#finally figured out where the perspective tool on procreate is | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

fortheloveofexy · 2 years

Note

What advice would you give to beginner artists/those trying to get back into art about resources or techniques? Specifically figure drawing because YIKES

Oh my darling Lev, I'd be happy to tell you what I've learned!

Okay, so some of this advice is going to be especially geared towards digital art, but the first thing I will say right now is that traditional art is great for learning the fundamentals. If you're completely new to art, I would recommend starting with traditional first.

Traditional is especially good for figure drawing bc you can work with really fast, loose shapes. I like to do timed sketches, where I spend 15 minutes drawing a figure in pencil or charcoal and try to get as much form in as I can. The goal is to work light and quick; don't get caught up in the details or erasing mistakes, just get the basic shape down. Do this regularly, at least once a week. You'll be amazed at how much you improve.

But, whichever medium you choose, here is some general advice:

Use references. I cannot stress this enough; references are essential for nearly every artist. Do not shy away from using them because you think it might make your work "less original". Most, if not all, professional artists use references in some form. It saves time, it saves your wrist, and it still hones your skills. Do not suffer needlessly drawing every single thing from memory when you can use a reference.

On that note - tracing is not a bad word. Tracing, outside of the art world, has a terrible reputation, and this is because it is often abused by people who don't know how to use it properly. Tracing can be a great way to improve your skills, save you time and save your wrist, provided you do it correctly.

A few tips for how to use tracing the right way - don't trace another artist's work. Trace stock images or photos you have taken instead.

Also, don't trace an image line-for-line exactly - instead, loosely sketch over the image you are tracing, mapping out general shapes and form, then draw in your own lines without the reference image and make any adjustments and changes. This way you're still improving your skills and your understanding of proportion/perspective, and the drawing will look more natural. Badly done tracings are very obvious and have a specific "look" to them that most people will be able to pick out. Well-done tracing is nigh undetectable.

Finally - while tracing is a useful and valuable way to improve, it should never function as a replacement for the fundamental skills. You still need to practice free-handing. Tracing is not a replacement for those skills - it's just another tool in your arsenal.

Even professional artists use tracing at times. Muralists, painters, even some of the most well-known artists in history used methods of tracing in their great works.

Now, for the more digital art-specific stuff:

I mostly use Procreate (which is only a $10 one-time fee on the app store) but that requires having an iPad and Apple Pen. So here are some alternatives:

Wacom offers drawing tablets that are less than $100 and come with a 2-year Clip Studio Paint subscription - a well known program that many artists use and some even prefer to Procreate. You can use Wacom tablets with basically any PC.

Krita is a free drawing program that also works well. It's a bit more simplistic than CSP and Procreate from what I've heard but it's a create way to get started with digital art if you've never tried it before.

There are literally hundreds of options out there for digital art programs to use, so I won't list them all here. But if other artists have rec's, please feel free to list them in the replies.

#asks #ask jess #art advice

67 notes · View notes

dontdoititsscary · 9 months

Text

Week 1 final - I started a joke

I attempted a more complicated study. I dont't think it made sense to keep going tho- I made some pretty amateur mistakes pretty early on - it seems obvious now but duh, how tf u gonna make an accurate study on...a different sized canvas???

So yah that error started a lil cascade of other errors obv. Here it is

original

where I got. So I stopped here (and I think am tabling it for now) I think of stuff like this as aspirational studies. I'm trying to go for shit higher than what im practicing because ultimately im learning this formal stuff so I can make dope stuff like this and draw my self indulgent spooky lil ghost comic. So I will respect the journey of the basics, but im also going to shoot higher. Anyway, tho I aborted this attempt I did problem solve to find a process for making the study be more accurate (and got some feedback in said server too!) 1) Right sized canvas 2)Do a very very general big shape block in of the major shapes of the comp 3)turn on and use procreates perspective tools (trying to figure out the vanishing points was important too. 4)check and recheck everything. Basically you dont want the pic to get too far away from you before you catch errors in thought/execution, cause mistakes cascade. So I didn't go all the way, but next time i'll get further.

