Today it’s pretty much just a video explainer – and an invitation to visit my 2025 World Watercolor Month page with all the details!
Watch the video below and scroll to the end to leave comments or questions — or click HERE to watch it on YouTube and leave comments over there. I read both dutifully!
I had hoped to make progress on my drawing for Mother’s Day – but this past few days have been a bear! So instead, enjoy a little Q&A – which got a little long and complicated in production, but hey. At least I finally got some questions answered!
Watch the video below and scroll to the end to leave comments or questions — or click HERE to watch it on YouTube and leave comments over there. I read both dutifully!
Some product may be provided by manufacturers for review and use. Compensated affiliate links are here at no cost to you. I appreciate your support of my work with your purchases! Full affiliate and product disclosure | My trusted partners in art
VIDEOS mentioned:
CLASSES mentioned:
April’s watercolor + gouache buds and blooms are all done – it came out so pretty! And May is underway, alcohol markers for deciduous and flowering trees, because I don’t know the names of these trees growing all around me.
Learn to draw 9 animals and a stack of fruit in beautiful pages for your journaling Bible – all in colored pencil.
Sweet little Ella will teach you how to mix beautiful colors to build up the ones YOU want! A nice little “snack” class at a snack price!
A few weeks back I had fessed up to being punked by AI in a google search while I wasn’t paying a lot of attention. Bad on me – but it’s got me thinking, how on earth will we keep up in knowing how to recognize AI faster?
When selecting references, it’s important to have real photos. (Better still would be drawing from real life!) If we find ourselves working from AI, we’ll start thinking that the wacky proportions and unreality of artificial intelligence images are somehow real.
In light of all that – today I’ll walk you through two websites that I use a lot, and that I trust – although I use them both very differently. See that discussion in the video, or the notes later on in this post!
Watch the video below and scroll to the end to leave comments or questions — or click HERE to watch it on YouTube and leave comments over there. I read both dutifully!
I do like a good “real people pictures” kind of reference site like PMP, but it has some pros and cons that make me choose how I use it.
On the good side: These are REAL photos. No photoshopping, no fancy lights. Think of it like the instagrammer whose life looks clean and perfect vs a normal human with dishes on the kitchen counter and kids running around with cookie crumbs flying everywhere! When we practice with photos that include all the crazy details, then we learn to edit – to choose what we do and don’t include.
On the bad side: It can take quite some time to find a photo that is just what you want. You’ll perhaps get caught up in the quality (“Oh I could figure out what to edit from that photo but I just don’t have the time/energy.”) and pass by images that may have worked.
That’s why I’m always saving so many photos into folders; I stumble on a picture that randomly pops into a search I’m doing, and saving it for later preserves a lot of time.
I resisted using Unsplash for a while. They do have a low limit on downloads when you’re not a member, and I wasn’t certain I’d use much from their site since I do like to do my own editing.
But what I started to find is that I can get a different kind of inspiration there. I may not use those photos all the time, but after spending time there, I have a much clearer idea what amount of detail “feels” right. Even if I do a search on PMP and find something that mostly works, Unsplash can show me how clean the image could be if I work at cutting ruthlessly!
Unsplash also helps to get a better view of things – if I have a reference where I can’t see how the animal’s nostrils or feet are shaped, I can often find a quality image close up that can inform me.
And as I mentioned in the bonus tip at the end – if you enter a “vibe” in the search bar, it can help you think through alternate ideas to “say” something in your art. I haven’t used it this way but it makes me think about the challenges I do every few months – enter a weird prompt in the search and find unique ideas to represent a concept.
This photo site is a new site for me – I saw a post by the stie owner, and she talked about how there’s no AI, she’s taking photos herself at sanctuaries and wildlife preserves, and she lets artists use anything for free. (To use elsewise, permission is needed.)
They’re animals in captivity, but I like that she takes photos in a series so you can “watch” the animal walk. Even the pros get a lot of standing-still pics, so the ones on this site are unique in what I can learn from them!
For any of these sites, if you use the images, then make a donation, regularly or once a year. Running websites isn’t cheap, and we want to encourage as many good sites to stick around and stay away from AI!
New artists are often drawn toward pre-simplified references; we look at those and think, “hey I can handle that!”
And yes, that may be the case. Extraneous details were already cut out by the photographer, either in the way they shot or cropped the image, the cleanup they did to the scene before even getting out the camera, or editing work they did later in Photoshop or other software.
I sometimes choose those too. The boat I painted last week was a photo from Unsplash that already had a number of decisions made. It didn’t stop me from making my own – but that’s not something a lot of newer artists would do.
The reason I choose photos for our classes from Paint My Photo instead of Unsplash is that they’re a better training ground for students.
What photos at PMP have going for them is that they’re by ‘regular’ people – not nearly as many pro photographers. They’re people like us. Often using a smart phone. Not doing post-production work. Not cleaning up a scene before shooting a picture of it.
