Hi, I'm Paul. If you're learning to draw and paint, I've got some good news for you: You can do it.
You don't need to spend a fortune on instruction books. You don't need to spend thousands on academic training. You don't need a box full of esoteric materials.You can teach yourself.
I'm doing it, and I want to help you to do it too.
You do have to be prepared to practice, regularly, and in the right way. Effective Practice. That's what this site is about.
If you really want to get better and you're willing to put the hours in, I can help you improve.
An Effective Practice Exercise to Develop Your Composition Skills
According to Carol Dweck (who's book Mindset I heartily recommend), there are two basic mind sets with which people approach their lives: The fixed mind set and the growth mind set.
People with the fixed mind set think that you have a natural set of abilities that you start with, and you can't do much about them either way.
People with the growth mind set believe that you can improve through applied effort. You can develop your skills in just about any area of life through practice... Read More
Why Perfectionism is Holding You Back (And What To Do About It)
Is too much perfectionism stopping you from making progress?
And if it were, how would you know?
Perfectionism is one of the most pervasive problems that budding artists suffer from. I know because I get a lot of emails from people who single it out as an issue for them. If you think you might be affected by too much perfectionism, rest assured: You're not alone.
A Powerful Way To Improve Your Compositions You (Probably) Haven't Tried
What do planets, fractals and migrating birds all have in common?
They all follow patterns.
We know they do because we notice patterns in the world around us. In fact, our predilection for finding patterns seems so strong that we find them even where none exist.
What does that have to do with composition?
I've been practising with pattern in order to improve my compositions, and I think it's working.
I think it can improve your compositions too... Read More
Principles of Composition: Opposition and Transition
"Fine Art, by its very name, implies fine relations. Art study is the attempt to perceive and to create fine relations of line, mass and colour."
So begins chapter three of Composition by Arthur Wesley Dow, and it couldn't be clearer: For Dow, visual art and its study is purely about creating harmony and beauty through design.
This post is the third in a series on the book Composition, which I'm using for my regular composition practice... Read More
Enjoying Practice For Its Own Sake
I don't usually make new years resolutions. It strikes me as a waste of time since so few of them are kept. At least, that's always been the case with me.
I'm breaking with my non-tradition this year though, and making one that I think is going to be easy to keep. In fact, I've already started doing it so I suppose I'm cheating a little. I'm just resolving to keep doing it for the rest of the year... Read More
Meditations on Line: Dow Composition Practice, Chapter Two
Teaching yourself is very much like setting out on a journey with no idea of the final destination.
It can be an unsettling way to travel, but it has its advantages. For one, it leaves you open to the unexpected.
I'm currently working through the exercises in the book Composition by Arthur Wesley Dow, I have been for the last six months or so. These exercises have had an unexpected and quite profound effect on my thinking about why I make art and how I approach my daily practice. I want to try and share some of that with you in this post... Read More
Regular Composition Practice: The First Post
It's 5:45 AM. I'm sitting cross legged on a cushion on the floor. Most of the world around me is still in bed; there are no cars on the street outside, no noise from the neighbours. Michelle is still asleep. In front of me on the floor is my little table easel with a pot of water, an ink-stone, an ink-stick and a Chinese brush. I have a few sheets of newsprint and tracing paper beside me ready to go.
I'm getting ready to do my daily composition practice... Read More
If you want to get better at something you need to practise regularly. Of course you do. No-one would argue with that. But regular practice alone isn't enough. There are good and bad ways to practise.
My own experience of teaching myself to draw over the last few years has taught me this: Practise ineffectively, and you'll be putting in huge amounts of effort for very little reward. Practise effectively, and you can progress much faster than you would have thought possible with much less effort... Read More
That's Not Art, It's Just Copying What You See!
How many times have you heard this?
I know I've come across it a few times, it's a common criticism of what we might broadly call representational work that slavishly copying what you see isn't art. An either/or dichotomy is generally assumed between feeling and accuracy.
Leaving aside the "that's not art" part, it's the "copying what you see" part that really interests me, and is what I'm going to be talking about today with reference to a couple of recent self portrait drawings... Read More
A New Non-Anatomical Approach to Human Form For Artists
I generally write about practical stuff these days, but I'm breaking with tradition a little here to write a short (well, about as short as they ever get for me) post about a new book on figure drawing by Ted Seth Jacobs. I don't have a copy of this book myself, and know only as much about it as can be read on the site devoted to it here. For that reason, this post isn't a personal review or a recommendation, it's more of a heads up... Read More
Talent: Why You Should Stop Believing In It And What Will Happen When You Do
Recently the subject of talent was brought up in the comments of one of the posts.
Whilst I respect the views of the painter friend of mine that left that comment, it really gets my goat when people talk about talent. It just keeps coming up.
If you really want to wind me up, don't insult me or my work, tell me I'm talented. This post is as clear a statement as I know how to make on why I think that belief in talent, innate gifts, whatever you want to call it, is pernicious, defeatist and ultimately damanging to progress. It seems somehow apt that 'You can get it if you really want' by Jimmy Cliff is playing whilst I'm typing this. And I really didn't make that up.
"You must try. Try and try. You'll succeed at last." I'm with you Jimmy... Read More
Composition: Some Possible Approaches to Learning Pictorial Design
Following on from the last post on composition, this post tries to organise a few thoughts on how learning composition can be approached by looking at how it has been dealt with in some well known writing on the subject.
There's also a little more about eye tracking and eye paths through the picture from Yarbus which is really interesting, and a bit of neuroscience regarding how we learn that'll probably send you to sleep. Or not... Read More
What Makes a Good Composition?
Can composition be learned? And if so, how?
Over the next few posts I'm going to try and answer those questions. It seems to me that a good place to start might be to try to reach some conclusions on what makes a good composition, to try to divine some basic principles of composition that can be learned and practiced... Read More