#art study #ehehehehehe

1 note · View note

arcticdementor · 4 years

Link

In 1924, the British scientist J. B. S. Haldane coined the term “ectogenesis” to describe how human pregnancy would one day give way to artificial wombs. “It was in 1951 that Dupont and Schwarz produced the first ectogenetic child,” Haldane wrote, imagining how an earnest college student of the future would describe the phenomenon. “Now that the technique is fully developed, we can take an ovary from a woman, and keep it growing in a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years, producing a fresh ovum each month, of which 90 percent can be fertilized, and the embryos grown successfully for nine months, and then brought out into the air.” By the year 2074, Haldane imagined, ectogenesis had become a popular technique — with “less than 30 percent of children... now born of woman.” Writing at a time when debates over contraception and eugenics raged on both sides of the Atlantic, his prediction was an understandable outgrowth of these new efforts to control fertility. “Had it not been for ectogenesis,” Haldane prophesied, “there can be little doubt that civilization would have collapsed within a measurable time owing to the greater fertility of the less desirable members of the population in almost all countries.”

Today, we have inched slightly — but only slightly — closer to perfecting the technology that would realize Haldane’s vision, albeit for reasons other than the eugenic improvement of the race. A small knot of scientists in the United States and Japan are experimenting with both live animals and human cells to mimic the functioning of the womb. And while their work is in its early stages, it is worth exploring the scientific prospects and ethical implications of research on artificial wombs.

Haldane’s chosen title — Daedalus — is perhaps telling. In Greek mythology, Daedalus, “the cunning worker,” was an ingenious practitioner of the mechanical arts, a figure whose inventions proved, at best, ambiguous contributions to humanity. His most famous invention — wings crafted from bird feathers, wax, and string, built to escape with his son Icarus from the clutches of King Minos — became the tool of his son’s destruction, when “the boy, exulting in his career, began to leave the guidance of his companion and soar upward as if to reach heaven.” The hot sun promptly melted the wax wings, Icarus plunged to his death, and Daedalus was left “bitterly lamenting his own arts.”

…

The question is whether these different avenues of research — at the beginning of pregnancy and the end of pregnancy — will one day converge. “I’ve talked to researchers who are doing research on partial ectogenesis — interventions for premature births, mainly — and I’ve talked to in vitro fertilization researchers who are trying to extend the period of time an embryo can live outside the womb,” says Scott Gelfand, Director of the Ethics Center at the University of Oklahoma, Tulsa, who organized a conference on artificial wombs in 2002. “Put the two together and eventually we’re going to be able to do this.” Of course, many scientific and biological hurdles remain, and physicians who work with assisted reproductive technologies are hesitant to predict the future. “The uterus is a complex organism,” says Dr. David Adamson, Director of Fertility Physicians of Northern California and past president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. “There are still issues related to immunology and cardiovascular development that are extremely complicated and not very well understood. In terms of putting together all of these and having a clinically successful artificial womb,” he says, “my personal perspective is that it is decades away.”

…

Artificial wombs are just the kind of technological prospect that radical ethicists love to celebrate. In 1985, philosopher Peter Singer gave them a ringing endorsement: “I think women will be helped, rather than harmed, by the development of a technology that makes it possible for them to have children without being pregnant,” he said. Singer’s vision echoed that of feminist theorist Shulamith Firestone, who made a similar argument in 1970 in The Dialectic of Sex. Once the “freeing of women from the tyranny of their reproductive biology” occurred, she said, they could finally reach full equality with men. Viewed this way, artificial wombs are merely another step in the ongoing advance of human reproductive technologies and women’s social equality. They would both expand the range of reproductive choices and make the differences between men and women matters of technological convention rather than biological nature.

…

But many ethicists are not so sure. “I think artificial wombs could lead to a commodification of the whole process of pregnancy,” says Rosemarie Tong, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and a leading scholar in feminist bioethics. “To the extent that we externalize an experience like pregnancy, it may lead to a view of the growing child as a ‘thing.’” The further we erode the mystery of the development of human life, the more appealing it becomes to think about improving upon it, or demanding greater control over it. Even given developments in fetal surgery, the human womb still insists that we not breach its protections too often. But with artificial wombs, the transparency of the technology itself would invite greater intervention.

