What makes a skilled artist? I think, there are several important ingredients:
- Sincere love for drawing and painting;
- An ability to see joy even in difficult challenges;
- A firm determination to practice every day plus discipline;
- A clear vision of how to improve and the scope of work;
- An ability to divide something complex into simple steps;
- Time and patience.
Is talent important? To be honest, I believe that its role is too exaggerated. People often do have a natural bent for various kinds of activities or pursuits, but this bent is nothing without the elements I listed above.
As a teacher, I always do my best to transform any baffling complexity into a sequence of easy-to-follow, digestible steps. Any drawing or painting demonstration should inspire and provoke action!
However, just having an algorithm of how to draw anything won’t be a great help for a beginning artist. For each subject matter and every project, we’ll find a number of variables that depend on a variety of factors. There always are more ways to draw x than just one.
That’s why I make sure that any educational material I create shows not only technicalities and steps of drawing—it also presents my process of thinking and making decisions.
My Drawing Lessons
If you’re interested in advancing your drawing skills, experimenting with various artistic media and just having an enjoyable practice time, please be sure to check out my articles and tutorials published on The Virtual Instructor 🙂
There I’m going in-depth on a variety of topics:
- How to create credible textures with ink liners—and everything that relates to ink art;
- How to draw on toned paper;
- How to mix various media—traditional and digital;
- How to improve your hatching and linework;
- How to strengthen the observation skills and draw from imagination;
- How to improve the results by making your practice more efficient.
I do my best to make the posts as interesting as possible, mentioning fun and useful-to-know facts about subjects that are depicted. Learning shouldn’t be boring!
The illustrations from the tutorials:
Also, you can find a collection of step-by-step drawing tutorials aimed for beginners on Envato Tuts+ Design & Illustration.
The main themes are drawing with ink, graphite and colored pencil techniques, creating textures, depicting animals and various natural objects.
My ink workshop was featured in the practical art magazine Paint & Draw. Here is an excerpt from the article:
Interested in Me as an Author?
I love sharing my knowledge and skills! If you feel like I could be a good fit for your website, online school, or magazine, please let me know.
My goal is to create content that is helpful, in-depth, and easy to understand.
Every piece of educational material is a unique combination of knowledge, creative approach, visual harmony, and practical experience. An understanding of how to present posts so they become comprehensible for readers and SEO-optimized for search engines is a nice addition to that list!
