Archive of all blog posts

I was recently digitally interviewed by Andrea Pinto, a student at the Universidad de Especialidades Espíritu Santo in Ecuador, who wanted to learn more about the site as part of a class project. As I was writing my answers, I realized that other people might have some of the same curiosities, and asked Andrea for permission to share the questions and my answers with all of you. When did you created... Continue reading →

This has been a harrowing few weeks for me and everyone who loves this site. As you may know, over the last several months we've been experiencing what I would describe as a shocking number of hacking attempts. We fought them off and fought them off and finally, one made it through and covered the site in scary black screens and threatening sounds for a few days. When I managed to clean that up and... Continue reading →

Paintingdemos.com just published an article that gives a bird's eye view of many different common life drawing techniques. Their overviews link to more in-depth explanations of each technique, so if one appeals to you, you can quickly find more information. They even mentioned this site and referenced one of our articles! Check it out at http://paintingdemos.com/life-drawing-techniques-and-methods/... Continue reading →

The super talented artist Loish just put out a very thorough tutorial on how she goes about digitally painting female faces in her particular style. She is known for a slightly cartoony style and rounded female figures with large, expressive eyes, and gorgeous command of color. I know many of you reading this blog are admirers of her work! So if you want to see Loish's process... Continue reading →

A lot of things have happened since I last posted here. When last I gave you an update, I was preparing for a second photo shoot to generate more original images for our tools -- this time, we were lining up models over 60 and under 15 to round out our collections of hands, feet and faces. Unfortunately, a few weeks before the day of the shoot, the photographer I had been working with had a family... Continue reading →

There are two extremely common concerns that are expressed to me through email, comments and forum posts, that both have their answer in better control over how much weight you place on your pencil when drawing. The first is being unable to go from under-drawing construction to completed work without seeing the "messy" under-drawing peeking from underneath. The second is being unable to produce anything... Continue reading →

It's been a long long while since we saw new full-body models for the figure study tool, but over the last week we assembled just over 50 new images for you! There's lots more, but I know some of you prefer to use the tools with the "Decent" models only filter enabled, so I won't post more previews here. Happy drawing!!  ... Continue reading →

Thank you to everyone who has been writing in about your experiences with the timer bug. I've identified two different cases that could cause similar symptoms. One has been patched -- I hope that some of you will see this problem vanish because of it. The other is still being worked, but I'm happy to say that we now at least have a solid direction to go in. Please do continue sending in your bug reports!... Continue reading →

For the last several weeks I've been receiving sporadic reports that people are encountering an occasional (or sometimes constant) bug that causes the timer to not work, and remain on a particular image forever, or until manually advanced. This issue is often (but not always) accompanied by a subsequent distortion of the image. So far, this bug has proved elusive to track down. I wanted to post some... Continue reading →

We did finish uploading the last of the images from our first shoot, which included a lovely new model. With everything said and done for photoshoot #1, our collection of hands & feet photos is 699 photos strong, and our faces collection contains 443 photos. Yowzers. For photoshoot #2, we're aiming to increase our hands/feet/faces diversity by adding elders and children to the mix. I'll... Continue reading →