Confidence, Art and Life

I have a weird attitude. I may be giving bad advice sometimes by coming from a completely different perspective. Or I may be giving good advice where it's needed most. I could be doing both in the same paragraph, depending on who's reading it. So take this as an essay both in general about art and specifically on pastels, because pastel has become my heart-medium.

Pastels are instant gratification. I want to paint it, bang, I do. There it is. Big and bold and visible across the room. I paint small for a pastelist except on very good days but pastels make it possible for me to paint at all most times, because of that speed and power.

This essay is in answer to a forum post where a new friend said something that made me think. I had mentioned I didn't have the space to paint large complex still lifes, so I've been doing small simple studies. I'm drifting into the 6" square format of the Daily Painters and thoroughly enjoying it. This friend compared that to my dipping my toe in the pool, then wrapping the towel around my hips and walking away calling that my daily swim.

Well yeah, actually that is my daily swim. The fact that I was able to do it at all makes it a good day. On a bad day my daily swim would be a two inch long gesture sketch of my cat while he sleeps, something I could probably do without even looking at him because I've done it hundreds of times. He said it was a mystery because other painters with even less space managed to do larger, complex still lifes.

Well, the mystery is solved. I did answer and tell him it wasn't just space but disability. Because he's right. If I was abled, I wouldn't mind getting up and sweeping ALL the food stuff off the dresser, set up a still life, sketch and photo it, live out of boxes for eating for a while till the painting's done (or just work from the photo) and then put all the food back. About like the kind of vigorous housemate who lets the apartment turn into a wreck and then every month or two blitz cleans it over one weekend - and saves time for video gaming overall because that blitz was relatively easy for him.

Heck, I might still live in a place too small for complex still life and just go out to sit on the sidewalk and paint a window display in a shop instead, because that caught my eye. Even make more than one bus trip to get back to the antique shop to do that. There's more than one way to scan a cat.

I adapted to physical disabilities before I knew I had them. This has shaped my attitudes about everything in life and I was constructively lazy for most of it so far. Everything I do to make myself comfortable has an immediate self rewarding effect that I'll actually do more. Someone abled and overworked might find comfort irresistible and prefer to sleep or watch TV or socialize when they could be painting and would enjoy painting if they gave themselves a bit of a push to do it. But someone who's always in pain and usually too tired to live is bored stiff with just watching movies or laying in bed and seizes on any moment when activity's possible as a break in the misery. This is the truth of my life and why I always dive for my Comfort Zone.

It's in my Comfort Zone that I'm able to do anything at all. Add extra challenges onto the logistics of trying to live in my body and chances are I'll wind up using up what little body energy I have in creating the setup or getting out the materials.

So maybe Comfort Zone is a problem like weight loss. Many people are a little over and could stand to lose a few pounds, but you really do not want to suggest that to an anorexic. They might push it to the point of death if you do. It's never a temptation to just do nothing, it's always an unpleasant frustration. I cannot keep the pace of the abled and I find my limits in unexpected and unhappy ways if I don't follow my intuition on what I can do right now, this day, this hour, this weather and what I ate and who said what to me online earlier.

Stress comes into it too. Stress isn't good for people in general, but most people need a certain amount of it to be happy, a comfortable pace. Some people actually thrive on a moderately high level of stress and excitement, depends on personality and metabolism and culture.

Fibromyalgia means that emotional stress, even something like reading the wrong news story at the wrong time when it gives me a shock, will knock me into total exhaustion and physical agony. Crippling pain washes over me. This will also blur my vision, wreck my memory to the point I sound like an Alzheimers patient, leave me forgetting my phone number or not finding something right in front of me. In that state I don't paint well even if I push myself hard and try to paint.

There were some kinds of work I could do in that state but all were left-brained rote activities. The entire 1980s were my "pain robot" years.

That said, I think there's something strange that goes on between attitude and confidence.

I'm continually surprised at how the level of confidence painters have is almost disconnected from their skills. It's not like the best painters beat themselves up more than beginners. It's more that some people are really happy with their own art and others not.

I am usually happy with my art even when it's flawed, because there'll be something about it that I like. I may want to redo it later but probably not by reworking on the same piece. I'll probably apply the critique later to some completely different subject, but if I'm not happy with something I am as likely to be wrong as when I'm thrilled with it.

But I have also got other challenges in life a lot heavier than whether a painting works or whether it's finite perfection. I strive to improve overall so that my worst come out pretty well and someone will like them. I reached a point of liking my own drawings very early in childhood after a long life study of one pet and from there just assumed I'd keep getting better at difficult subjects, but I approach them slowly. I also don't even do them until I've got all the tools I need to do it right sometimes.

But, back to the physical. When I paint, it makes me happy. Especially when I go right into my Comfort Zone and choose a subject with bright colors like a macaw or hummingbird or flower or fruit, or a cat, any cat, a landscape without any other people in it or signs of human habitation where I know I'm not going to get hassled by anyone and can amble through at my own pace without running into those abled hikers with their huge backpacks warbling about "It's only another mile or so" to the water. Better not be or I'm dead. I like to see the water right in the scene.

I like those moments with wildlife where sitting still long enough lets them relax and understand I'm not hunting them, so they wander out and show themselves close. Wild cats especially but most wildlife too. I didn't get to do it often but I have had some moments to remember and love documentaries.

