Have you ever wondered what it would be like to use the same medium that Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Edouard Manet and one of my favourites, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec used? Pastels are easy to use, available in wide ranges of colours and one of the most direct ways of applying pigment to a paper or canvas. Hosted by Attic Studios,…
It’s October and I am back to doing the annual pastel challenge! It means that, along with a group of other pastel artists and enthousiasts led by Gail Sibley, we challenge ourselves to paint with pastels every day of the month. Paint every day; easy, right? Well, not as easy as it sounds! Doing something every day builds routine, but finding…
It’s been so long since my last post, I am almost shy to start again. I feel like a stranger, lurking around on my own site! A few things happened since I was here last (that was last July, in case you were wondering). So this is a story all about how my life got flipped-turned upside down, and I’d…
So you want to be an artist, eh? 😉 Because we don’t live in a black-and-white world, let’s start with getting an understanding of how colours work together and how a tool most artists still use all the time, the colour wheel, came into existence. In 1666 Sir Isaac Newton was the first to develop the colour wheel. He saw…
A lot of people I meet, when I tell them I consider myself an artist, tell me they’d love to be more creative and paint, but are afraid to even start, because they feel they don’t know anything about ‘the basics of art theory’. Well, I am here to help! Let’s release that creative beast that’s inside you! 😉 To…
Recently I read a BBC article about how artists’ brains are actually structurally different, compared with non-artists’ brains. Participants’ brain scans (full research report here) revealed that artists had increased neural matter in areas relating to fine motor movements and visual imagery. But the authors reported that training and environmental upbringing also play crucial roles in their ability. As in many areas…