When drawing digitally sometimes even the simple act of exporting the image out of photoshop and viewing it on my monitor instead of on my cintiq shifts my perspective from "the artist" to "the viewer"
I don’t have a mirror, but I use my phone camera (and encourage my students to use theirs.) It really helps me to look at my paintings in a thumbnail size—it forces me to stop obsessing over small areas of a painting and get back to seeing what is happening to the piece as a whole. Phone photos also allow me to flip it upside down and backwards to make sure I’m not missing something really off. I’m with you 100%—the longer I work at this, the more I realize how valuable my time away is; what sometimes feels like frustrating disruptions to my work day often end up being a real benefit when I return to a project.
I needed the permission to step away from something I was working on today. Too often I feel the pressure to be working on something with whatever time I have available. However, this pressure to produce is not always productive. And sometimes when there’s no hard deadline that ensures that work gets done, those self-imposed deadlines can be really damaging. It’s good to let things marinate for a while.
When drawing digitally sometimes even the simple act of exporting the image out of photoshop and viewing it on my monitor instead of on my cintiq shifts my perspective from "the artist" to "the viewer"
I don’t have a mirror, but I use my phone camera (and encourage my students to use theirs.) It really helps me to look at my paintings in a thumbnail size—it forces me to stop obsessing over small areas of a painting and get back to seeing what is happening to the piece as a whole. Phone photos also allow me to flip it upside down and backwards to make sure I’m not missing something really off. I’m with you 100%—the longer I work at this, the more I realize how valuable my time away is; what sometimes feels like frustrating disruptions to my work day often end up being a real benefit when I return to a project.
I needed the permission to step away from something I was working on today. Too often I feel the pressure to be working on something with whatever time I have available. However, this pressure to produce is not always productive. And sometimes when there’s no hard deadline that ensures that work gets done, those self-imposed deadlines can be really damaging. It’s good to let things marinate for a while.