Making Art Everyday
Establish and Grow Your Art Making Practice
Lisa Bardot of Bardot Brush hosts this year-long series of drawing prompts. There are daily, weekly and monthly project aims, lots of tutorials and colour palettes. Lisa uses Procreate and and iPad (and makes it look so easy!) but we can use anything we like.
To join in or follow along with all the projects have a look at the hashtag #MakingArtEveryday on Instagram.
Food: Fruit & Vegetables
As I want to improve my Photoshop brush skills this year that's where I started with the orange and tomato, the first two prompts. Of course, my idea is to find the brushes I can work with and get results I like and save them. As usual, I forget that part and get lost in experimenting!
For the final four prompts I worked in Illustrator and used my Circleism brushes for the banana, the pear and the eggplant. The turnip isn't one of my favourites; I tried some other Illustrator brushes and working with them seems more difficult.
Wanting to create a workflow I understand between programs, I decided to animate the banana in After Effects. It's not terribly exciting, but I like the smooth action and I manage to keep my layers with blending modes intact.
The final Fruit & Vegetable prompt I tackled was strawberry, with a colour palette rather than drawing the fruit itself. With more Illustrator brush practice I tried for an abstract idea of a Summer's day with simple shapes and patterns. Looking at this two months' later I like it much more than I did at the time.
A final food prompt ended my almost daily effort of #MakingArtEveryday, with a breakfast food. A Full English Breakfast crossed my mind, so I went and ate one and drew some toast instead!
As much as I like my Circleism brushes, and other pattern or texture brushes in Illustrator, I do still love a good, clean vector design.
During February and March inevitably I slowed down. Choosing the weekly goal prompts, I returned to Photoshop and drew a bear. Taking my time over the week I learned to rotate my canvas to make my brushstrokes easier and a bit of mindful colouring was very soothing.
In keeping with the sombre mood, the following week's prompt was a pig, having a bit of a day! As an experiment I worked the pig large enough to upload to my Society6 Shop - who knows, it might be just the thing for someone!
And, finally...
My favourite piece so far. Although putting this update together has reminded me that I like everything I've created so far more than I thought - except for that turnip...
Using a photo from Adobe Stock Free I painted this portrait. I called it Faraway Gaze. This wasn't done for a prompt, just to keep playing with Photoshop brushes.
Rather than drawing a sketch, I tried something I've seen Kyle Webster do; create the basic shapes with selections and then paint. Having never had much control, or success, with selections, I was pleased this turned out so well.
Thank you for reading and your support.