At stake in this debate is the very meaning of human pregnancy: the meaning of the mother-child relationship, the nature of the female body, and the significance of being born, not “made.” Let’s say, for example, that scientists perfect the artificial womb to the point where it becomes a “healthier” environment than the old-fashioned human version. Artificial wombs, after all, wouldn’t be threatened by irresponsible introductions of alcohol or illegal drugs. They could have precisely regulated sources of temperature and nutrition and ongoing monitoring by expert technicians in incubation clinics. Like genetic testing of unborn fetuses, which is fast becoming a medical norm rather than a choice, people might begin to ask: Why take the risk of gestating my child in an old-fashioned womb? With an eye to avoiding costs and complications, insurance companies might begin to insist that we don’t. (Imagine “expectant mothers” stopping by the incubation clinic once a week to check up on their “unborn” child.)

In the near term, most women would almost certainly gestate their children the old-fashioned way, even if they had the choice. “Relatively few people, with tons of money, who are unusual, would use artificial wombs,” says Tong. But even the option of artificial wombs might change the way we view pregnancy, and perhaps the way we view women. Feminist critics of science, particularly those who embrace an “essentialist” view of women, have long claimed that artificial reproductive technologies threaten women’s social status. Australian sociologist Robyn Rowland has argued that the creation of artificial wombs would spell the end of women’s innate power. “We may find ourselves without a product of any kind with which to bargain,” she writes. “We have to ask, if that last power is taken and controlled by men, what role is envisaged for women in the new world? Will women become obsolete?” Rowland and other feminist critics are hardly shrinking violets; they called their 1984 conference on the subject “The Death of the Female.” They view the medical establishment as irredeemably male — a monolithic, misogynistic institution that views women who are not pregnant as, literally, idle machines.

More thoughtful feminist critics note that even without the possibility of manipulation by the medical establishment, artificial wombs would create serious disruptions in our relationships with our children. “It would weaken the mother-child bond,” says Tong. “Indeed, I think it would weaken the bonds between parents and children in general. On the whole, I think the physicality and embodied nature of pregnancy is a real and material way for one generation to connect to the next... Without that rootedness in the body, relationships between the generations become more abstract, less feeling-filled.”

…

There has always been an incalculable mystery surrounding the womb, as religion and folk wisdom attest. “As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child: even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all,” says Ecclesiastes. In the Hebrew Bible, interventions in the womb were considered to be solely the province of God, not man. In the story of Rachel and Jacob, when the barren Rachel says, “Give me children, or else I die,” Jacob responds in anger, saying “Am I in God’s stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb?” For centuries, folk tales warned pregnant women against walking in graveyards, looking at deformed people, witnessing a solar eclipse, or even strolling around after dark, lest they damage the developing child.

Our feelings of awe and curiosity about the womb are a reaction both to its physiological function and its potent status as a symbol of fertility, procreation, and the continuation of the species. It is not quite an organ, although it can be donated and transplanted; and it is more mysterious than the heart or the lungs, which both men and women share. It is freighted with meaning because it is the site, or the potential site, of such a fundamental and in many ways still deeply mysterious thing — the emergence and development of a new human life.

In an essay written just before he died, the philosopher Hans Jonas observed that “natality,” as he called it, “is as essential an attribute of the human condition as is mortality. It denotes the fact that we all have been born, which means that each of us had a beginning when others already had long been there, and it ensures that there will always be such that see the world for the first time, see things with new eyes, wonder where others are dulled by habit, start out from where they had arrived.” In the end, artificial wombs are different from current technologies like IVF and modern arrangements like surrogacy, because they represent the final severing of reproduction from the human body. There is something about being born of a human being — rather than a cow or an incubator — that fundamentally makes us human. Whether it is the sound of a human voice, the beating of a human heart, the temperature and rhythms of the human body, or some combination of all of these things that makes it so, it is difficult to imagine that science will ever find a way to truly mimic them. We should remember this truth as we expand the reach of our powers over the very origins of human life, lest we give birth to a technology we will live to regret.

#christine rosen #the new atlantis #artificial wombs #feminism #bioethics

0 notes

markwatkinsconsumerguide · 5 years

Photo

Consumer Guide / No.34 / ROSE FREYMUTH-FRAZIER with Mark Watkins.

A repost from 2016.

MW: Rose, you live and paint in New York City. Describe your studio set-up and the materials you tend to use…

RFF: I’m pretty orderly because I work from a home studio. Working at home, as opposed to maintaining a separate studio space, (which I’ve also done in the past), has made me much more orderly and frugal with my mess making.

