Ranarh's Art Blog

My most recent tiny tip, dealing with the patience needed when creating art. I want to reassure all beginning creatives that time trying to finish something is never wasted. Finishing is part of the process and as important as any other; you must be able to draw a line under a project and start another. In time, you will learn when you can or should abandon an idea (for the time being), when it's done, and when it isn't. Most artists are apparently either unable to finish, or finish way too soon. Find the balance! (And while you're at it, learn how many projects you can have going at once.) Allen Williams puts it well by saying, "beginner's drawings are often not so successful because they leave too much white on the page. In other words, there's not enough drawing in their drawing." Considering this, I think, solves a lot of beginner's problems. Work until no spot is left unattended (which of course doesn't mean to cover the page in medium; an e...

Some topics in art are prone to mistaken thoughts, and hard to get rid of - like, using reference is cheating (hint: it's not). In the spirit of "Ranarh's Tiny Tips", here is some compacted advice for the beginning artist on Custom Brushes. Custom brushes are hard to make Not at all. It rarely takes more than just a few steps to make them. There are plenty of easy tutorials on creating your own brushes from scratch, and many brush packs to download. Magazines often feature them, too. I can't paint without custom brushes You could of course paint an entire photorealistic painting with only one brush. But it's more difficult or will take longer than also using custom brushes. Understanding what you are painting is more important than the brush. Custom brushes are cheating Traditional media features many different brush types, and painters use all kinds of things to apply paint to a canvas: toothbrushes, sponges, buckets, their fingers, crumpled paper, c...

A little something about painting black or white objects. Check out my other tutorials on my deviantArt account: http://ranarh.deviantart.com

Overpaint of the practice picture I set my fiancé on to learn Photoshop, and maybe even some art along the way. We started with a value sketch I made. Then bashed in plenty of photos as a base; rocks, ground, technical equipment like engines, rails, stairs, gas tanks and whatnot. Most of which I got from ImagineFX and CGtextures.com. By then I realized it takes a beginner much, much longer than me to achieve the same results, and their heads start spinning from the myriad of shortcuts, tools, adjustment layers and everything - even if I explained only what I considered the necessities - and the picture was left alone for a while. Then I pitied the poor thing and decided to do an overpaint. I wanted to improve the composition and contrast. Warming up the colours allowed for better contrast between the shadowed and lit areas, and larger shapes de-cluttered the left-hand structures. Stronger aerial perspective was introduced. I worked out some shapes in the artificial str...