Drawing A Mans Arm Muscles On Video

Drawing arms can be tricky for some, but I did a quick video showing you how to draw them quite easily, there's no real technique with it, it's really just about knowing your muscles, maybe you could try this book on drawing anatomy if you need extra help, in the video I show you how to draw a mans arm straight and then an arm drawn like it's flexing the muscles.

Here's the video and I hope you learn something from it...

Promote Your Artwork Online

Promotion of your artwork online is really easy as you are spoilt for choice with many free sites to choose and use and in fact I recommend you use a combination of the sites that you already use now with some new ones you may not have heard of, first of all there are many social networking sites available to sign up for that could potentially aid your art promotional efforts, the big contender Facebook is one as it is beating Myspace in terms of scalability and applications features as more and more people start to use it as an all round promotional tool.

Social networking

So lets start with the social networks for promoting your artwork, you could set up networks that could grow on Facebook, Myspace, bebo or any other social network and these could feed traffic into each other providing some links along the way and this in turn could make your art and any web pages that it appears on slightly higher in the rankings, many people worry about some social media sits that have a thing in the code called a nofollow tag, which says to the search engines that links contained within certain areas of a page cannot be followed and indexed, but what you'll find out is that different search engines obey their own rules, so nofollow links may appear in some search results.

But even if there are nofollow links, people in your network that are interested about a particular topic, they will click on it and read your content, so never discount this fact, the funny thing with networks is that they can grow over time, double, triple or even quadruple in size, it's like a snowball effect that keeps on snowballing.

What you'll also find now is that social media can have the added feature of being tied into the main blogging platforms such as Blogger and Wordpress, making it far easier to share your content around the web on social bookmarking sites which can also be searched on within their own index or database and sometimes links can be picked up by roaming RSS feed software which aggregates feeds for blog content and video sites such as Youtube, so you'll find your blog posts and videos ending up shown on other sites as a result, which is in turn another way to say a backlink.

Promoting your art online comes down to having the time to write small content posts that link to your art and creating a whole marketing strategy that gets yourself known as an artist, back to Youtube, I think this is a fantastic free opportunity to show your art and plus how you create it too. There are many artists on Youtube and some of them are truly amazing, my efforts only scratch the surface as there some who do amazing portrait art of celebrities.

What I like about the promotion of my artwork is that some people either love it or they think it sucks(trust me I get a few comments like that!) but so long as your art appeals to someone, then does it matter, will it frustrate you if your art rubs someone up the wrong way? course not, just keep on creating your art and carving out a niche for yourself in whatever art you create.

Craigslist is a site that you may want to try and test out, just to see if you can get people interested in your art, whether that's to buy or look at through your gallery of art like an online exhibition, it's free, but like the majority of free advertising sites out there, there are rules that you have to abide by so that you ads don't come across as spam or an illegal advertisement, but this should be common sense thinking.

Blogging

As mentioned above blogging is one option that should be an option, it should be an essential component of an art promotion as you can write useful content and insider artist notes that people won't find anywhere else, because it's unique to you, you can mix up the blog posts too, by simply showing a new drawing with a small paragraph that explains about it or you could do a long drawn out post on the day that has just passed by with all the work you have just completed. When it comes to blogging, you have many options available to you and it doesn't have to be the same written blog posts, you could do video or even podcasts which tend to give a personal element to your ramblings.

Provide a versatile blog which appeals on many levels and people will be interested to come and see your art and listen what you have to say or read about your opinion on something, blogging is just something that you have to keep up with and stick to on a regular schedule to make it more worthwhile, as readers will expect new posts each week or at a timescale that they have gotten used to.

Promoting your art is easy, so look for more posts like this soon....

Scripting A Comic Book Is An Inspirational Process

In my latest hubpage, I examined the process of scripting a comic book and I did an example of a page that could be scripted which gave a good insight into the methods that I use when creating a script for a comic book, but now I thought I'd examine how you would get inspired by the project of a script and that would motivate you to create a worthwhile story or script.

First of all if you are going to draw your very own comic book, you can instantly get inspired by the quick drawings that you do for your story, I for one always draw, everyday if I can get away with it and there are numerous sketchbooks within my studio that are full up with various unfinished and finished drawings and so you can begin a story from any number of sketches that you create.

If you like movies, then you'll get a feel for the whole storytelling process and comic books are similar in a way, in that the dialogue can be as spectacular as possible but also realistic so that the characters can shine or be as dispensible as you want in terms of characters that you want to have a round for awhile versus those that you don't.

Some other ways you can inspire yourself in your scripting....

• Reading - This is a top one as you can gather ideas from different sources and mish mash them together and come up with something new, I do this frequently for times when I get stuck with ideas, it's guaranteed to work anytime.
• Writing Notes - Notes for this, notes for that, keep them organized though as you may find that a desk full of scraps of paper may make you look like a messy tramp who has just ransacked your own desk looking for scraps of food.
• Watch neverending tv dramas - Tv dramas can be inspiring, even if the stories repeat somewhat with conventional soaps and family dramas, you can analyze story and narrative structure through the real life scenarios that play out and also you can get a feel for the many different characters that exist or could exist in the real world.
• Study favourite comic books - Sometimes just sitting down with a few of your most favourite comic books you can suddenly have more ideas and more enthusiasm for your comic book scripting, the art and the writing should be studied well as a whole and separately.

Whatever way you choose to write your comic book script, you may want to try the approach of a challenge to try and see if you can create a comic book script that is spontaneously creative in many ways, Scriptfrenzy runs a competition or rather a challenge to write a 100 page script in 30 days and you may find this a good way of creating a rough comic script to work with.

Drawing What You See

For a couple of years now, I've been really trying my best to draw what I see and take more notice of my surroundings for artistic inspirations and for now it is working as I can relate to my environment more as  a result and see things clearly now to actually try and draw what I see and that is just mindblowing, because back when I was at school I hated drawing rocks and trees and boring life based stuff, but now I can appreciate that it certainly does help to learn to draw from life.

Not only does it give you energy when walking out in the fresh air, you can see some fantastic sights if you capture them with a digital camera, even at my local park I took some fantastic snaps of just trees and the different areas of the park and it gave me a great sense of the outdoors and landscapes it filled me with enough visual ideas to draw new worlds based on my imagination and this to me is just excellent.

Here are a small collection of the photos that I took quite recently....

Drawing what you see is a useful exercise, because life is full of stuff to draw, even the mundane can be made exciting if you try to make it so, try it, take a picture of some trees or a fence and try and draw it, then see if you can make it better in some way, use it as a foundation and move on from there with your imagination, let it take you on a trip.

A Great Oil Pastel Resource Site

Oil pastels is something that I haven't done for years in creating art, I have some oil pastels in a box that I haven't even opened yet and this site that Robert Sloan has created is a fantastic resource for anyone who is interested in trying out Oil pastels for sketching and colouring in artwork, Robert has started to do some youtube videos too and they are presented well with clear audio instructions.

There's lots to discover over at Robs oil pastel site, such as oil pastel reviews and examples of the kinds of work you can achieve with good quality oil pastels, I like the way the site is presented and I sure have learned a few things from Roberts Site, so what are you waiting for, go check out - Oil Pastels With Robert Sloan