Staying organized

(image curtesy of teachersatrisk.com)

I must start this post off with an apology.  I have been neglecting my blog lately and I am sorry.  If it makes it any better, I have felt increasingly guilty about this over the last several days. :(

Why, you may ask, have I been neglecting my responsibility and commitment?  To be honest, I have to blame multiple factors:  the up-coming holiday season, the various projects that I have planned and initiated (nothing to do with art unfortunately) for the holiday season, the upcoming plans I have been arranging for the girls' holidays since they will be home full-time for 2 weeks!  And oh so much more that my brain feels like it might collapse under all the weight of stuff to do (not unlike that desk up there)!!!

I'm sure I'm not alone in this situation.  There must be an entire planet - maybe even this one - of people feeling overwhelmed with their various commitments this time of year.  So I thought I'd try to help out a bit by presenting some of the tools I use to help keep myself in order.  Of course, these tools work best when you actually use them, which I also sometimes neglect to do.  I admit that lately I haven't been using them as much as would help me either.  Gonna see to that.

So...to my list.  Speaking of lists, I LOVE lists!  I find I am most productive when I can write down all the things I want to get done in a day; the big and the small, the easy and the more difficult, the likely and the "I wish".  But my absolute favourite thing about lists is crossing off items when they are complete :)  What I don't like is all the paper I use and the pieces lying around after.  This brings me to my first tool:  Wunderlist

Wunderlist is a free app that you can download to your iPhone, iPad, Mac, Windows, Android, Kindle and the Web.  It's a pretty basic app, but also very versatile.  You can pretty much create lists for anything you want to.  Here's a shot of my copy:

 You can see I have multiple lists ranging from things for my house (like Weekend), and Things to Sell, and of course, projects to work on in my Studio.  There are more features that I haven't played with yet, like a timer option so you can set up WHEN you want to get something done or done by.  

When an item has been completed, you just check the box and the item moves from the top to the bottom and is "greyed" out.  What's neat about this is for things like my Weekend list, where some items are the same every week, like groceries or laundry.  So the next weekend, I unclick the repeat items to return them to the top area and voila!  I'm ready with my list quick and easy!

Speaking of timing and getting things done "on time", my second tool is the good old calendar
function that comes with my OS - either Outlook for PC, or Calendar for Mac (or if you're online a lot, Google has one too).  Appointments are obvious things to put in, but other things I have in there are things I want to be reminded to do.

For example, I like to work my brain with Lumosity daily, but I don't always remember to do it.  I type this item into my calendar and tell it to repeat daily and send me a reminder message 15 min before a time I that have set up.

You could also put things in there like dates bills are due, or reminders to shop for birthday presents/cards.  You can assign priorities to the items as well so that you can stay on track for the most important things (my problem with this specific function is that I feel that if I bothered to put it in the calendar - it's important so prioritizing won't help :P).  There's almost no limit to this tool and you can print it up and put it on the fridge if there's a lot of family items on it to help keep the family on track.

My third tool might be a bit less obvious - Pinterest.  Pinterest is like an online version of a bulletin board.  Just like you could pin up notes and ideas on a bulletin board, you can collect website address links (say blog posts for example) and create multiple boards (or you can think of them as folders if you like) to "pin" or save the link for future reference.

I am a creative person and there are probably about a million things that I want to do, or see, or set up.  I'm not really sure how other people use it, but for me it's a great place to put ideas for recipes I want to try, sewing projects and other DIY things I see on the internet that I think are really cool, or even tips I might find on decorating my house or gifts I think would be perfect for so-and-so.

At the moment I have 16 boards with 617 pins.  That's a lot of ideas that I don't have to go searching around for on the internet in one of my frantic moments when I'm looking for something specific I saw, and oh man, what site was that on again?  What search words did I use to get there?  The boards are organized the way that's most useful for me.  I've actually become a bit addicted to pinterest because I love finding something new and adding it to one of my boards to read in more detail later.  Then, if I don't like it, I just delete the pin!

There are oh so many more tools available in today's advanced technological age - and many of them are free!  You can also find apps that are more specific to a particular niche - for example, try googling "Apps for artists" and you will get 186,000,000 hits!  That's a lot of potential help!

I'd love to know what tools/tricks you use to keep yourself on track!

Mastering Composition

Have you ever had a painting that was so frustrating to work with you just wanted to give up?  Did you in fact give up with a frustrated scream?  Have you ever worked on a piece for HOURS only to find out at the end that you hated it?  I have to say that I feel your pain.  I hate when I've worked on what seemed like a very promising piece for hours, or even days, to come out at the end with something that just lacked.  The colours were great, the value scale was awesome, the details were perfect, but still it lacked.  What a waste of time/energy/supplies!!!  I don't know about you, but this sort of thing drives me bonkers!

Well, it may be that what you need is a polish on your composition skills.  As I mentioned in my last post, I am working hard studying the various aspects of artistry.  One of the things I'm studying is a book by Ian Roberts called "Mastering the Art of Composition".  An excellent book, by the way, I highly recommend it.

In this book he talks about the aspects required in design and composition of art.  What grabs your attention from across the room when you look a piece of art?  Is it the subject matter?  Not likely, as you probably can't quite see it.  Is it the colours?  Again not likely as they probably blend together a bit with distance.  It could be the value contrasts, and/or the arrangement of the value shapes within the piece.  I am simplifying here, after all, it takes Mr Roberts a whole book to explain this well.

He also talks about how composition and design have to be the FIRST things you think about, even before you start painting.  If your composition is poor, nothing you do in painting (colour, value, intensity) will correct it and make it a good painting (sound familiar?).

He discusses the use of certain tools, like a viewfinder (he even describes how to make a pretty cool one yourself with some card and acetate), a grid of thirds, a thumbnail sketch, and a perceptional shift to see in value masses, not details.  He advises studying paintings you like, that grab your attention, to learn what the artist did and improve your own compositions.  Using paintings by the Old Masters (who had much fewer tools to work with than we do today) to discover how they achieved so much with so little.

Above all, Mr Roberts recommends doing "A Composition a Day" for a year or so.  These should be small (4" x 5"), in pencil (say B, 2B, 4B) and use objects that are around you in your life.  He compares it to practicing the scales on a piano every day.  Nothing too drastic - keep it simple.  If you work attentively and with purpose, daily for a year, you will see a dramatic improvement in your compositions - or so he says anyway.  I intend to find out for myself and have started today with my first (hopefully of many) composition sketch.

 This is my setup.  I picked some toys from the girls that were simple shapes.  He also advised that an object in space alone is not a composition.  It's important to have a background to relate the objects to/with.  Many of his examples showed a light and dark divided background, so I picked a black sketch book and a white binder for mine.  My light source is single (mostly - I tried to ignore the light coming from the window on the left as it wasn't strong enough) and coming from the right.

And this is my composition sketch using the 3 recommended pencils.  I can't say how well I followed Mr. Roberts' direction, but I think I did OK for my first attempt.  It didn't take too long either - I'd say about 30 min from setup to finished drawing.  The hard part was squinting to see the value masses and eliminate the detail from my setup.  White objects would work better I suspect.  I look forward to continuing this exercise tomorrow.

I'm not quite finished reading his book yet, only about halfway really.  But so far it's been a highly educational read and I can see that if i stick to it, how my art will improve.