What happened is that because I couldn't run and play as a little boy, I got very good at reading, writing and drawing, the things that were still fun when you sit still for a long time. I did and do lots of little drawings that can be finished before I'm too tired to do it well. I learn a lot and over the past few years have learned so much more than I ever expected, WC is tremendously stimulating.

I get decisive when I paint. A mark is there when I've done it. Removing marks in any medium takes a lot more time and effort than just taking it for what it is and moving on, dealing with it by changing what I do next. That's just a physical fact. Anything that makes it slower and harder to finish a painting means I'm less likely to even manage to do that painting, so my reworking paintings usually isn't cost effective.

I have seen great painters brag about throwing away 19 out of 20 paintings they do. This makes me cringe. I can't count the number of times I hated something I finished, but other people loved it, and then years later I found out why and that what I thought was my worst was actually my best because I'd leaped beyond myself and intuitively practiced a principle I didn't consciously understand at the time.

The thought of wasting that much effort is horrifying too, but on body energy I'm on a budget something like a single parent of five kids working a part time Wal-Mart job. All physical activity takes five times the body energy given my skeleton, that's a limit I had from birth. I took much longer learning to walk than other children and was extremely clumsy being cross eyed on top of it, the eye operation helped but didn't change all of it.

So if I had to cross the room to get more paper, I did so five times. If I have to get out a different box of pastels, I did it five times. If I set up the easel or stand at it, I did it for five times as long and my scoliosis kicks in. Between pain and spasms, I can get too excited and push my back to where I'm stuck with days of bed rest. I have to stop at the first twinge, so slight it doesn't even register as pain, or I will pay bitterly later on.

But maybe for someone passionate and physically vigorous, brushing off a huge piece of Kitty Wallis paper 20 times till they're emotionally satisfied isn't a big deal.

I am currently trying to settle in and rearrange my life to be able to paint more, paint better, paint larger someday. That's a slow process and a good deal of it is a matter of literally rearranging furniture with the help of home care workers. I manage to paint when I can't even take a bath without help, because having help in the bath means I have some energy left to paint the next day. Literally the actions involved in scrubbing my body are sit-ups my back won't tolerate. I can manage two to wash my hair and if it ever gets so bad I can't keep that up, I'll get them shaving my head because I dislike other people washing my hair.

I live on disability for a reason. I'm hoping to get back to painting for a living, or more realistically supplementing old age Social Security by painting on the side. If I wasn't disabled at all, I would have made a good living as a painter probably from the time I was 20 and started getting cash money for little pen and ink dragon drawings. I'd have had the energy to do enough of them and most of all, paint them bigger and colorful and get to enough conventions, do the full sheet starscape and nebula beyond craggy moonscape astronomicals too, live in the sci-fi fandom but drift toward fine art on the side.

It's also screamingly funny to me to look at different art markets like the museums-gallery fine art circuit, the sci-fi fantasy fandom, the graphic novels and murals style of modern art, and see that each one has its own expectations about subject and ideas and "originality" which usually means "Do some old familiar favorite really well and be good enough at this style we can tell it's you without the signature. Share what the dragon or water lilies or mountain goat means to you."

Some people here like tough critique and most of all prefer to see flaws pointed out, because they are tired of compliments and lean toward perfectionist, get disgusted if they feel something's wrong and can't put their finger on why. Or don't trust it if it looks good.

Others blossom under the support. WC excels at both, the critique guidelines here are just broad enough to make it very comfortable for both the tough-critique "exciting challenge" crowd or those that thrive on support and encouragement. I got a lot of encouragement as a kid because sitting still made me get way ahead of any healthy child. I had the time and boredom to do it.

So what works for me may not work for you. Or it may work well for you. Please don't throw away your paintings! Just sell them to other people who like them, they may be right, they sure are for themselves and it'll make them happy. Let it go and use the money to get more paper. Remember that your worst is still way beyond what a lot of people can do at all and they'll still love it as much - just as they do still love the one they bought a decade ago that's not as good as what you do now.

There are always better painters. It's open ended. If you're up in that range you're already so specialized in your own style that the others that great are doing things you'd never think of doing, and so there's something cool to learn, including what you'll invent tomorrow. Or what happens when some chemist creates a new pigment or manufacturer an entirely new medium. There is more to learn about painting even in one medium than any one artist could learn in a human lifetime or even a dozen lifetimes because all of us are also always inventing. Art is not a zero sum game.

I think some ideas, like ranking it best and worst, are bad when applied to it because it gets so subjective and holistic. Your personal taste is going to apply to all of it and so does that of your buyer or gift recipient. Your skill at communicating with those art viewers is only going to increase, though sadly physical illness, pain and injury can reduce it. But that can be worked around. Skill can compensate for lost capacities.

I might get more detailed again if I got prescription glasses. Or I might not because I'm coming to enjoy working loose and concise. It's all fun.

What's the point of this essay? You have to judge for yourself. It's real obvious to me now that yeah, I don't do things the way other people do. What's easy for you is nearly impossible for me, but some things that would be hard for you are stone easy for me. I've had one major still life painting planned for almost a decade now and may well paint it someday - little by little by little and without actually owning any of the objects. It involves an expensive wooden sideboard, a lot of lovely crystal and glass, a mirror and a beautiful white cat sound asleep in the middle of it. Which of these things is going to destroy all the others? Guess!

