"From start to finish"

For me, the best thing about being an artist is the beginning of a new piece of work. You have the blank canvas staring you in the face just screaming for your full attention. Your brushes are cleaned and you have a fresh supply of paint on your palette. The smell of turpentine and glue from the canvas begins to fill the room and you are ready to begin. Your mind is fresh and your spirit is high. What a wonderful feeling that is.

This little 10 min sketch is full of mistakes and the proportions are all wrong. And I intend to keep it that way. Why? Because it is a great representation of how I generally start my drawings and sketches. Here I'm just beyond the starting point and have blocked in the biggest shapes with an even light tone. The value is about a number four from white to black on a ten step valuescale. The proportions are indicated and I am ready for the finishing stages of cleaning up my drawing and fixing mistakes.

Sketchbook and "workout"

Hello, everybody.

As most of you can imagine, being a top athlete takes a lot of work and a lot of time. You have to stay in shape, both mentally and physically, eat right and sleep tight (haha!).

We artist have it much the same way. We must eat healthy and get a sufficient amount of sleep. But we also have to stay in shape. But instead of running and training with weights, we train our minds through a constant workflow to maintain, and develop, speed and skill. If we neglect this it can, and will, lead to a bunch of bad stuff.
We may lose faith in ourself and think we're not good enough.
Believing that we one day will make it basically is all we have as artists at the end of the day. Its the engine that keeps us going when things get hard. Its like that carrot we never can quite seem to catch, even though we move forward one step at the time.
So; to sum things up: Work hard, try to keep a constant pace at what your doing and believe in yourself when the going gets tough. It probably will.

Finally -  what I like to do to keep myself in shape is to do these little sketches. They are quite easy to do, doesn't take up a lot of my time, and are quite valuable in many ways ( I will get back to that in a later post).

Have a great day, folks.

Talk with you soon.

Mads.

 

Let me hear what you guys think in the comments section, and lets have a debate.
And if you have any questions, don't hesitate to e-mail me at mads.lohre@gmail.com.