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my art professor

November 12, 2018

Copy after Anders Zorn’s portrait of Ols Maria that I did during my digital illustration class as a demo for my student. I can’t say often enough how much doing master copies of works I respect has improved my skills. I think that it may be one, if not THE, fastest way to improve your skills. There are different types of copies that will teach you different things. Relatively fast ones, like this are great for understanding the basic tonalities, colors, and design of an artist.

Try doing a series of one hour master copies. Pick ten works you love and over the next ten days paint each of them for an hour. Tag me @myartprofessor in your instagram posts or link them in the comments below. Tell me what you’ve learned!

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I’ve been adding videos to youtube!

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had my students doing master copies as a way of practicing their newly acquired digital painting skills. This is one I did in class using Corel Painter and some old school brushes I’ve been using for over 15 years! Actual time spent was around 40 minutes (I gave the students an hour). I sped it up here to about 10 minutes.

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I’ve been adding videos to youtube! This is a freewheeling unedited discussion given during a recent class on how to work with edges, perhaps one of the most abused subjects in painting! I break it down into interior/exterior edges, round/flat/cornered edges, surface textures, and material qualities. For me, this really simplifies things down. I’m painting a picture of a mushroom in Adobe Photoshop using a small assortment of brushes I’ve collected over the years.

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I’ve been adding videos to youtube! This is the ABC Method for drawing ellipses. By far (outside of digital…) this is the best method for freehanding a perfect ellipse everytime. Even if you’re doing a drawing that’s not directly using perspective, all you need to do is rough out your rectangle around the ellipse (like a vase top), find the vertical and horizontal center lines and then follow the method in the video! You’ll get a perfect ellipse every single time!

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