If I had that stuff I sure wouldn't pose the cat in the middle of it but I may get good enough at planning paintings and rendering those objects to put it together entirely by design, capture my Siamese in the right pose, work out the reflected colors on the white fur and remember the exact hue all of it gets in the mirror because the slightly greenish glass cools everything. It'd be a fun painting. It won't be watercolor even if it'd work in watercolor because Getting Older is not going to make me more capable of stretching a full sheet of watercolor paper. Its most likely going to be pastel on sanded paper. It won't be realism. It will be impressionism.

It's simultaneously going to wow with its beauty and shock you with the thought of all that broken glass a moment later, make you want to reach in and gently catch the pitcher, pick up the kitty fast, if I do it right you will have about a 50-50 chance of saving the situation provided you know cats and that cat trusts you like your cat does. I could remove Ari from a pile of breakables on a good day and I'd move the at-risk pitcher before removing him - in that direction in case he decides it's Rowdy Cat Play Time.

But that's the fun of it. I see that paintin gin my mind and slides of it in watercolor, in oils, in oil pastels, oil sticks, oils by painting knife, pastel realism, pastel impressionism, all different ways, exist where you can't see them. And someday I'll have the skills to do it. Then sketch. Then get to work on it about once or twice a year till it's finally done. Not something I can live on, but it will get done or I'll die first. And that's how my life is shaped.

Know yourself. Know what you do and what you don't and why. Stop beating yourself up. Neither you nor your art has to be perfect. Perfection only exists in finite unliving things and art that's too perfect isn't, because good art has and shows the imperfections in life. Compensate for your barriers and weaknesses, play to your strengths and do what's right for you, because that's also where your style comes from. Past a moderate level of skill, others who know you can tell it's yours before you sign it.

Why not just take a picture?

Journal page from last August in colored pencils

I ran into a comment in a letter to the editor in The Artist's Magazine that demands an answer. The writer asked "With realistic portraits (snip parenthetical), I wonder, why they didn't just take a damn picture?"

Well, as someone who does realism sometimes, especially in colored pencils, sometimes in pen-watercolor or watercolor pencils, very occasionally in pastels because I treat that as a loose medium, there's a real answer to this question.

The human eye and hand are better than any camera. If you learn realistic drawing either monochrome in graphite or pen or charcoal, or using color in any color medium - but especially those that lend themselves to it such as oils, acrylics, gouache, pastel pencil, colored pencils or watercolor pencils, you will have a truer image with better color and values and accuracy than even the best digital or film camera can achieve. Cameras distort.

We get so used to the idea that photos are accurate that it takes learning to draw to realize just how far off they are. A camera is monocular. Most of us artists have two eyes and can perceive depth much more easily. Every photographer I know grumbles about gamut ranges and their limits. 

Here's an easy example for anyone who has a phone or digital camera. Get one of those standard, velvety dark red roses with a blue-cast red. They are beautiful and classic. As a drawing subject it's wonderful. As a painting subject, starting with Alizarin Crimson or Permanent Alizarin Crimson is a good idea, but don't keep it monochrome, you will want touches of a warmer red and some Ultramarine or at least a triad palette - a warm yellow like Cadmium Yellow would be fine and you can mix the greens with the full triad because those roses also tinge toward red in their leaves.

Now take a photo of it. First with your cheap phone camera. Then with the very best camera you can borrow. If you are a good photographer with good equipment, lighting and studio, you may actually be able to get a photo recognizably a red rose. Congratulations, you're probably professional and might be able to sell that piece to a card company.

But even that photographer is going to take a hundred or more shots to get the good one where you can see that it's a red rose with a water drop on its petals and the right light and shading to see its form. They're still going to do significant playing with the image after getting it in order to achieve something suitable for either a fine art frame or a magazine cover. 

"Why not just take a picture?" is a little bit like "Why not just paint it in oils?" Because someone good at both photography and oil painting will have a lot easier time getting a realistic red rose of that hue with that triad palette on a canvas at any size than with the camera. It's that difficult to get certain colors with a camera, let alone all the color nuances in something that common but that saturated. 

Photographing landscapes, you can get the sky beautiful and the trees are black silhouettes against it. Or see all the detail in the trees but get a washed out white sky with invisible clouds. The colors are going to be off, adjust one and something else will go crazy. Nothing gets worse than trying to take a photo of a painting after it's done, when the painting has gone beyond the camera's gamut range and value range.

Two versions of one of my best realist paintings.

The first photo is truer to the exact colors of the background, though the truth lies somewhere between them. It also shows the value relationships and color relationships on the leaf better. The second photo is closer overall and the bananas are still less saturated than they were in life. No white showed at all in the actual painting. I have light lemon yellows that just vanished. The shadow of the banana on the leaf is not as blue as it looks even in the second version, it's a blue-green, not an ultramarine. 

The second one is what I chose to display, the closest I could come to the splendor of a realist pastel painting that came out perfect. I love color and sometimes I choose to paint highly saturated subjects just to get to use the brightest colors in the box. I worked hard on this one and did the full Colourist Method working loose to tight, value first with a color structure, then more accurate color and more detail at each stage till the final blazed. I still love the painting. I framed it. I might never sell it, this mad thing with bright yellow fruit on blazing green leaf on cerise cloth is something I love. I have it in a black mat as a bright little spot of intense color in my room.

No photo can do justice to the reality of that sparkling painting. Yet I painted it from a photo better than my photo of the resulting art, done by a photographer far better than I am. 

So there are really two answers to this.