That all means that the images are ones we see around us all day every day. Full of clutter, full of things that aren’t perfectly arranged. I think of the difference between these two sites as similar to regular-people-instagram photos of our messy, human lives, compared to the influencers with millions of followers. Their homes are perfect, always tidy, minimalist in design, focus and lighting is always perfect. Much of that is done by editing the photos – so while it’s not usually AI (though who knows nowadays!), it’s not normal life.
So why do those messy, imperfect photos provide a better training ground? Because when you sit down to paint your own life, or you go outside to sketch what your town looks like, you need to know how to edit what you see. To be ready to make decisions about what to keep and what to let go of. If someone else already made most of those decisions for you, there’s not much left for you to do aside from executing a copy of their edited world.
As newbie artists, that is often a good thing; you can focus on technique without thinking about editing. I get that. But….if you want to learn to just sit down and draw or paint something on your own, learning the skills of editing is vital. That’s the point of creating thumbnail sketches, as I spoke about in the boat sketches video. I know it’s not the fun technique part – but if you want to keep growing, it’ll make a huge difference in your growth rate!
In the Open Studio Zoom last month, I answered a little about working with searching at PMP – and a few people said I should post a video about how to use it for students. That led me to combining it with all that I talked about today. So if you have questions be sure to send them my way – you never know when it’ll inspire a whole video!
I’ve got a little question and answer session today, don’t worry it’s not terribly long!
First I’ll answer a question that came in over the transom from Lakshmi…. “Are you still glad you quit crafting?”
Second – what’s the Honey scandal and how does it affect artists??
Third – what on earth is up with Meta???
Also yes I need to trim my bangs.
If you prefer reading to my silly vlogging (which includes rollerskating so stick around for the end!), the approximate text is in this post; I didn’t want to ramble so I tried writing it down, some bits got chopped and others reworded, but the gist is here.
Watch the video below and scroll to the end to leave comments or questions — or click HERE to watch it on YouTube and leave comments over there. I read both dutifully!
And then….we have Zuckerberg promising to make instagram and facebook even worse than they are right now. I mean, getting rid of the fact checkers is getting more attention but honestly they were pretty useless the way they were implemented anyway….but the things they’re now going to allow in discourse on Meta platforms are atrocious. The new list of permitted terms referring to women, disabled children, immigrants, other races, anyone you don’t like and want to demean – all kinds of classes of people can now be called names usingh words our mamas taught us not to utter because they are SLURS! I mean to call disabled kids the R word again!??? I gotta peace out of that mess.
So I’ll be mostly leaving Meta. My stance right now is that I’ll post 2x a week on fb and ig on the days I have a video going live.But I’m no longer going to do my daily creative posts, reels, or teaching there. Just not feeding that beast. I’ll share those in other places, I will continue my daily sketches subscriptions, and posting even more regularly on Artventure, and some other platforms I’ve been experimenting with.
But honestly do head over to my community at Artventure. Get the app on your phone, plop it on your home screen so you remember to visit. I’ll be doing more teaching there, experimenting with live demos, and on January 25th our first open studio zoom of the year will experiment with easygoing critiques of student homework if youd like to submit a piece for that or a question i can answer, I may tackle one on wc brushes. And one of my local art buddies is going to bring one of her oil painitings in progress to get some feedback on it; she and I do that all the time in person but she said she’d happily be a guinea pig at open studio since she loves my critiques.
Artventure is free to join, and it’s got no ads, no algorithm, art from all kinds of artists in the community, all levels, all mediums. It’s kinda like social media used to be, but better.
Hope to see y’all there – and then back here on Monday morning because there’s something special going on with Olo markers next week, so we’ll talk about that then.
I’m so tired of being sick! The image below is pretty much what I look like right now (except she looks so cute still while sick!)…..I can’t stop my nose from running!
It’s not Covid and that’s the one thing I’m thankful for, but man. It’s brutal! I get tired SO easily….I got up feeling better on Sunday and got dressed for church, but had to leave early or I knew I wouldn’t last long enough to pick up meds at the store on the way home. Yeesh!
I did lay on the sofa for most of the week though, the dogs were very sweet and comforting. In between naps I used some of the time to work on something I’d wanted to get to for ages: replicating the Tiny Tutorials class at art-classes.com!
Watch the video below and scroll to the end to leave comments or questions — or click HERE to watch it on YouTube and leave comments over there. I read both dutifully!
This course was originally just on Artventure – as a way to fundraise for the platform. If you purchased it that way you’re welcome to continue! But Artventure is not as yet paying its way, so just in case we can’t keep it going, the Tiny Tutorials class is now on Art-classes.com as well. Which makes it accessible for all those who want this kind of teaching but don’t want to have to join another platform to get it!
In both locations I’ll keep uploading new TTs as I come up with them! Content will continue to grow.
The differences between the two locations:
If you’ve had one of those questions that just sounds like it’s too dumb to raise, IT IS NOT. Some of the tiny tutorials that have been the MOST POPULAR have been explaining a ‘”d’oh” idea! Just last week I posted about the “belt” around a pencil extender and a ton of people said they had no idea it was even there.