I have an easel set up, a palette and a little shelf of materials which are mostly a combination of standard commercial oil paints and a few beautiful, high-end brands.

I was lucky enough to have Rublev send me a bunch of samples which are lovely and I really like Michael Harding paints as well.

http://www.rublevcolours.com/

http://www.michaelharding.co.uk/

We just adopted a little Persian kitty and I know that keeping her safe from the materials is going to add a whole new dimension to the way I work!

MW: Do you ‘whistle while you work’ ?

RFF: Rather than listening to music, I like to hear people talking while I paint I need someone to tell me a story. Pod-casts like “This American Life” and public radio are good but listening to audiobooks is my favorite, usually the classics and the longer the better. Favorite authors include Tolstoy, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Dostoevsky and Orwell. I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to Dracula over the years!

MW: How do you 'wet your whistle’ whilst creating?

RFF: Well Mark, I do drink a lot of coffee in the morning and by morning, I mean anytime before 2pm. It takes me a while to get going everyday.

MW: When starting out, how did you select the right person/s to study with? As ’ pupil’, was there ever a danger of being overly influenced by 'teacher’ in terms of taking on their style?

RFF: I was so lucky to have great mentors along the way. First, Gregg Kreutz at the Art Students League of New York. Then Steven Assael, whom I met through a workshop at the New York Academy of Art.

After that I was his studio assistant for two years. Finally, I spent a summer with Odd Nerdrum in Norway. Odd was a huge influence on me wanting to learn how to paint in the first place so of course that was a formative experience for me. I draw from each of these painters in terms of technical tools.

I admired a lot about them all and wanted to get what I could from each, but I knew I’d go on to paint work that was true to my voice, not theirs.

MW: How did you come to develop your own style?

RFF: One’s voice and perspective develops gradually. The more you work, the more the characteristic traits begin to reveal and repeat themselves, becoming what you might call a “style”.

I think my work might be more recognizable for its subject matter than anything else. I’m deliberately following, to the best of my ability, the path of figurative realism but using that venerable style to paint contemporary themes.

So in a way, I suppose it’s mostly in the subject matter where I deferential myself.

MW: How do you price your work?

RFF: Mostly based on past sales. I discuss it with the galleries.

MW: Why is (some of) your work sexually provocative? Would you like to push the barriers back further? What would that look like on naked canvass?

RFF: It seems a lot of life is about sex, from the behavior itself to our sexual identifications and associations.

Power, beauty, procreation, desire, fulfillment, repression and its consequences are just a few examples of how the variables within the world of sexuality color societal behavior as a whole.

Contemporary art, by extension should be at home addressing all of this. So when my work appears to be about sex, it is actually about life in general.

I’m just presenting ideas through this particular filter which I think is pretty universally recognized deep down by most of us. It is interesting in today’s world, with images so accessible on the internet, that a painting on canvas can still strike some as provocative.

I guess that is a good example of why painting is not dead after all, at least not just yet.

MW: The Playboy interview, might be said to be pushing back barriers, how did that come about?

RFF: Ms. Magazine did a feature on my work which lead to the Playboy interview shortly after. I was pretty happy to see my work bridge that kind of expanse within one month.

http://www.playboy.com/articles/playboy-conversation-freymuth-frazier

MW: Give one or two lines on the inspiration / meaning for each of these pictures…”Uprising”, “Angela”, “Woman Fighting Bull”, “Woman Caught Fishing” and “Sarah At Bat”...

RFF: “Uprising” is a political play on the pin-up. “Angela” is a dancer who came to my studio and demonstrated that party trick exactly as I painted it. “Woman Fighting Bull” and “Woman Caught Fishing” are both parables of female empowerment. “Sarah At Bat” is specific to a friend of mine who was fighting against difficult circumstances.

MW: Rose, what’s on the cards for the rest of 2016?

RFF: Mark, I’ll have work at Parlor Gallery in Asbury Park, New Jersey in a show opening at the end of July and also at Ann Nathan Gallery in Chicago as part of their season opener in September. I also continue to show with Cavalier Galleries at their three locations including, New York City.

www.freymuth-frazier.com

0 notes