1. Realistic drawing and painting is more accurate in form, color, value and proportion. Once mastered it may look like a photo but it's better than a camera can achieve.

2. Taking a picture isn't easy. Photography is a medium in its own right. Photorealists have learned to use their cameras as a sketchbook and master both photography and realism. An ephemeral image, digital or film, is repainted usually much larger than life in archival materials to form a big painting or a mural. 

It's all art. It's all good. To ask why people would draw that well by hand is to assume that art is something like manufacturing. The realist artist, however accurate, and the good photographer both are individual artists with a unique signature to their work. They care about the subject and say something with their images. They express what they mean. 

A good realist portrait artist can turn that grainy selfie your girlfriend sent on the night you two met into a portrait of her and of that night as if you were there when she took it. On archival materials, be that graphite on good archival paper or artist grade colored pencils or oils, your great grandchildren will know about the night you met and the look in her eyes as she wanted you to see her at her best. When she's an old lady her youth will still be alive. An artist knows the story and knows you and puts all that into a painting, a drawing, or a very good portrait photographer you hired to capture that night for you forever.

Art is subjective. Art isn't perfect. Art is sometimes permanent and sometimes fleeting. Digital images may be tremendously lasting if you have some way to record them on durable media or just keep getting meticulous about backing them up indefinitely. Or they may be as fleeting as forgetting to upload them to the cloud, but you remember it and sketch from it. 

Art is communication. 

Loose pastel painting of a conch on dirty sand with foam

Why I painted this conch the way I did was half the photo reference to give me the details and a rough idea of the form, which I adjusted a little, and half the memory of a huge one maybe ten or eleven inches long that my grandparents let me play with as a little kid. I listened to the sea in it and ran my hands over that shiny pink area within. I loved the salt crusted on the outside and its rugged form, its interesting weight, the idea of being by the seaside instead of just visiting a lake. Decades later on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, I walked on seaside beaches and saw the sand and what kinds of wrack were on it. I smelled it. I experienced it. All this always mattered a lot to me, it was the stuff of dreams and my love of the sea. Some part of me will always be a beachcomber however few the times I've been physically capable of it.

This one's more painterly but still more or less representational. Not as detailed as the photo and not as overdetailed as realism can sometimes get - especially if the photo reference isn't good and the artist is still learning.

Here's a much less realist one.

Sunset at Sea, loose pastel clouds, sun, sea, boat

This is almost abstract. I mostly played with cloud shapes to get the feel of backlit sunset clouds in some sunset colors I've seen many times. I worked from a reference that had more or less this color harmony and I moved the clouds around a lot, changed the texture of the waves and gradated them, just did all sorts of things to it to turn it into a fantasy. It reads true but it's nowhere near as detailed as it looks and most of it's from imagination. The boat itself is just a single calligraphic squiggle with the tip of a dark purple stick to give an impression someone's sailing in at sunset or sailing out even farther toward the night. Up to you which way the boat's going, it's not even that specific. Depends which way land is closer, there's nothing in sight for context! 

I changed the placement of almost everything and it's visual fiction of a subject that's different every time. It's my fantasy of sunset at sea and has a lot of my feelings about the sea as much as the conch does. The adventures I wished I could have but were never practical with my physical limits. If I had no disabilities whatsoever, I would have taken off in my twenties to work on ships and travel by temporary work, writing stories and painting journals everywhere I went and probably traveled constantly. The dream of it is still something grand and I traveled enough on land, saw the sea enough to have a good life.

Realism is just one way of creating an image. There's a full range of accuracy and detail from realism and beyond to pure abstraction. There are paintings I still don't comprehend or if I do, I realize I didn't like them because I disagreed with it or didn't like the mood. Many styles of art have stylized features that aren't accurate but get the idea across - like the big expressive eyes in anime drawing, they reach the heart and don't worry about precision recording. Yet botanical drawings and Audubon's paintings are sometimes true records of extinct species. There is a place still for realism as history, especially as we still lose species every year to pollution and industry and global warming.

Without historical photographers I would never know what the past's beauties and horrors looked like in the age of photography. Everything from lost castles to Civil War battlefields do get conveyed powerfully by photography and by realist sketching. But a drawing can go someplace the camera still can't.

James Gurney is my favorite illustrator now, tops. He doesn't stop at what he can snap a picture of, He can put a child riding a triceratops with as much fancy saddlework and colorful pageantry as an Indian elephant in a religious parade. Try finding one of those with meat on its bones, let alone dressed in gold-edged silk and congenial with children, willing to pose! If you can imagine it, you can draw it. Realistic drawing opens up what's inside your head to the rest of the world as if you carried the greatest camera of all time into your dreams. 

I have seen Salvador Dali's dreams and he wouldn't have painted them nearly as well if he didn't know how to paint the waking world accurately.

Abstraction is stronger if the artist does master basic drawing and perspective. Knowing the rules, tricks and techniques of rendering makes stylized rendering more powerful and consistent. 

But there's a natural learning stage where a student's copying a photo in the spirit they draw still lifes and plaster hands instead of live people. It's not moving. It's got a lot of detail, they can take their time and measure and get it true to the source. You can do that with the Old Masters too and it's just as valuable an exercise. In fact either may be a good picture to sell to someone if you did a good job of it - to me that is basic journeyman work, so long as you have the rights to use the source photo.