LMK if you have ideas for those very basic things – or bigger things. I might do a full YT video, it might even lead to a class – but might be perfect for another tiny tutorial too!
Some product may be provided by manufacturers for review and use. Compensated affiliate links are here at no cost to you. I appreciate your support of my work with your purchases! Full affiliate and product disclosure | My trusted partners in art
Happy New Year! I’m here with a Monday video, yeah, kicking off the 2024 season a day early. But it’s January 1 so let’s get this show on the road!
I’ve got some simple resolutions this year, some that are a little more complex, but they’re all about making my life more FUN. I really don’t like resolutions that remind me, every time I have to do them or realize I forgot them, that I am a terrible person. Tell me not to eat junk food and I guarantee 20 times a day I’ll feel miserable!
So I’ve got some resolutions I’ll be trying this year. Including the one in the title about social media, coz dang, that makes me feel miserable, doesn’t it do that to all of us?
Watch the video below and scroll to the end to leave comments or questions — or click HERE to watch it on YouTube and leave comments over there. I read both dutifully!
I accidentally left my slippers right next to the heat register. Usually they’re bedside when I tuck myself in but for some reason that didn’t happen. But when I got up the next morning my toesies were SO HAPPY. Now I’m excited to get out of bed in the morning….my toes are ready!
I’m ready to make this a GOOD year, how about you? And celebrating the little things is one way I plan to make it an ongoing PARTAY! There are all kinds of sites that list what “day” it is, and I’ll be consulting them regularly. Including a flamingo bash at a girlfriend’s house when her birthday comes round.
Usually when I get a trolly comment or a testy email, or my website has issues—or even when I have issues and send out a newsletter with a typo (gah!) and hear from dozens of helpful people…..I just feel bad. It’s hard to just shake it off, but I’m now going to assign POINTS to every one of those things, and when I hit milestones in points I’ll be WINNING a shopping spree for art supplies. Then I’ll cheer for the negative when it heads my way!
During December, 2000 new people followed my YT channel – WOW! Plus I had a couple watercolor reels go viral on both my IG accounts, and each one gained over 8000 new followers!! While I can’t guaranteed that any of those lovely watercolorists are going to see any more of my posts, I’m going to be leaning into painting even more than usual.
One special thing I’ll be doing is a monthly realtime watercolor tutorial just for $10+ patrons. It’ll be a little like a subscription class if you think of it that way. Patrons have usually said they don’t have time for more video from me, but it’s very possible that the thousands of new people following me are not yet inundated and would love a little watercolor. So yay for that!
I realized recently that I’m not making the kind of progress I’d like to with my figure drawing. I’m definitely better than a few years ago, but realized it’s because I only draw people once a week, and then take sumemrs off. Uhm after all my lectures about getting busy with daily practice, what am I doing? So….I’ll be doing daily figure studies. Not much will get shared as they’re NSFW in some people’s eyes. But I’m gonna be diving in.
It’s more of an overhaul I guess. But honestly I’m tired of algorithms blocking what they once shared. Artists all say they don’t get any traction when they’re trying to promote their fine art, their Etsy, their classes, or even tutorials. Social media only wants people to stay on the site. So I need to figure out how to get CREATIVE in keeping in touch with my peeps! Here are some new things I’m doing:
Join my IG broadcast channel that for now is called Creating something every day. There’s a big link on my IG page here …basically its one GIANT direct message out to those who follow that, and I can send a little message out twice a week when there’s a tutorial (with links!), and let you know if there’s a sale, class, etc.
Weekly email newsletter
I’ve revamped my weekly newsletter—it’s not your average “blog post” email! It includes subscriber specials, bonus tips, behind the scenes stuff, laughs, and more. It’ll go out only on Saturdays, saving me time writing 2 a week (and you getting an extra email!) So if you want a Tuesday reminder, follow one of the other ideas here.
Don’t want email?
Tell YT to send you ALL the videos by tapping on the bell, and have your notifications turned on.
Sick to death of algorithms on all these sites?
Join Artventure, where I post my videos plus some extra info. AND we’re going to be having monthly zooms there like a super fun Zoom studio session we just did last week. I’ll be creating some bonus videos expanding on ideas in various classes so there’ll be way more to learn there in 2024.
Substack: gbye! Moving to my own site.
I’m completely divorcing Substack. They confirmed some terrible policies so I’m voting with my feet. I’m moving daily sketches to my fine art site – subscribe to that daily email here. When you subscibe Ill send you a list of tips for starting a daily sketch habit, and there’s a little coupon code for new subscribers, too!
In general I’ll share only things I think the algorithm might like. And maybe not even every day any more, we’ll see. I’m not going to give it my really good stuff coz, well, it didn’t LIKE any of it!
Facebook will only see something from me on video tutorial days because, well, hardly anyone even saw the great post about my mom whose painting won in a contest. Her painting was turned into the corporate greeting card for the folks who own her assisted living place!
Not just the let’s lose weight stuff. What’s the FUN STUFF? 🙂
