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I really like The Complete Watercolorist's Essential Notebook by Gordon Mackenzie. Amazon Link If you look into it make sure it's the "complete" version which includes his book on landscapes as another section in the book.
I really like it because it is very thorough on specific techniques, general artist fundamentals, and more abstract ideas like painting without fear while the book is easy to understand and enjoyable to read. Hope that helps!
my suggestion is to find a small painting group run by a real artist. i pay $65.00 for 6 once a week sessions that go 2 1/2 to 3 hours. the artist will critique your work, give you suggestions, and sometimes do a demo or even paint on your painting to show you haow things should be done. the other thing to do is findsome books at the library and see step by step instructions. here is one i borrowed from local library, https://www.amazon.com/Learn-Paint-Acrylics-Small-Paintings/dp/1631590561
>The initial conflict is that creative things are dangerous
YES. I have so much trouble with this question! What I have found helps is doing lessons out of a book. I know it seems silly, but if I can do a lesson out of something like Learn to Paint in Acrylics with 50 Small Paintings, I can think of the thing I am doing as "a lesson" and not "aa creative thing". But once the lesson is over, I can tell myself "well, here I have been messing around with paint and nothing bad happened, so I can keep playing with it and nothing bad will happen" -- and that seems to help calm me enough to slide into being creative.
The trick is, it needs to be a lesson in the material I want to use. So a watercolor lesson if I want to work mostly with watercolors, etc. But that helps a lot.
There are also a few books out there with his artwork, I have this one and I love both the art and the notes from Christopher Tolkein.
This is the answer. I bought this book (https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/1600582834/ ) when I first started out and it was helpful for a minute. But actually doing the mixing is how I learned too.
Mark Carder of Draw Mix Paint's video for mixing oil paints was really helpful for me in mixing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNB3XY67Q-I
The two animals don't seem engaged with each other -- that is, it doesn' feel like a battle.
There's a decent book called "Capturing Motion in Watercolor" by Douglas Lew with some techniques.
Not really. In order to have an accurate calculator you would need accurate color values for every paint. Unfortunately paint varies from batch to batch just a little and frankly unless you are measuring at the 0.1ml level or precision you will get additional variations.
What you can do though is obtain a book of color recipes and then use primary colors from each paint line to mix a color you like. Useful if you want to mix a unique color.
For most typical modeling applications modelers have developed recipes for colors. For example: Soviet Aircraft were painted a light blue underneath called AMT-7 — one way to mix this using Tamiya paint is you mix 6 parts XF-23, 2 parts XF-8, 2 parts XF-2. There are other recipes for each color.
This book gave me a great foundation in graphic design principles and gave me the language i needed to guide my learning? Design Basics Index: A Graphic Designer's Guide to Designing Effective Compositions, Selecting Dynamic Components & Developing Creative Concepts
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/1631590561/
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First projects are basic but it has some neat-o ones too.
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Next project in it is to paint a piece of toast :)
Aw heck! I think anything I do that comes out well is an accident. But I'll give you two resources that have been particularly helpful to me -- two teachers with very different approaches.
First is Urban Watercolor Sketching by Felix Scheinberger. He's a former punk rock drummer who brings that energy, edginess and fun to watercolor.
Second is the great Shibisaki-sensei. His YouTube videos show you an easy approach to beautiful painting. And he's extremely chill, the Japanese Bob Ross.
Third, watercolor/sketch a lot. Bring a watercolor sketchbook, a small paint set and a water bottle/jar with you wherever you go! Paint everything. You'll start teaching yourself just from doing it.
If you use an iPhone, the iModelKit app can help with mixing. I find it so-so, as it relies on scanning web colors, not measuring them directly. However once you know a color’s correct values, you can mix in the app to get close, which gives some ideas. I then try the mix IRL and adjust to my liking.
Get a color wheel. It helps with visualizing where to begin and which colors to start with. As you get more comfortable, consider getting a color recipe book that has every color you would want and ratios of colors needed to mix them.
If your available colors will be limited, but you are willing to buy modeling paints via mail order, I recommend Tamiya. It sprays very well using either DIY store lacquer or isopropyl alcohol 91%. The latter is better but it is possible to mix a tiny bit of lacquer thinner into the IPA. There are quite a few mixes using Tamiya for just about any and all military colors.
I’d focus on the base colors: white, black, red, blue, green, yellow, and silver. You can use the colors to mix or adjust the other colors to just about any color you would want. If you know you’ll use a premixed color often, get it.
A good starting point would be to familiarize yourself with the concepts in this book.
A lot of great tips in this thread too!
I just received this for christmas - https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Watercolorists-Essential-Notebook-experimentation/dp/1440309051/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1514489489&sr=8-5&keywords=watercolor+book
I'm super excited to start digging through it! It's not written as a lesson plan or anything, but I plan to go through each topic/technique to practice from daily.
If you don't find what you're looking for, you might try The Lord Of The Rings Sketchbook by Alan Lee. There are lots of pages suitable for framing if you don't mind slicing them out of the book. (you could try to score a used copy)
(Amazon has the feature that lets you look at pages)
Yes as a matter of fact. Originally he would write letters to his children as though they were from Santa himself. And they did follow a story-line. They were mostly about life at the north pole with Santa, the Polar Bear, the elves, and the occasional goblin war. This version of Santa was incredibly old but knew how to handle himself in a fight. These letters were later composed into a book, here's a look inside on amazon https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Father-Christmas-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0618512659
Reminds me a lot of a book I have: Urban Watercolor Sketching: A Guide to Drawing, Painting, and Storytelling in Color
I've done a few general sketches but really need to be consistent at it. How often do you find yourself sketching on average?
I still don't know what I'm doing either, but I've been working through the super-accessible and helpful book "Learn to Paint Acrylics in 50 Small Paintings" by Mark Daniel Nelson: http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Paint-Acrylics-Small-Paintings/dp/1631590561
These kind of artist paints are all that I use to paint. Thinning them down is handy, but not essential. If you are careful to not overload the paint and rely on very thin layers they work fine right out of the tube with a bit of medium mixed in. Artist acrylics tend to have a very high pigment density and very finely ground pigment they also are very opaque compared to pre-mixed miniatures paints so it takes less paint to achieve a similar effect.
The biggest difference is that you'll be mixing colors more often. Artist paints are very forgiving in that regard, but you will probably want some kind of mixing guide until you are used to the properties of the paint.
I really like Alan Lee's Lord of the Rings sketchbook
Lee was one of my favorite LotR illustrators long before the movies. The sketchbook does not illustrate everything but it is laid out with chapters named for where they are, and you reach them in the same order as in the book. You should be able to tell where you are without accidentally looking ahead.
If you want to find more of Tolkien's art Hammond and Scull also released The Art of the Hobbit with his illustrations for...the hobbit. And later this year they'll release The Art of the Lord of the Rings!
For the first one I used a few images from Alan Lee's sketchbook, he's the conceptual artist for LOTR: http://www.amazon.com/The-Lord-Rings-Sketchbook-Alan/dp/0618640142
The second one is specifically his sketch of Minas Tirith: http://i.imgur.com/o57QkIx.jpg
Can't believe this is not already posted, but don't see it. There is actually a coffee table book of his art called The Art of the Hobbit: http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Hobbit-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0547928254
Many (all?) of these images could be scans from the book.
There's no specific site to find all of these, but there is a book on Amazon and...well here's a Google search.
JRR Tolkien wrote Letters from Father Christmas to his children, telling them about battles with trolls and adventures with elves and all sorts of crazy things. For anyone that hasn't read the collection, it's pretty great. I don't plan on having children, but if I did, I would do this.