Either use your own or use photos that the photographer - another artist - has given permission for hand copying to create your own right. Otherwise depart from it so radically that it just gave you an idea, which is fair use. That does mean Don't Trace without Permission, but go ahead and trace as a measuring method if you're learning. It's as good as any to find out people's foreheads are that enormous and their eyes not where you think. 

Copyright matters because the photographer is an artist too and uses a difficult medium. They have to try and try again with different settings and directions and lighting and then manipulate it after it's taken, and get about one or two good ones out of a hundred shots. Each medium has its strengths and limits. 

Why not just paint an oil painting? is as valid a question. The best answer to it is "Because I wanted to do it in this medium instead."

10 Tips for Daily Sketching

Pen and watercolor page of art supplies and ivy leaves

from my current Stillman & Birn Zeta art journal

I've done daily sketching or art for years, been interrupted by events like moving or health crises and then picked it up again many times. So I have some tips on creating and keeping the habit. These are ten things I learned that worked for me:

1. Post your progress online somewhere that others can see it.
2. Paint the subjects you love.
3. Keep going back to favorite subjects over and over.
4. Set out your favorite supplies visibly to inspire you.
5. Use supplies that give fast results if you only have a few minutes.
6. Work small and simple as a default if tired or something interferes.
7. Try gesture sketching, timed gesture sketching or thumbnails.
8. Don't stop if you miss a day or even several. Life Happens.
9. Date and save all your sketches.
10. Display the newest and best to self and others.

1. Posting the goal to a goals thread somewhere online is a public commitment. I use the Goal Post monthly thread on Pastel Talk forum at WetCanvas.com, an online art community that I'm active in. Everyone posts a monthly goal and then posts progress whenever they do. I put Daily Art or Artish on my monthly goals. Cutting mats or organizing supplies counts. Then when I do the day's art, I post that day's success. I do post more often than most of the participants because of that, but it reminds me to do it. We comment on each others' goals and sum up at the end of the month. I count off how many goals I achieved and some months attain all of them.

This could work anywhere online, especially with a small low resolution image of the day's art. I'm starting to post again to Rob's Daily Painting even if it's a sketch, which I neglected for a year due to sickness. Reviving it, I'm starting to get readers again. If you put the images online, people will comment and say something nice to encourage you. If you use an online community, make sure it's a friendly one where comments are positive. If your Facebook or posting site gets trolled, use a blog or community that's positive and well moderated. It works best if most comments are supportive critique or compliments.

2. Draw what you love. What you sketch most often will become easy. Even if it's a difficult subject, drawing it over and over will give you some fast improvement. Daily sketching of something you really like will result in a level where you like your drawings and from then on it stops being as much of a challenge. I love cats so my default for a number of years has been "draw my cat." It doesn't have to be just one subject. I also do small still life objects, pebbles, dead leaf once in a while, clear glass marbles, anything that looks cool to me. I collect little things that look cool to have something handy and interesting to draw.

Doesn't matter what it is, why you want to draw it or if you can draw it well. Keep doing it and eventually it'll get into your comfort zone when it always look good. If you hate it in the first place, forcing yourself to do it will discourage you from drawing again. I hate doing shoes, toothbrushes, soap bottles, appliances, the sorts of subjects that if I rendered it perfectly it'd look like I drew it for an ad agency to sell the product. Things that make me daydream about being out in the woods are much more likely to make me feel like drawing again. They're almost as serenity inducing as being in the woods. So don't draw what aggravates you. Draw what you wish you could draw so well you'd love to frame the drawing.

My cat Ari and his catnip carrot in pastels, rough sketch

3. Keep doing those favorites over and over. I started doing my cat asleep because he was holding still and I hoped it'd be easy. I was so wrong.. until after a dozen of them it did start to get easy and after five years of this, I'm now something of a cat expert when any animal reference comes up. I do big cats well because I studied my personal hairball producer so much, that surprised me in a good way.

These two are very closely tied. It's hard to make myself draw something I hate over and over enough times to do it well. I never wanted to be able to render a soap bottle invitingly with markers in order to sell an idea to an ad executive, I wanted an art journal full of feathers, stones, water droplets on leaves and twigs and glass bobs that was breathtaking good like the ones I admired. The more I do this, the more this actually happens. The more improvement on my favorite subjects, the faster they get into my comfort zone. 

Sometimes things that are really tough, like clear glass marbles, can turn into a quick and easy "OMG that looks so real" Showstopper that gets a lot of comments when I post it too. So pick things you really want to draw well and then keep trying. Pay more attention to progress than perfection until perfection just jumps off the page and throws it into the "Easy" category.

4. Set out your supplies right in reach and easily visible. I used to keep my Pitt Artist Pens set open and handy next to my computer, now I've got Tombow brush pens nearby. Also pocket watercolor sets, water brush, tin of watercolor pencils, pastels sets. One pastel set has a transparent lid so I can see all the colors in their tempting array. Anything organized by spectrum color tends to be very appealing and make me want to paint and draw in color whether that's colored pencils, either sort of pastels or the pan watercolors set. Keep them clean, organized and tempting so they're both easy to use and draw your attention.

5. Use supplies that give fast good results if you only have a few minutes. I'm disabled and might only have a brief window of feeling good enough to do anything in a day. I miss days because I might not be able to get out of bed. What I do to get around being sick works the same way for people who are just busy. Here are what evolved as my favorite sketch supplies.

