http://www.openculture.com/2019/03/new-archive-digitizes-80000-historic-watercolor-paintings.html

The watercolor painting has a reputation for lightness. It’s a casual endeavor, done in scenic outdoor surroundings on sunlit days. Watercolors are the choice of weekend hobbyists or children unready for messier materials. Watercolors, in other words, are often treated as unserious. But for a couple hundred years, they served a very serious purpose. In addition to being a portable medium with an expansive range, watercolors’ ease made them the primary means of making documentary images before photography completely took over this function by the turn of the 20th century when portable consumer cameras became a reality.

Creative Commons has officially launched CC Search, a search engine that indexes over 300 million images from 19 image collections, "including cultural works from museums (the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art), graphic designs and art works (Behance, DeviantArt), photos from Flickr, and an initial set of CC0 3D designs from Thingiverse." All of the indexed images are in the public domain and released under Creative Commons licenses--meaning the images are generally free to use in a non-commercial setting.

Implied lines are more closely related to the way our minds “see” objects. By understanding implied line and recognizing the approach that should be taken to create them, we can bypass our analytical left brain and create a drawing that is more accurate to what is observed.

Draw the entire scene within a defined picture plane on drawing paper or in your sketchbook, but do not use line. Instead, draw using only value. Allow the contrast that happens between the value, color, or texture create the “lines” in the drawing.

You should draw.
Sometimes a problem seems too big or too abstract to fit into a neatly formatted list of requirements. It’s difficult to hold and pick apart a series of steps in your head. You want to connect ideas, follow many series of steps in different directions, while also considering constraints and stress cases. But your brain wants to follow one train of thought from beginning to end. Anything that looks like it’ll take you off track gets brushed aside, “We’ll come back to it.” You end up in a battle with your own mental capacity. You need to explore all sides of a problem while simultaneously looking for weak points. There comes a real concern of things slipping through the cracks because your brain can’t hold them all or remember them for long.
Visualizing problems on a canvas gets them out of your head and into the real world. You can put all the pieces in front of you so you — and everyone else — knows what you’re working with. Every time a new idea, challenge, or path comes up, make a note. You may not solve it at the same time, but it’s there, waiting until you’re ready. This frees up mental space to start challenging your ideas and working towards solutions that include everyone — instead of barrelling down one track to the obvious, happy-path conclusion.

Your team should draw.
Because whiteboards are part of our physical space, they can be gathering places. We sit together with our teams, but each facing our own personal, digital canvases: our monitors. Work is only shared when you as an individual feel it’s ready, or a colleague has asked you to share. When we work at the whiteboard, we share our work while we work .

Everyone should draw.
The whiteboard is not a canvas for designers, it’s a canvas for discussion.

“Almost everybody I know who does interesting, creative work went through a phase of years of where they could tell that what they were making wasn’t good as they wanted it to be… It is only by going through a volume of work will you close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions” — Ira Glass

Every month I reflect on ‘How I can be a better Designer’. I learned through my background in visual arts that you can train yourself to draw better in a shorter period of time (literally).
I experimented with this in the Summer of 2013. My goal then was to achieve realistic sketches of eyes that captured human emotion. To do this I gave myself a 30-minute time limit and these were the results…

1) 8–6–4–2 Rapid Prototype Method
The premise of this method is to sketch for 8 minutes, 6 minutes, 4 minutes and 2 minutes with quick 2 minute feedback sessions in between.

2) A Twist on the #DailyUI Challenge
Maybe you’re like me and you’ve received the congratulatory email on Day 100 🎉 with nothing to show for it. This was the simple twist I added to get myself started.

3) Solve a Problem you’ve encountered
Take a moment in your day-to-day to note down real world problems that you wish there were better solutions for. You might already a list or two or five. It’s time to solve that problem.

After one week of pen-tooling mazes, I never had any difficulties with the instrument again. If I could shout one thing from the rooftops to beginning illustrators, it would be to conquer mazes.

I started looking at the components it would take to rebuild—a circle for this, a modified rectangle for that. With the exception of some unique paths here or there, almost every part stemmed from the simple shapes we learn in kindergarten.
In fact, it actually turns out that most flat illustrations are either based upon these basic shapes (which Illustrator perfectly pre-sets), or an organic shape (for which the mazes serve as preparation).

• Daily routines
• Drawing in the mornings
• Group drawings
• Tutorials

The number of museums that have made their collections available online whole, or in part, has grown exponentially and shows no signs of slowing.

The opportunity to see all of Van Gogh’s bedroom paintings in one place may have passed us by for now—an exhibit in Chicago brought them together in 2016. But we can see the original bedroom at the yellow house in Arles in a virtual space, along with almost 1,000 more Van Gogh paintings and drawings, at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam's site. The digitized collection showcases a vast amount of Van Gogh’s work—including not only landscapes, but also his many portraits, self-portraits, drawings, city scenes, and still-lifes.

Called Hamonshū, the books were produced by the artist Mori Yuzan, "about whom not a lot is known," adds the Public Domain review, "apart from that he hailed from Kyoto, worked in the Nihonga style" — or the "Japanese painting" style of Japanese painting, which emerged during the Meiji period, a time of rapid Westernization in Japan.

Mix & Match Robots with a Sketch library
Create robot illustrations in Sketch App with this free library. Combine frames, antennas, sensors, accessories, and colors. 🤖

Exercise 1: Negative Space — see what is NOT there
Exercise 2: Dynamic drawing— see movements
Exercise 3: Foreshortening — see in perspective (boxes/buildings)
Exercise 4: Proportion — see flat (window)
Exercise 5: Depth — see overlaps (plant)

Whatever is the direction digital artists choose for their professional realization, one of the crucial and hardest challenges is finding own creative style. Today we are discussing this theme with Tubik graphic designer Yaroslava Yatsuba, now experienced in both traditional and digital art. She is keen to share some useful tips and practices helping designers to find and keep their own style in business and theme flat illustrations for various purposes. Let’s consider what graphic designers could do so that not to sink in the variety of styles and catch their own golden fish fulfilling professional goals.

Xabio Arts

Not convinced you need FiftyThree’s Pencil stylus in your life? Or maybe you just want to level-up your skills? This guide covers both by revealing the kinds of Surface Pressure and Blend secrets that will turn you into a Pencil master.

It seems to me Annette said something like this: Begin with a proper sketch book. Draw in ink. Finish each drawing you begin, and keep every drawing you finish. No erasing, no ripping out a page, no covering a page with angry scribbles. What you draw is an invaluable and unique representation of how you saw at that moment in that place according to your abilities. That’s all we want. We already know what a dog really looks like.

Nice perspective and I love the radio.