Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Posemaniacs

According to the Posemaniacs's site: "Pose Maniacs supports all artists, including art students and people who study illustrations and mangas on your own. This blog is for uploading variety of poses for nude sketching, and introduces other FLASH training tools for drawing."

Someone on one of the groups I belong to posted this some time back. I really got a kick out of it. It is an excellent site for reference. I love the fact that you can see all the muscles. It is somewhere between an artist's dummy and a live model.

This can be used for gesture drawings (30 second drawings), for practice drawings, and for reference for art pieces. There are so many possibilities!

Saturday, May 9, 2009

I won't apologise for defending the arts

It’s not charity or empty philanthropy. It’s an investment in jobs and our collective soul
by Kevin Spacey

Open any newspaper or turn on the TV and you are confronted with the realities of recession. So it is perhaps inevitable that there will be some who frame the arts and culture as luxury items and accept that they will have to survive on shorter rations. And in the grand scheme of things, what does it matter, they say.

I believe that, far from being luxury items, arts and culture are a necessity in our lives, as individuals and as nations. Culture is the ...read the whole article

(Originally Published in TimesOnline on May 9, 2009)

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Every Day in May

Élena Nazzaro has challenged artists to draw every day in May, and several artists have taken her up on her challenge.

I first became aware of this challenge through the Every Day Matters group (that I have often mentioned on this blog). It looks like a wonderful challenge and the participants seem to be having a lot of fun with it. Unfortunately, this year, I will not be able to participate. However, there is always next year.

There is a Flickr group set up for this challenge that you can view here --> Every Day in May

Also, here is a partial list of participants for your viewing pleasure:

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Recycling an Old Book as a Watercolor Sketchbook


I belong to a group called Every Day Matters. While reading the posts, this morning, I came across this post and just felt I had to share it. Shirley recycles old books into watercolour sketchbooks and she shows us how she does it in a post on her blog. I am thinking of following her instructions and creating my own sketchbook (not necessarily watercolour paper, but perhaps using my favorite drawing paper du jour).

You can view Shirley's full post on Shirley's Blog.

You can also view a related post (from following a link on Shirley's blog) to a wonderful post with with illustrations by Martha of Trumpetvine Travels. Martha "reloads" Moleskine sketchbooks.

The idea of recycling old books into sketchbooks is appealing to me. You now have some wonderful instructions to follow if this appeals to you too.