I use a lot of different sketch mediums but they fall in two categories. Small, clean and no setup for journals: pen or watercolor pencil, pocket watercolor pan sets, Niji waterbrush, very soft B pencils, brush tip pens like Tombow or Pitt Artist Pens. Pigma Micron pens are great and waterproof, but the watersoluble Stabilo ones let me shade by pulling color out with the waterbrush. 

My other sketch supplies are bold - oil pastels, charcoal, soft pastels and Pan Pastels all give me bold results very fast on 9 x 12" sketch paper. Drawings big enough and colorful or dark enough to see across the room. If I want to work big I use something loose. Small, I use bound journals.

6. Work small and/or simple if tired or anything interferes. As described, I use very detailed rendering mediums like brush pens, pen/watercolor, watercolor pencils etc. in bound journals. If I feel like doing detail I literally do something very small - a life size clear marble or two and get it perfect. If I want to do something bold and don't have much time, it's one pear in charcoal and white on brown paper that looked good across the room. It doesn't matter which way I go - I keep the subject simple enough to do it well in the particular way I feel like. 

I like to change up the medium I use so as not to get bored doing the fruit from my lunch over and over. That keeps the exercise from being dull, but I am still drawing pears regularly in season and those marbles look cool in pastels as much as in watercolor realism. You might prefer to choose one sketch medium and stick with it, but when things are tight, draw something so simple and easy it won't take much effort. Go ahead and draw around a coin or use a ruler to start it if you want a perfect circle or straight line, because those tools are there for a reason. With enough practice you'll eventually do freehand lines and circles well even if you usually use them.

Of course sometimes I've got more time and feel good so I'll do a serious pastel painting in more than one session or fill an entire page or two with good pen/watercolor realism instead of just doing one marble. This is what to do on the days you've only got five minutes and grab the pocket sketchbook and the ballpoint you were using at work to sketch a pebble or your coffee cup. It still counts! Let yourself do as much or as many as you like, just set the minimum so small and simple that it's hard to fail.

Charcoal and white pastel pear on brown paper.

7. Try gesture sketching, timed gesture sketching or thumbnails. This relates to the above. I might sometimes do a full realist glass marble but it's also okay to grab a black and a gray brush pen, look at a photo reference and try to do a 2" square thumbnail sketch creating a composition of it. Or do a fast gesture sketch of my sleeping cat curled up, almost a spiral with a foot and two ears sticking out. I started doing this because various classes advised thumbnailing serious paintings to plan them. It helps composition to do that whether you do the painting or not. Practicing thumbnails will improve your more serious sketches. 

Timed gesture sketches are good to train yourself to believe you really can draw something well when you've only got a five minute break on a really long day. I learned that on the fly at a life drawing group. One model said "I'm going to start with a few short two minute gestures" and got up to do a dozen poses with a two minute timer. i went crazy trying to draw her. If I didn't finish, I just went on to the next one. To my surprise, by the end of those gestures I was drawing her a lot more accurately and I finished her fifteen minute pose before the time was up - because I'd blocked her in that fast after the warmup. Everyone got better sketches of her than the rest of the models.

So I tried it again with my cat and discovered I didn't need the timer. He rolls over or moves at least every two minutes even sound asleep. I started drawing him as one of my favorites a few years ago and that made all other animal drawings easy by comparison. Most of all, it didn't take many two minute cats before I could always recognize him and his pose with them. They don't have to be big or detailed, just try to get the pose. 

This gives your hands proof that you really can squeeze in at least one drawing during a break and it means those quick drawings will come out decent enough to motivate you to keep doing them after relatively few tries on the same subject. The reason is that you pay more attention on each try. What you see in the subject is cumulative. Practice at it means being able to do it on the fly and get the essentials of even new things on the first go. 

8. Don't stop if you miss a day or even several. Life Happens. I have multiple disabilities and can't even keep up activities of daily living let alone earn a living. If I could only work one or two days a month and can't predict which days those are, I'd have to get a month's income per painting and be able to complete it within an hour or two to live on my art again. Not likely. 

But people juggling long work hours and stress in emotional relationships, other commitments, other good habits like exercise can also have their schedules randomly interrupted by other people. If you get used to drawing on your break at work, the day the boss wants to socialize all through your break it didn't happen and then you forgot. Life happens. 

So let it go. Don't do perfection. Do progress, the next day do it as if you hadn't missed a day. Or several, because that was friends in from out of town or some romantic something - love can soak all available time and energy in life whether that's a happy long weekend off at the same time or a three day argument about the budget. 

Missing a day or several is going to happen, but it's easiest to build up to where those are rare by not worrying about them. Count instead how long you go between them and find out what interferes. Each day is its own. Each success matters. Losing a day is just luck, it's not breaking a promise to self. But each day you get it is a reward, something cool, a treat for yourself.

Because the more you do it the better your sketching is and the more often you go "Wow I didn't think I could get that so well, it was just this goofy little sketch but it came out awesome." Those happen, more and more the better you keep it up.

Robin in pastel pencils from June

9. Date and save all sketches. This is proof to yourself that you're keeping it up, which is a real achievement. As soon as you accumulate some of those, you will start seeing real improvement. Count those successes. Every now and then look back to old ones and see how amazingly far you've come since last month or last year or a few years ago. I have been doing well for a long time but I've seen more improvement than I thought I could have - because the better I get, the more I can see that I can improve. I draw better than I used to but not as well as I will - and dating sketches is constant tangible proof of that. I sketch things now that I used to think of as impossible and occasionally get it on the first try.

