Working notes
Things I got wrong long enough that writing them down felt cheaper than getting them wrong again.
2026
-
Silhouette before anything else
Why the first hour goes on a shape nobody will see, and the two-second test that decides whether the drawing continues.
-
Fur is a value problem, not a texture problem
Four years of drawing individual hairs, and the thing that finally made fur read was cutting the brush size in half and the layer count by three quarters.
-
On charging properly
Undercharging is not humility, it is a slow way to stop drawing. What changed when I doubled my rates and lost exactly two clients.
-
Edge control, or why everything looked like stickers
Hard edges everywhere reads as cut-out. The fix is knowing which three edges in the piece are allowed to be sharp. Draft.
-
Colour picking from photographs is a trap
The colours are right and the painting still looks dead, because a camera already made the decisions you were supposed to make. Draft.
2025
-
Gesture, and drawing the thing before the parts
Eighteen months of figure practice condensed into the one instruction that would have saved most of it. Unfinished.