Care to share a personal tip on the process of creating your art?
Whether digital or physical, what certain tools do you use and what unique ways do you use them to achieve the best results? Namely, what tips would you be able to share with someone looking to get into making art somewhat similar to yours?
Examples:
oil painting - Are expensive brands of paints worth it? Do you prime your painting surface? Why/why not?
digital painting - Are their tricks to the way you can use some photoshop tools? What bumps your game up from beginner to mid-level?
photography - what can/can't be accomplished in Lightroom? What's worth investing in? And how do you make a photoshop selection to cut out a person or animal with fuzzy or whispy hair?
crafters of all mediums - what adhesives are good? What's the best place for materials?
This is obviously an open-ended conversation as tilde's user base is still growing. What type of art do you do and what personal tips can you share?
I'm definitely no expert, but this is my experience:
Watercolouring - you don't need super expensive paints or brushes, but spend a little. Go ahead and try a student grade paint palette and brushes. I like Winsor and Newton (student grade) for both. If you go too cheap, the paint will never mix or spread the way you want and you'll just get frustrated. Too expensive, and you're just wasting stuff. And expensive stuff, I found harder to use.
Palette - you don't need a lot of colours, but you should have at least 10 or 12, with primary colours. This will be enough to allow you to decided what colours you like and force you to mix a bit, instead of colour by numbers.
Brushes - I would start with actual watercolour brushes and not mix medium. They'll hold and release water better. For me, a good angle brush is enough to start.
Paper - again, I would use actual watercolour paper. Doesn't have to be expensive, but they should be rated for watercolour. This will give you time to move and work colour/water.
And honestly, just paint. See something you like, try to copy it. Think of something cool, try it.
I actually prefer artist grade watercolour. Not necessarily the highest grade, but I find the professional paints to be cheaper than the student grade for what I do. Just a dollop of ultramarine can give a decent intense wash on a meter of paper. If I use student grade I have to use almost the entire tube. And the colours don't fade as much, and take longer to fade.
That being said, it doesn't matter as much what you use as long as you use it. And use it with a fun heart~
My tips were more for someone just starting. I do agree professional grade goes a lot further, but found when I was just starting, I often mixed far more than I needed, especially for intense colours like ultramarine.
Fair enough! Winsor Newton is decent in the student level.
For someone just starting...I recommend not using a tube of black, but always mixing it from opposing colours. It always has more life and depth to it.
Strongly agree with this. I find working on transparency much better than black. I very seldom use black, and usually just ink with a fountain or brush pen when I do. Of course this depends on what you're painting.
For writing, I'm a big fan of FocusWriter. It's distraction free, and has some nice features like a timer and daily goal. Or, if you're writing something short pen + paper is amazing.
I'm far from a expert photographer, but one thing I feel comfortable asserting is that you don't need fancy gear to take good photos. It's preferable, but ultimately unnecessary. My favorite pictures I've ever taken have all been with my smartphone.
Haha, I think I'm exactly the opposite. I really don't care about distraction-free tools, all I want is a familiar editor where I can vomit words through my fingers. I'm comfortable writing in an email, in Notepad, or in Word (my word processor of choice).
That being said, I DO use two specialized word processors... Scrivener for novels, because it lets me organize notes, create character profiles, and move scenes around; and Final Draft for screenwriting because it lets me format my script on the fly with ease. (Using tab to tag dialogue, for instance, quickly becomes second nature.)
Oh, and I also abhor pen and paper. It's just not fast enough for my thoughts. :)
When recording music, I make sure that my pillows are dampening my room's vertices and there's a washcloth rubber-banded around my condenser mic. At a saxophone masterclass I went to 2 years ago, I had a personal talk with the guy running it and he was telling me tips to "personalize" my self-producing. He told me he'd hang a dreamcatcher around his bell in the studio and he had to be wearing his favorite green button down shirt. There's a certain comfort-level you have to be with yourself to have the best mindset and produce the best ideas (at least when it comes to acoustic recording.) Everything has to be YOURS. Your sound, your environment.
For Drawing and dry media, put it under the bed for a few weeks, at least. It's amazing how good work gets better and bad work gets worse under the bed. Don Juan might have said the work changes our Assemblage Point while we sleep.
So I'm a photographer, but I shoot film instead of digital. For those just starting out in photography, I do recommend learning with film. It's more of a direct learning process, especially with older manual cameras. You basically have to learn the basics of exposure, there's no auto mode to take care of things for you. I usually suggest cameras like that, simple, reliable cameras, but ones that don't really hold your hand as much. Now, I use a camera with auto-exposure (more accurately aperture priority), because I know how all the different sides of the exposure triangle affect the image and each other.
For video editing, it's well worth learning Adobe Premiere Pro. It's a really well done piece of software, and once you figure out its quirks, the editing workflow becomes really quick and efficient.
I found the software daunting at first, so I signed up for a trial month at Lynda.com and blazed through their Premiere Pro course. Got me up and running in no time. That was last year... I've been honing my skills ever since.
I'm about to get into all this in 2 weeks. Thanks for the tip! I'm still toying with the idea of how elaborate of a video intro I'll need. If I decide to get crazy, any suggestions on making an animated logo? I did some Flash animations like 10 years ago, but I'm sure there's better ways.
I would generally say a simple, clean, memorable and short logo animation is the best. It doesn't outstay its welcome and is more likely to be appreciated as it lets people get right to the content quicker.
You can find resources online like After Effects templates that you can then modify yourself pretty easily to make an animated logo. For example, this site has some links and examples.
Thank you so much! I checked that link and that's a great resource and very inspiring starting point. I can see a few late nights playing around with it in my near future.
Once you get the basics down, After Effects is a lot of fun to mess around with. I played around and learned from tutorials, just googling when I couldn't figure out how to achieve an effect.