10. Display the newest and best to self and others. I post my sketches on Wetcanvas and am back to blogging and posting them on Facebook too. That's "yes I'm succeeding at my self set goal" and also gets compliments. At home I look through my art journals when I pick them up, get happy about the good pages, think about improving on the ones I'm not as happy with. Most of all see the improvement. When I finish one there are a lot more good pages than I expected.

In a lot of movies, a character who can draw will have a wall of sketches to show the viewer what he's good at. A primate researcher has a whole giant cork board full of realistic gorilla expressions and full body poses, you know he's the gorilla scientist. Hannibal Lecter filled his cell with beautiful views of Florence and you knew he was a genius with an eidetic memory before he opened his mouth. The movies do that to give a lot of information fast. 

I always wanted a wall that looked like that, full of good sketches that told anyone who came in that I can draw well. It's there. Because I'm me and love color, most are in pastels so it's not quite Hannibal Lecter's somber view, it's this blazing garden and fruit stand and nature preserve with my cat here and there making my room a lot more colorful. It's a constant reminder of my skill and who I am - everything in it meant something to me and the style is naturally the kind of art I like most. 

If I have to take down all of it like I did once for the exterminator who insisted bugs hid behind paintings (there wasn't even one), I just start over on the blank wall and recreate it with new sketches. It always looks better than the last time I did the Sketch Wall because practice does that. Instant feedback and identity reminder. I sketch all the time. I do daily art. I'm good at this thing, especially at the subjects I love. It also makes me want to do more. When it's full, I take down the worst of what's up to put up the newest. That means my very best stay on the wall for months and maybe years, but anything flawed rotates into the portfolios and storage boxes for me to go through on spring cleaning and go "Wow, didn't realize I still that. Dang, I really improved. Oh I can't believe I used to draw like that. It's so easy now."

It's constant proof of success. Small incremental success is addictive. These are the things that worked for me.

Drawing at the same time every day is something I could not do because weather is random and my disabilities flare sometimes for reasons I can't even detect. A pressure change can leave me comfortable and energetic one minute, answer the phone, talk two minutes and blam, nap attack and I don't wake up till it's the next day. Or my wrists and hands hurt too much to hold a pen. So that's pot luck. i have to seize the moment and draw whenever I can to keep it up, count it done when it's done.

That is one strategy and doing it the same time and way every day is another. Both are habits, I just happen to have the particular disabilities that break any habits I have at the slightest disruption. Use whichever works. Use whatever of these get you going and ignore any that don't. We are all different and you're the one person in the world that knows most what motivates you or not. 

A failed trial is just that, a success is something you achieved. Small daily successes are good for both your drawing skills and general outlook in life. It's a human thing that's all too absent at most jobs, but art is the one thing that you can never really run out of ways to do something cooler and more interesting. It's also the one thing in life that the more you do it your way, the better you get. Style is something that just happens like handwriting, skill is what makes it visible to everyone else. But very few kinds of activity leave positive, tangible results and improvement every time you do them. It's incredibly satisfying to get to the point something that looked crazy difficult is part of the "easy stuff."

Red clear and blue catseye marbles in pen and watercolor from Zeta journal

__________________

Breakthrough on New Supply Freeze

There should be a Latinate phobia name for this reaction. Artists from beginners to experts seem to run into it so often that it should have its own term. You buy something new and wonderful like Pan Pastels or Derwent ArtBars or Roche' pastels (the world's most expensive at about $16 a stick!) and then the happy package day arrives. You tear open the box like it's Christmas morning and you're seven years old again. Santa still loves you and wow, the fat man knew you loved color best of all.

Then comes the New Supply Freeze.

It's a sudden panic attack. How could I have bought 72 Unison pastels? Unisons! Those expensive hand rolled ones! In the fancy aluminum case no less! OMG these things are so perfect - how the heck can I ever get good enough to use these perfect hand rolled unbelievably awesome and expensive supplies. I tanked my savings getting them. I stretched my budget to the point of breaking. Now the magic brush/stick/pen is in my hand, I know I'm nowhere near as good as the artists I saw using them on YouTube.

That panic isn't just you.

Artists still feel this on up into their professional careers. Award winners sometimes feel this way about expensive brand-new supplies. The first page in a Stillman & Birn art journal or a Moleskine notebook, when you know you could've just got the cheap ProArt spiral bound one for sketching does that. Or the first use of an expensive sanded paper, or a new linen canvas with a fine portrait weave. Whatever it is, when you upgrade your art supplies to a new level, try a new medium and get the best available supplies, there's a natural terror that you're not ready for it yet.

Also, coming in from outside in a lot of social pressure surrounding myths like Talent, there's the panic that you may not be able to learn to be good enough to use the great new supplies. Support from friends and collectors can help shout down that panic. There are people besides your mother who love your art. There are teachers who knew you had potential and some of them brag on you. There are friends who paid you good money to paint something. Collectors who met your art before they knew you that became friends - and in that panic, you forget how they became your friends and think they only bought it to make you happy.

Naw. They bought it to make themselves happy. They fell in love with it. You really are good enough to use the great new supplies and they will help you to paint better.

Artist grade art supplies perform better than cheap stuff. Beginners are often discouraged because they see great effects done by professionals and experts, then try it with materials that can't perform that effect. No matter how new you are to a medium or to drawing and painting, you will actually get better results using the brand new artist grade expensive goodies than you would if you'd sensibly gone down the children's school supply aisle in the discount store for its equivalent.

