Some online resources that have helped me

Over the past several months, as I got reacquainted with the world of making art (after a three decade hiatus!) I’ve basically walked, breathed, slept, ate, and dreamed about art. My long-suffering spouse Hope has had to endure multiple days on end of me disappearing to a studio space to just pursue some kind of art making that involved messy paints, scratchy marks, despairing noises, lots of pastel dust in the air, and stinky Lava soap used to clean up hands and brushes.

I felt like a man possessed by this incredible urge to just MAKE A MARK, literally, with anything that I could hold in my paw onto any available surface.

Make marks I did: with every conceivable tool (my fingers, brushes or every size, palette knives, scrapers, pencils, pens, markers, pastels, and stylus), on myriad surfaces (sketch paper, note paper, sticky notes, canvases, boards, salvaged wood from a place called Eco-Cycle here in Boulder, iPhone, and then iPad).

A lot of those marks were terrible. My first foray into oil painting was disastrous, mostly because I didn’t have the patience, desire, emotional fortitude, or anything else to wait days for layers to dry, which is why I switched to acrylics after a week.

But during this frenzied period, every once in a while, I’d create something terrific, like this (Nude with Tattoo):

This was the fourth or fifth painting I did, and as I was laying the paint down, I thought to myself, “You’ve got something here — keep going.” I remember how scared I was when I outlined the shape of the body – pressing the brush down to lay down that thick black line of paint seemed like an out-of-this-world commitment!

But when I showed it to others they looked at what I’d painted and then looked at me with that expression that said, “Damn, this dude is onto something” — the look that all artists want to see.

But mixed in with the occasional good painting were tons of really terrible ones, some of which were so damn awful I had to throw them out. So many others were later covered in a nice big layer of gesso and used for something new because I didn’t want to spend the money on more canvases.

I don’t really believe that any art supplies can be wasted (after all, you either make something awesome or you learn something new, or both–there are no mistakes, just happy accidents, thank you Bob Ross) but it can be pretty dispiriting to look at a week’s worth of sketches, paintings, and whatnot and only see 1 or 2 things that you feel are good amidst a pile of dreck.

So I got my learning on, and thankfully we live in the Internet age. And although that same Internet is filled with trolls, idiots, neo-nazis, and trumpers (but I repeat myself), it is also filled with all kinds of humans doggedly and in good faith pursuing excellence in their endeavors, and art is no exception.

So here are some of the online resources I used to get myself on the right track (in a future blog post I’ll do a quick roundup of helpful books as well). Some are free, some are paid, but hopefully a few of these will be helpful to you.

Much of this stuff centers on abstract art, but even if you don’t have an interest in it, the compositional stuff should really underpin any art practice you have.

Youtube tutorials

There’s a ton of resources on Youtube by some very really great artists who are also great teachers (not necessarily something you see every day). The offerings range from time-lapse videos that show the basic steps of making art, to really involved tutorials that go into all the why’s/how’s/wherefore’s/etc.

Here’s a small sample of the videos that I found super useful and inspiring. A lot of these focus on composition fundamentals, which I view as the key to making great art (mostly because I’d come from the world of photography–I found it easy to transition to what I knew from that world to the world of painting).

Udemy

I’d been receiving Udemy newsletters for years because about 15 years ago, I learned how to play Delta Blues guitar (another passion of mine) largely through online classes at Udemy and other places.

One day I saw a course being offered on abstract art, and I jumped on it. The instructor is a little dry, but she will take you through all the steps of thinking through composition fundamentals, which I view as the building blocks of making great art, period.

In fact, the homework that she gave during this class prompted me to record a series of videos on 10 different abstract compositions like vertical, horizontal, diagonal, cruciform, and so on.

Here’s the class. Enjoy.

Blog posts

David Kessler has a terrific series of videos on creating abstract art, focusing on composition. It’s worth watching all of them even if you aren’t interested in creating (or understanding) abstract art, because at the end of the day, all art, be it super realistic photography or the most abstract painting, follows the same compositional rules.

Over on Felt Magnet is a nice piece on how your composition (notice a pattern here!!?!) creates a solid armature to anything you want to paint/sketch/draw/etc.

A piece titled “What is Abstract Art” by Mark Mehaffey really zeroes in on the basic principles of composition that make abstract and nonobjective paintings really work.

Meanwhile, over on Shutterstock, a great explainer on Abstract art really demystified how to make this kind of art. The piece walks through different compositions with examples from leading lights in each type of art. I remember reading it and thinking to myself, in different sections – this is me, this is the kind of art I wanna make.

Mitchell Albala’s “Cultivating an Abstract Aesthetic in Landscapes” was, frankly, a revelation. I mean, don’t get me wrong, intellectually I knew you could make abstracts out of any subject, but this article really opened my mind to the possibilities of making art the way I wanted to make it.

Domestika.org

Bar none, the resource I went to again and again was a website called Domestika.org. They have tons of classes on all aspects of art – making art, selling art, you name it. I remember grabbing up about a dozen classes at a super cheap price when they were running a sale, and I learned something really great each time.

Even if the subject of the class was something I ultimately didn’t want to pursue (oil pastels, for instance) I learned a great deal about how to use the tools, about color theory, the universal rules of composition, energy, making marks, all of it. (And even if the analog tools didn’t land with me, when I switched to Procreate, you’d better believe that knowing how oil pastels worked in real life really helped when using the digital brushes in question!)

Here’s a short list of some of the classes I took:

Instagram

Last but not least, I followed a ton of artists on Instagram. There are too many to list here, but I found tons of artists creating abstracts, landscapes, figure studies, and more, in every conceivable medium, with every conceivable combination of techniques, tools, on every continent, spanning age groups from teenagers to nonagenarians.

These folks are a source of daily inspiration. Check out who I follow on there. You’ll be inspired too.