ART RESOURCES - Anywhere's Art

This is a list of the resources that I use for my artwork.

Pencils

Koh-I-Noor coloured pencils: I have really been impressed with the rich and smoothy consistency of these pencils. They are especially good for subjects that you want to create layer by layer because they blend very well. Portraits of human subjects are a good example of where Kor-I-Noor pencils excel. I recommend the 72 set pack for someone just beginning. It’s enough to produce almost any color that you can imagine.

Prismacolor pencils are a tried and trusted brand of oil based colours. Many artists swear by them and will not use any other type of pencils. Like Kor-I-Noor pencils, they can be used to produce impressive pieces of artwork. They have a creamy waxy consistency and they blend quite well but one has to remember to buy a colour separately because it does not come with the pencils when one orders them. I recommend the 72 set pack as a starting point.

are also worth mentioning. I particularly use the water soluble ones when I want to produce a watercolour effect on my drawings. Good example of where this could be useful is when drawing trees, flowers, fruits, and a cloudy sky. So which ones are the perfect coloured pencils for drawing? Unfortunately there is no perfect answer to this question when it comes to coding coloured pencils. You are going to have to decide for yourself. I recommend that you try all the colours that I have mentioned. You can start by buying the 12 piece samples first when choosing coloured pencils. In time you will realise which ones you are most comfortable with.

Drawing pencils: what you choose depends on the thickness of the lines that you want in your final product. For instance, a cartoonist or manga artist would want thick, bold outlines in their work so a dark, thick pencil would be ideal.. However, for those that do not want the drawing outlines to be visible in the final product, it is best to use a thin pencil. I use a retractable 5 mm HB pencil.

White: the white that comes with the coloured pencils that I have mentioned above has not impressed me at all. Unless you are drawing on dark coloured paper, you will not see much of its effect in your work. Therefore I use a white ink pen with a thin nozzle (5 mm). I highly recommend it for white highlights.

Paper

Paper is the most underrated tool for an artist. It surprises me how much care and effort an artist will take to pick other tools like pencils and brushes and yet not apply the same attention to detail when choosing paper. The type of paper you chose should depend on the effect that you want. Use smooth to extra smooth paper when you want as smooth photorealistic finish, e.g. when drawing faces. Grainy paper will not allow you to blend your colours well and will leave mountains and picks which can reduce the quality of your final product. I recently started to use and for my coloured pencil drawings. I am extremely impressed with it and the difference in quality is quite noticeable.

I highly recommend Bristol smooth types of paper if you want to take your artwork to the next level.

Recording videos

Studio lights

When I first started recording art videos, I either only recorded during the day under natural light from the sun or I used two of my bedside lamps. I soon realised that the quality of the videos was especially poor when I recorded using the beside lamps or on a cloudy day with variable light intensity. With the bedside lamps, there was always a yellow hue from the incandescent lamps which messed up the colour representation of my work. Using white balance on my camera or during editing was not sufficient to correct this problem. With using natural light, the problem was that when it was cloudy and the light intensity got low, there was a lot of noise as a result of my video camera being unable to perform optimally under low light conditions.

It is therefore essential to have studio lights if you want to produce art videos that can be taken seriously. The kind of studio lights that you need are those that are called daylight studio lights. They are called daylight studio lights because they emit light energy in the same spectrum and colour temperature as daylight. This ensures that you get a more accurate colour represantation in your videos.

I currently use two 45 W Fotostudio daylight studio spiral lamps with a colour temperature of 5500 K. Each lamp gives a light output equivalent to a normal 500 W lamp. I bought the lamps together with two mounting tripods as a set. The tripods can be extended to a maximum height of 1.8 m, which is sufficient for my video recording needs.

Tripod

To keep my camera steady and secure, I use a Cullmann 2500 tripod with a 3-axis head. It is very leight, weighing in at roughly 1.28 kg and can carry a maximum of 2.5 kg. It has steady rubber feet which enable me to position it at what might seem like awkward angles while maintaining its grip on my smooth glass table.

Camera

I currently use mobile phones for recording all my videos. In the beginning I used only one camera but I have since incorperated a second camera to get a second angle. I find that this helps to give the audience another angle of my work which in turn helps keep their attention – an important factor for audience retention.

I started out recording wiith a Sony Xpeia Neo which could record 720p at 30 frames per second (fps). Later on I bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 with which I record in FullHD (1080p at 30 fps). Upgrading to 1080p significantly improved the quality of my videos. I have since been impressed with the Note 4 and I intend to start using one to record my upcoming videos at either 2160p (4K) at 30 fps or 1440p at 30 fps. The use of 4K resolution will depend on the amount of storage space I have available on my external USB drives which I use to store raw footage.Since my videos take roughly 8 hours to complete, this is likely to be a real challenge. I will update this section once I have tested 4K out.

There is one serious challenge associated with using a mobile phone for recording long videos – the 30 minute restriction. Under trade laws which were passed to protect the video camera and camcorder industries from being made irrelevant by the introduction of mobile phone video cameras, a video size restriction was put in place. This was meant to deter people from purchasing mobile phones for use as dedicated video cameras. I will explain more about this challenge and how I overcome it in one of my future posts and videos.

Web hosting

Bluehost: I have been with Bluehost for the past two years and have been very impressed with their business model and customer service. They are currently hosting 3 of my domains and I have never had an outage in this whole period except for scheduled maintenance which is announced in advance probably 4 times a year and never lasts more than 3 hours.. If you want to start your own website or blog, I highly recommend them.

Mobile apps for digital art

There is one mobile app for digital art that has impressed me – AutoDesk Sketchbook Pro. I started out by using the free version and I was so impressed with its features that I decided to buy the pro version, which has even better features, after using the free version for about two months. I recommend you to try out the free version first. You might find it sufficient for all your requirements.