I developed a method for handling that panic. It works for beginners as well as experts who just feel like beginners when facing a new supply or medium.

Start out by charting the good new stuff. Take out your sketchbook or a sample surface - if it's oil paints or something else used on canvas, use a cheap canvas board or canvas pad. Do swatches of it. Make test marks with it. Turn that into a simple left brained task. Label your swatches if you like, this will be an enduring record for when the new 'too good' supply is an old favorite and you run out of the color you use most. This really matters in dry mediums like pastels and colored pencils - when you have several hundred pencils or sticks, identifying the little nub with no number on it for replacement can only be done by going through the charts.

It works with paint too. You can tell the difference between brands sometimes, discover that blob of dried Ultramarine watercolor was the Daniel Smith French Ultramarine rather than the Winsor & Newton one. They have slightly different hues and textures, one will become a favorite.

Now you've broken the new supply's virginity.

If it's a new journal, take a back page and chart one of the supplies you use most in journals - all your ink colors, or a set of colored pencils, handy where you can reference the chart. Leave the front page blank so that later on when you get a good idea for an opening page you can create it. Or design the opening page on printer paper and then redo it on the first page carefully.

There's nothing that says your first painting on expensive Kitty Wallis pastel paper has to be alla prima off the top of your head, from memory, on impulse.

That's the other practical tactic to beat down New Supply Freeze.

First you chart. Then you chart mixtures, obvious common mixtures you've used often in similar supplies. See how the new supply handles. If you've never tried acrylics or oils or something, you'll start to get a feel for how they mix. Obvious beginner mistakes like trying to mix a light green by starting from a strong blue can happen on the mixing page instead of on your first painting. You can put "blue first" next to "yellow first" and see that you got a better green going first with the yellow.

By now you're starting to get a feel for how they handle. There's still the question of whether you can do a painting good enough to justify the expense.

Fight fear with reality checks.

Start doing thumbnail sketches. Do notans. Plan your painting. Do small color studies testing the material on its intended surface. Try out techniques in a small way and plan a serious painting by doing all the preliminaries. No matter what your skill level is, you'll come out with a much better painting doing all the planning studies.

Thumbnail sketches eliminate a lot of composition problems right at the start. Don't just do one. Take a sketchbook page and something common like an HB pencil or a free ballpoint pen from the grocery store and draw a dozen of them. Spend only a minute or two on each thumbnail. Pens are good because you can't go back and fix mistakes, you have to start over if a dark mark goes where you wanted light.

Choosing the best of the thumbnails, work out a value sketch in a bit more detail. Refine your idea.

Then do a color study, not full size, just work out the mixtures and exact hues and textures you'll want in the final painting.

Scale that up to your full planned size and wow... all of a sudden the first page in that Stillman and Birn Beta watercolor journal has a gorgeous watercolor or acrylic landscape on it. Your first pastel painting on sanded paper has depth and richness, it's a worthy painting. You look like a better artist than you really are.

Or rather, your skills shine at their best, because the really good artists out there are going through all those preliminaries when they do the knockout contest entry paintings that left you feeling so awed. They have sketchbooks with thumbnails in them. They have notans that were not worthy. They did color studies that came out ghastly and drew things misproportioned and goofed up putting in a cloud that looks like a horse when they didn't want a surreal flying horse fantasy painting.

Or they got that by accident in the color study and decided having a horse materialize out of a cloud would be a lovely spiritual or fantasy painting, ran with it and used the idea the mistake gave them. Mistakes are serendipity. Every stage of the process of breaking in your new supplies will teach you more about using them until your first piece with them is not only your best painting, it's better than you even thought you could do.

Reality Checks always trump the New Supply Freeze.

There's a reason it cost that much. That's care in its preparation, finer milling, greater pigment load, more expensive valuable pigments, unique effects that only that brand has in its proprietary chemistry and methods. The good news for self indulgent hobbyists who buy the best is that they will learn faster and consistently get better results.

High quality art supplies pay for themselves, including with shorter learning curves.

If you're a beginner starting watercolor, choose a smaller palette of colors and get expensive artist grade paint. It's stronger. You'll find out the small tube of artist grade paint will thin out and cover a larger area than the big tube of cheap student paint. You'll get effects with it that don't work as well with the student grade paints too.

My example is my first test with Derwent ArtBars. That is not actually a painting under the color chart. It's an idea for a painting, a quick color study done with Derwent ArtBars where I tested dry over dry color mixing and then washed it, tested wet in wet color mixing, swiped a wet brush over the watersoluble sticks to see how it handles as paint, did all sorts of things with it. Because I worked over some of the tests they're not as neatly organized as the examples I'll use in my review of the product. Because I just made up some of the rocks, they don't look as good as they would have if I'd set out some pebbles on my desk to sketch them from life.

It doesn't matter. That page let me find out how to handle my Derwent ArtBars and thus when I do the final version of ArtBar examples, they'll make more sense to my art supply review readers. That one was for me. The sticks aren't virgin any more and have now joined my sketch supplies. I will probably do more muted mixtures in the good example painting that I create for the review - but this one has the necessary mistakes to make my review illustrations look more professional.

Enjoy your new supplies. Just play with them and don't take the playful results that seriously - your first real painting with them will thank you for all the preliminaries.