Currently Browsing: internal critic 22 articles
The Freedom of Quick, Loose Sketches for Your Drawing Skills
Over the last 35 years and hundreds of students have confessed to me that they “don’t have time to sketch,” or that they “were physically too ill to sketch.” I always respond that you can always find time, and even if ill you can get something down on paper that will be useful to you […]
In Context: Everything Included on a Journal Page—How Do I Find It?
In my last two posts I wrote about just getting stuff down on the page. There’s one drawback to this approach if you have a noisy internal critic who likes to interrupt you and tell you what a mess of things you’re making. If you have 10 things on a page, many of which might […]
Sketching on Any Old Paper You Have At Hand
Sometimes we can get into our heads. We can spend time telling ourselves all the reasons we can’t take time right now and paint. As a teacher for over 30 years I think I’ve heard every excuse there is: no space to set up, don’t have the materials I want to work with; I don’t […]
Another Potential Journaling Hiccup: The Perfect Time and Place
Blog readers and students often write to me about their hopes and deferred dreams for their journaling and their art life. They live with the hope that if they can “just get through to retirement,” or “Just get through this current crisis [fill in the blank as to what that is]” that the clouds will […]
The Case for Not Finishing a Sketch
I’m the first person to encourage people to finish what they start. In fact I encourage people to push past the point where they think they have finished, because until you “break” a few sketches you don’t really know where that point of finish resides. But I also wanted to put a word in today […]
The Final Lectures Series: Which Question
Note: If you’re playing the home version game—today’s image on the blog’s landing page is a sketch of Dame Margaret Rutherford. It’s in the video. This is part two in my farewell to teaching series of posts. In today’s video (an excerpt from the mid-session webinar in my last Drawing Practice class), I address […]
Dig Out Some Old Art Supplies
Even with the best laid plans sometimes things happen. I like to tape sketching sessions to use when explaining things to my Patreon subscribers. But last month while preparing pieces for this month’s playing with color theme I more than once forgot to turn the camera back on after taking a break to get something, […]
Enjoy the Little Bits
It’s important if you’re going to keep your drawing habit healthy that you take time to find something good in what you’ve done. Yes, you might not have captured someone’s likeness, or caught the proportions of a still life or landscape, but there is always something you can find and enjoy. And if you do […]
Physical Therapy for Your Art Practice
I suggest to my Drawing Practice students that they do a six-week plan and goal setting session at the end of class; and that they repeat that every six weeks for the rest of their lives. Knowing what our goals are, and seeing how we executed our plans, helps us realign our strategy for going […]
Protected: Limited Choices Lead to Successful Projects
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.