State of the Art 🎨

I’ve always enjoyed art, but never made enough time for it. In the past, I’ve mostly done abstract pencil sketches and digital pieces in Photoshop. Last year I spent some meaningful time exploring a couple of new mediums, and I’ll share some of that work here.

Pingu & Fishy
Pingu & Fishy, my first original piece in Procreate

Digital Art in Procreate

Procreate is a fantastic iPad-only app that is wildly popular in the digital art community. I started my foray into reconnecting with art via an iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, and a couple of excellent Procreate classes on SkillShare (one and two). It was a lot of fun, but I didn’t stick with it for long.

I’ve included my first original piece created in Procreate here: Pingu & Fishy. This is just messing around, but maybe one day I’ll do something with these new characters.

Pencil Sketches

Next up was returning to pencil sketches. Although this is the medium I have the most (though still limited) past experience with, I’ve been really off and on with it.

While picking it back up, I particularly enjoyed sessions with my girlfriend where we’d each do a series of sketches from the same reference photos or objects, starting with crude one-minute drawings and then increasing to 5, 10, and 15 minutes.

Here’s one where I didn’t set a time limit. This was a five-hour sketch:

And one more:

Dreamspill; an original sketch. I like adding stylized and abstract elements when drawing.

Acrylic Painting

While in Belgrade I found a wonderful place called Beo Art House. They don’t do classes per se, but they give great guidance and help when you need it, and they have all the supplies you’re likely to need to practice your medium of choice. All you need to do is show up and you can then dive into anything from painting to calligraphy, religious iconography, or sculpture. Their setting is absolutely lovely and usually filled with interesting and hip people working on their own art, from college students to expats to local celebrities (I met Serbian national basketball team player and Olympic medal winner Dajana Butulija there).

So that was the setting where I tried painting for the first and second time ever, over multiple sessions each. I ended up really proud of both pieces, which you can see below.

First painting:

Second painting:

I’m hoping to continue exploring painting and drawing, and I’d love to try out sculpture in the future. Since I loved Beo Art House so much, whenever I’m back in Belgrade I’ll be picking this back up for sure. Wish me luck!

See Flagrant Badassery: A Few Art Samples for a few more pieces I’ve previously posted online.

2 thoughts on “State of the Art 🎨”

  1. The time-lapse gif at the end really makes it look like magic to me, as someone who has negative skill in art. All the pieces you showed here display such talent. I hope you continue with it… the world can use more brightness.

    (Tech side note: your comment form, at least on Firefox, could use some UI love. I had to use Firebug to find that a comment-input field even existed; it’s absolutely invisible otherwise.)

  2. Thanks so much, Jeffrey! Seeing your comment here made my day, and got me checking out the amazing photography on your blog again. Hope you’re doing well!

    (And thanks for the callout. I’ve just improved the comment form styling to make it much more visible.)

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