A Person, Artist, Software Engineer, Geologist.

I'm continuing on my artist path and thus far it's going much better than I was hoping for.  My teacher is a working artist that is mostly self taught and eager to share his steps and missteps from his path. This has worked out great for me!  I think that my background (no joking, really) in Software Application development and UI helps with this.  The concepts of overlays from Light to Dark, Large   to Small, details mirrors my UI thinking.  Because of this and following the required drawing and perspective steps (gotta have a foundation dudes), the lessons have worked for me.  The latest result is this image of the photo earlier in this blog.  It turned out great. I always thought that art was something that was magical and only a very select few contained it.  But after reading the book "Art and Fear" and taking this class, I've switched my thinking.  Almost everyone can do art. What a nice concept.

OK, so what does Progress in Art mean?  For me it’s like progress in almost any area of learning.  Skills, understanding and practice, practice and practice so that the basic foundation becomes normal and allows the freedom to build upon it and explore away. There is still a long way to go for the foundation that I want.  Hey, it took me years to get a software engineering foundation that carried me to great things.  I expectation would be the same for anything I do, including art work.  The secret is there is no secret, it’s a lot of learning (and discarding old habits you may have learned before), process (yes there is a process) and practice. Very interesting to see the steps of progress before ones very eyes.  Not so much on developing software as it’s mostly hidden.

It’s not how new or old the technology is, it’s that its different from what you know and how it teaches you to view life in a new way. My exploration is going back, way back to the pencil and just drawing.  All of the concepts are still there, light / dark values, composition and last color.  It takes time to draw an object from hand and have it look OK, but you learn a lot about it and later, everything else you look at. The image above is actually a watercolor painting, but you still need to draw the forms and understand the values in order to paint it. How much we miss in everyday life when we look without seeing.  Be it light values or other aspects of life that we normally “gloss over”. I did the same thing with video creation and learning about creating videos and production.  This same “Back to the roots” process allows to never watch a movie the same way again and understand how much work goes into a movie, drawing, life.