In the past I suppressed the desire to learn and practice creative art in favour of the more technical engineering interests I had growing up. I am attempting to correct this imbalance now.

I started on this latest journey by attending two art weekends with Richard & Diana Moore in Jan and April of ’09. The drawings you see here are in drawing chronological order. The first two were created during the art weekend. The image of the eyes at the top of this entry were the first thing I was asked to draw after a short period of instruction.

The most influential book that sparked this journey was ”The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: A Course in Enhancing Creativity and Artistic Confidence” by Dr. Betty Edwards.

If there is no other book you read on foundational art knowledge this book will propel you into this new world with enough information to keep you there! I can’t say enough good things about Dr. Betty Edwards and her refreshing approach to teaching art to those of us who didn’t go to art school.

Since I started this journey I have expanded my desire to experience many forms of visual art from pencil drawing to digital painting to 3D modelling to Photography and most recently Film making. Each one of these endeavours has informed my skills of the next. Learning a skill on one of these medium seems to translate to the next. It never ceases to amaze me how that works. The only thing I can put that down to is that the fundamentals of art knowledge are independent of how they are expressed. To me it seems that learning to “see” is the fundamental gateway skill into this world.

The CG Society offer a number of similarly structured online courses for a range of digital art subjects. I was looking for something that could teach me foundational art skills in addition to the skills of digital painting. That course was called “Becoming A Better Artist”, an eight week “boot camp” style art course created and presented by Robert Chang. I couldn’t believe my luck in finding such a life changing course.

The course assumes you have Photoshop however I successfully managed to use GIMP instead without compromising the value of the lessons. After the course I purchased Art Rage digital painting software. This software provides a less technical environment for painting studies. This is what I used for the figure studies on my digital painting gallery.