Drawspace.com

I discovered a website recently, Drawspace.com, which features drawing lessons created by Brenda Hoddinott, who is a talented artist. This is a very cool site for anyone interested in learning to draw. Registration is free, you can sign up to be notified of new additions to the site, and the site is well organized. More importantly though is the instruction! While some of the tutorials don’t go as in-depth as I’d like, there is so much covered here that it is a wonderful resource for any artist.

Hoddinott provides a wide range of lessons, from drawing tips, skills, and the basics of getting ready to draw, to drawing highly detailed imagery to caricatures and cartoon drawing. The lessons are provided in PDF format and range from Beginner to Advanced. In reviewing the lessons I’m reminder very much of the Walter Foster drawing books that introduced me to drawing when I was young. Oh, if only the web had been around back then! Thankfully though terrific resources are available today on the net for the youth of today, and for those of us that are still young - and even younger at hear. Visit the site today at http://www.drawspace.com

Gradients For Visual Impact

I recently did a couple of ads for Cerro Coso, one highlighting the campus of the college, and one with showed the service are of the Kern Community College District. Knowing that these ads were going to be included in a publication with lots going on around the ads I wanted the ads to really stand out. To give the ads that extra impact with color I used gradients as a background fill. This allows the photos and graphics to really pop on the page, and allowed for the similar ads to be differentiated by the primary color scheme of each ad.

While these ads would have worked on a white background, the richness of the color really makes them stand out. These are pretty large ads, being 9.5”x12” and 9.5”x6” so the color will have added impact due to their size, really adding to the drama of the design.