of 72 is even cheaper than does Derwent ones I have and don't like. Man, I'm bummed now!