Tag: digital

  • An imaginary landscape I drew today. It feels as hot as this looks today.

    more…

  • Life Under Glass

    Since my last post I have continued drawing digitally in Procreate and testing how it feels to both pull from and challenge the habits and modes of drawing on paper. I’m finding myself distinctly enjoying drawing digitally. As I said in the last post, I am using an Apple Pencil on a ~10 inch iPad. I applied a Paperlike screen film which adds a very subtle “tooth” so that the Pencil feels less like hard plastic on smooth glass. I’ve started using some digital brushes like simulated halftone patterns which I have used lightly in the past on paper usually…

    more…

  • React to the Ground

    A blank drawing surface stares back as a challenge. The smooth surface of a page says nothing about what it wants. A fresh sketchbook or canvas can stop many artists in their tracks. Often the way I will approach a blank page is to immediately make “random” marks and forms — scribble, smudge, glue, scrape, smear — to break up the space of the page. Because my approach to art making is intuitive, I rely on an interaction between the surface, the tools, and my hand to further the process. I react to the surface and then to my own…

    more…

  • How to draw a circle?

    The how of making art is a cottage industry. There are countless classes and tutorials about the right tools, techniques, and mindset for people that want to make art but feel for whatever reason that they don’t know how. More often than not, these same people are also looking for some form of permission to be creative. They want some structure, purpose, and maybe even a set of achievable goals before stepping into something that feels like it requires mastery. And belief in mastery implies that the majority of us are not masters. What a lot of people want out…

    more…

  • Fingers Dipped in Water

    In the previous post, I showed a series of abstract drawings I made on my phone. Digital finger painting. Making those miniature images of line and colour in motion were a therapy for me at various times. A way to pull emotion out of me expressed as visual motion. As I described, working on my phone was a space between other spaces. A way to duck into a creative space when the circumstances of a time or place didn’t allow for other modes of expression. What began as pure abstraction and motion studies in those phone drawings lead somewhat unexpectedly…

    more…

  • Finger Paintings

    The glossy glass slabs most of us now have with us in pockets and bags — the ubiquitous relative supercomputers that we mostly take for granted — are not inherently the most expressive artistic tools. “Phones”, in a short number of years, have supplanted the regular tools or at least augmented the structure of many creative practices. I have no real urge to get into how technology has shaped art and the lives of artists over the last few decades. It’s a deep topic of discussion and study but my interest is more homely. I’ve always had an fascination in…

    more…

  • Amateur Escapist

    In 2015, I created a site called Amateur Escapist that I meant to function as a quarterly collaborative art zine based on my experiences with similar projects online in the early 2000’s. The first release First Words included nine artists (including myself) and I was blown away by the work submitted. For a variety of reasons, AE didn’t go beyond that first “issue” but I still have hopes of reviving it one of these days. Assembled Dots and Feelings Davin Risk for Amateur Escapist 01 : First Words, 2015, digital collage A realization that I always move towards assemblage and…

    more…