Inge Druckrey on how she teaches her students to have a designer’s eye. It’s a long one, but watch the first five minutes and you’ll be hooked. From the video:

“Suddenly you begin to see things in your daily life that you never noticed. It’s one of the best presents of Art Education: to enjoy seeing.”

This is one of the great gifts from my father, his father, and my best teachers: giving myself permission to walk through life and take a moment to see, to notice beauty in a chance combination, or play of light.

It’s not only permission, but even an imperative: you must stop and look. If you do not, you are not living fully. You are missing it.

Seeing is a learnable discipline. Most kids do it, and we call it inattentiveness or distractability. Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost it.

How can you make beauty in your life, if you don’t know how to see it?

What do you do to see beauty?

“Song of the Sea” painting - finishing up the linework. The hill was challenging and fun. You have to look pretty close in the original frame to see it, but there’s all these wonderful veins and shapes in the hillside. I plan on tinting them back a good deal in the next step. I’m not happy about the glow behind the lighthouse. There was just no way to overlay light (like you can on a computer) like they did, and the brushstrokes were pretty choppy when the paint was thin. So, based on an adage I learned in school (“embrace happy accidents”), I just made it blocky and stylized and ran with it. Not perfect, but the goal here is to learn and enjoy the process, not have a nice photocopy of their image to hang on the wall. Next: overlaying transparent color.
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“Song of the Sea” painting - finishing up the linework.

The hill was challenging and fun. You have to look pretty close in the original frame to see it, but there’s all these wonderful veins and shapes in the hillside. I plan on tinting them back a good deal in the next step.

still

detail

I’m not happy about the glow behind the lighthouse. There was just no way to overlay light (like you can on a computer) like they did, and the brushstrokes were pretty choppy when the paint was thin. So, based on an adage I learned in school (“embrace happy accidents”), I just made it blocky and stylized and ran with it. Not perfect, but the goal here is to learn and enjoy the process, not have a nice photocopy of their image to hang on the wall.

Next: overlaying transparent color.

Here’s a few stills I shot with my iPhone whilst working on the painting.

My basic approach was to evaluate the concept and image. I have no idea what combination of media Cartoon Saloon used; my guess is it’s a combination of paint, drawing, and computer graphic treatments, all composited with animation software. I restricted myself to acrylics and a paint marker for the line work.

It would have also been fun to try to do it all with watercolor; for example, I could have used a resist medium with a pen applicator that would “mask” the paper (white) until I washed over it later. In this case, I decided to apply the dark layers, then a layer of white ink, then washes (with a gloss gel medium for transparency) over that.

Here you can see me building up the dark washes of paint. I’m just roughing out the shapes and colors. After it dries, I’ll hit the next layers.

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