Month: December 2012

As an artist I do posses several books which have guided me through my learning process. Even if I’ve found these books useful they are only a small portion of the learning process in my case. What I’ve found throughout the years is that building your drawing abilities mainly relies on your ability to interpret the information that you see and re-alliterate in a new form. Can a book make someone a better artist?

Seeing the world in a different perspective is an essential skill for drawing or creating art. This skill can be developed with time but is made easier if it is broken down into simpler steps. Different artists have different techniques which they use to break down the forms around them some of which are easier to grasp than others. A good a book shows the student how to break down the information in their surroundings so that they can better work and manipulate the forms. Such fundamental techniques include but are not limited to the following.

1.  Perspective
2.  Structure
3.  Anatomy
4.  Composition
5.  Color
6.  Lighting and shading

Books generally provide a good resource for these basic techniques which can help further improve an artist’s current skill set. With the proper understanding of these fundamentals a student can learn how to render what they see around them. Like anything else the quality of the book is a factor in determining whether or not the student will be able to learn the essential techniques. If the student begins with a book which is too advance or has incomplete information they will not benefit as much from the reading material.

Although these fundamental techniques show the artist how to interpret and copy the information it doesn’t show them how to manipulate these forms to create something new. The re-interpretation of this information is a separate skill set which is more difficult to teach a student and relies on their ability to think creatively. This creative process is done by taking seemingly unrelated subjects and combining them to make something new. I have yet to discover a book which teaches visual creativity since this process is heavily dependent on personal experience.

Books face another difficult road block in their endeavor to teach potential students. A book can’t force a student to work through the millage it takes to acquire any given skill set. Skills require several hours of practice in order to become cemented into one’s muscle memory. Like anything else there are the odd exceptions to this rule but for the most part most artists need to spend the time actually drawing in order to become efficient at their work.

While books and reference material can improve an artist’s ability I do not believe it is realistic to say that it will make a better artist. A better artist is created by long hours of training in combination with learning essential drawing techniques. Books can provide the fundamentals which are necessary to achieve a level of professionalism but can only take the artist as far as they are willing to push themselves. I hope you’ve found this information useful and I hope to see you guys in the future. Thank you can take care.

Copyright © by Yasmeen @ YarkspiriFantasyArt.com

Anyone who’s been using adobe Photoshop for a couple of years will be aware of some of the problems which can occur from a lack of software knowledge. The following is a list of some of the features can cause some frustrations if you’re not aware of them prior.

The quick mask tool is a keyboard shortcut which can be very useful depending on what you’re trying to achieve. It can however cause severe frustrations if you don’t know what activates this keyboard shortcut. Hitting the “Q” on your keyboard turns your canvas red in the areas where the mask is being applied.

The language settings for your computer can have a dramatic affect on the Photoshop shortcuts that are made available to you by default. The problem arises when you use the Alt + shift button to change the language settings from English to French and normally affects brush resizing options on your keyboard.
The inability to see your brush as you paint can be beneficial at times but is most often an annoyance which can be easily fixed. In most cases the brush size is either too small to see in detail or the “Caps Lock” key has been pressed accidentally. If this occurs you simply need to turn off the “Caps Lock” in order to see your brush once more.

No being able to paint anywhere on your canvas may be caused by having a portion of the image selected by using the marquee tool. In this case all you need to do in order to fix this problem is to simply go to Select + Deselect to remove the existing selection.

Although a file may have been created in Photoshop it may not always open in this software as a default when it is double clicked. Even if this is a minor nuisance it can be easily fixed by right clicking on the file and choosing Open with + Chose Default Program + Adobe Photoshop to open any similar file in this software.

Even if it is very rare, Photoshop may sometimes save you files in extremely large files sizes. If this occurs I would highly recommend checking your image options and seeing if your pixels per inch have been accidentally set to pixels per centimetres. I normally find this to be an issue if the file size exceeds 1G in size while being saved at 300 dpi.

Everyone who enjoys using Photoshop does so because of the easily accessible panels which contain various feature made available to you. There are some instances when your panels may disappear in a mysterious manner and this normally occurs when the Tab button has been quickly pressed. To bring these essential tools back to the forefront you simply need to press the Tab key once more and the problem is resolved.

Should you encounter problems with the resizing option of your windows it is most likely due to one of your preference options. You can change these settings by going to Edit + Preferences + General. You must then turn off “Zoom resizes window” followed by selecting the “OK” button.

Scratch disk is full error messages can be extremely annoying when they occur since it prevents you from using the software properly. The main reason why the scratch disk error appears is when Photoshop begins using the hard drive to temporally store the information when the ram is full. If this occurs you will need to delete the temporary Photoshop files which are stored in your temporary folder (Computer+ C + Windows + temp). Another important step will be to clear up the disk space on your computer by removing unused files and folders, emptying the recycle bin and defragmenting afterwards.

Although these issues can be problematic the good news is that almost all of them are easily fixed. While there’s a large variety in what Photoshop makes available to its users this same variety can cause some problems to arise. Hopefully this small list will help make your Photoshop experience more enjoyable. Thank you for reading this topic and I hope to see you guys soon.

Copyright © by Yasmeen @ YarkspiriFantasyArt.com