Rediscovering the Road Not Taken …

I found bits of myself scattered among the pages of a book today. Like the aftermath of a collision between a drunken cyclist and a street vendors taco cart I recognize tiny flakes of my thought strewn throughout the author’s insightful text. This seemingly random juxtaposition of the cheese, meat and sauce that is my life has gained form … -ok, ok I mashed it together myself and made a little dog shaped out of taco meat.

Art & Fear
Anyway, the book is great so far. Art & Fear. If you are an artist, or struggling to be an artist, and beset with the common fear that somehow you aren’t a ‘real’ artist, that your work isn’t good enough because it doesn’t look like [insert famous artist name here]’s work. Or if you fritter away your time over-planning and never doing your art, over-dreaming and never planning, or endlessly copying others styles, worrying, feeling inadequate, going back to school to become an accountant (not because you want to be one, but because you consider yourself a failure as an artist)…. if this is you then you may want to check out this book. I think it should be required reading for all creative types (or even the parents of creatives as I see my 10 year old son showing evidence of the same fears regarding his budding abilities).

I am not sure if I will ‘make it’ as an artist. I find it odd to even worry about things like that at almost 50 years of age. I am old enough that I felt confident in knowing where I was in the world. Now I find myself with a bit of a teenage identity crisis. This book is helping me refocus and define what it means to be an artist. It has helped me to begin exploring ‘my art’ instead of trying to emulate the styles of others in the hopes of finding acceptance.

Whether or not I am ultimately ’successful’, I feel that I have begun to shed some of the crushing burden of my own uncertainty and am excited to try to find my own work.

Well…. six months after being laid off I am still looking for steady work. I was riding high for a while, back to school, graduated, my first art job, then laid off. I’ve been surviving on various odd jobs and bits of freelance.

I have been working on my site a bit so if you have a chance to visit please do.

Read more »

I made another small pack of brushes -not my favorite but hopefully some will find it useful.

You can get it on this page and see what brushes are included in the set …

I’ve added another small collection of brushes. Click on the image to open the downloads page in a new window and see more preview images.

I like to draw and have often thought of creating a comic book. My character skills are still a bit underdeveloped and getting a consistent result from frame to frame takes a lot of time. Using Flash as a way to build reusable characters to pose and render out as static comics (or with some animation like moving clouds, exploding panels etc) has been on my mind. I imagine the standard library building techniques would be great for this and once built, could speed up the process - what do you think?

Read more »

This is just a quick note for those promoting their art. If you haven’t done so already consider adding a Deviantart page. I added three brush packs over the past 3 days. My site generated 200 or so downloads. Deviantart generated 1300 during the same period. It makes sense to cross link your various blogs and sites to drive traffic through them and increase your visibility.

Ever since Dan Ritchie created DogWaffle it has had a fanatical following. I tried the demo some time back and loved the particle brushes. When they rolled that feature into a separate product called PD Particles -that only cost about $20- I purchased it.

I recently dug up some presets I created and posted them as part of my site update. If you have any of these products

I created another small collection of ’stone’ Photoshop brushes which you may want to check out.

Check them out >>