As children we paint and draw all the time. We enjoy the chance for self-expression and are unconcerned by the final result. As adults we are a lot more afraid to paint. We have become more inhibited and psychological barriers are usually to blame. Our first experience of art training often comes at secondary school and it is at this time that people decide that they aren't good at art.
It is during these years that we lose belief in our ability and we don't try drawing or painting again. We lose the confidence that we had as a child. This perception can be compounded later even if we do pursue art as we often set ourselves unrealistic goals. Attempting paintings that are beyond our skills levels convinces us that we have no talent and we give up. Another psychological barrier is the belief that you have to be naturally artistic or creative. Creativity is actually about engaging with the world and trying to express how you feel about it.
Starting out, a lot of people feel that they don't know what to draw or paint. If you don't know what to paint then paint things that you like or something you care about.
Smarthistory: Art History on Khan Academy
A lot of painters draw landscapes and portraits of family and friends. You can get a lot of satisfaction from just drawing what you see. Worrying less about the outcome and enjoying the process of creating art is the best advice any would-be artist can receive. However to improve as an artist you need to master some basic principles. The biggest obstacles facing novice artists are the technical aspects of painting. When we look at objects our brains create simple shortcuts to provide information quickly. For example, looking at an apple the brain recognises it and provides information based on previous experience — in this case, a round green fruit.
This is why artists are so good at capturing the things they paint which such precision and detail. Learning this skill makes the other technical skills that you need to know easier. Once artists are looking at the world around them and observing what they see properly, putting this information on canvas is the next step. There are various techniques that artists can learn to help make their paintings better such as composition, use of colour and basic draughtsmanship. First you can check if your site is online by visiting the URL in your browser, although it can take up to hours to fully become visible to the world.
That means now is the perfect time to dive into your WP settings page and make a few changes to get your blog looking sharp. By default your site name should match whatever your blog name is. So that you might leave alone.
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On this page you can change how comments work on your blog and which criteria need to be met for comments. By default all your WordPress links will look really ugly. Now the last thing we want to do is reset the default photo sizes. People gather a first impression within the first seconds of landing on your website.
Check out the free WP themes directory and try searching for blog themes. There are thousands of free themes out there with plenty to dig through. You can spend hours looking at themes—and in many cases that might be a good idea to make sure you really like the one you pick. This will take you to the themes page with a list of all the currently installed themes.
It should appear automatically as the first result.
So clicking that link will now make the theme live on the blog all from this one page. These are all free themes that can work well on an art blog:. Spend as much time as you need to find a theme you like and get it up. Nobody will see it until you start publishing content anyway. But this gives you a clean starting point to add new features with plugins.
Starting An Art Blog: The Basics
The WP community has thousands of free plugins covering a wide array of great features. Deactivated plugins have a light grey background while active plugins are colored light blue. You can always go through Yoast to change some of the SEO settings for different pages or archives, but the default is more than enough. If you want to learn some basic SEO for your blog then check out this awesome guide to learning Yoast. Everything in the plugin is totally free and honestly pretty simple to understand. Internationally renowned artist, author and tutor Peter Stanyer has taught art for over 20 years at many different levels in further and higher education.
Aimed both at complete beginners and more experienced artists who enjoy recreational drawing, his online art classes will teach you the techniques you need to draw with confidence.
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All the fundamentals are covered here, including mark making, tone, colour, shape, composition, perspective and more. Requiring around 30 hours of study, this class involves a number of assignments made up of carefully structured, practical, drawing or painting projects. Learn the foundations of working with acrylic paint in this three-and-a-half-hour online art class. You learn about setup and materials, colour mixing, pigment choice, brush-handling and palette-knife techniques, as well as gels and mediums.
Once that's out of the way, you're then encouraged to complete three paintings a still-life, a landscape, and a seascape using three different colour palettes.
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This class is split over seven video lessons, which can be either streamed or downloaded. Fine artist and teacher Richard Robinson asked his students to name the biggest stumbling block when it came to painting, and an astonishing 72 per cent said it was getting their colours right.
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So in this two-hour art class, which can be both streamed and downloaded, he explains everything you need to know, from how the brain sees and analyse colours, to the key to colour relationships. With 40 practical exercises to complete and pages of printable lesson notes, this class is suitable for everyone from beginner to advanced.
Historically, art schools have always taught a systematic process for drawing people that can be applied to figures of any body type, set in any position. Running across 15 and a half hours of downloadable video, this class delivers exactly that. It's taught by Stan Prokopenko, an accomplished fine art painter who works for the Watts Atelier school in California and shares his knowledge with millions online through both free YouTube videos and more weighty, paid-for courses like this one. Aimed at both beginners and experienced artists looking for a refresher, this figure drawing class will teach you how to draw human figures by breaking down shapes into simple forms.
Some of the specific techniques Carder outlines are a little unusual, and the class doesn't cover how to draw a portrait from life. Disney's Aaron Blaise offers you the benefit of his expertise and experience when it comes to drawing with charcoal.
Aaron Blaise spent 21 years of his life as an animator on such films as Beauty and the Beast, Lion King and Brother Bear, which he co-directed. In this art class, Blaise creates a charcoal drawing of a lioness, in real time, across five hours and 30 minutes. He draws from a photograph, and you can download a high resolution version of this image, print it out, and follow along at home. He always strikes the right tone: