In this clip from the podcast, illustrator Shannon Wang talks about how she found inspiration over the past year using the Sktchy app. You can check out the full episode here - Shannon Wang: Illustrator, Painter and Tattoos Tom Ray's Art Podcast
So you draw portraits do you have people that you actually model them for are you making them up in your head?
There's an app called Sktchy that I found pretty close to the shutdown.
It's an app, you can post pictures of your artwork, you can also post pictures of yourself to be drawn by other artists. It's more about portraits than it is anything else on there and that was always something that I had a hard time with.
They offer classes to learn how to draw. You could take a whole class on learning how to draw an ear or nose or eyes or whichever! So I just kind of went all-in on that on quarantine and was just drawing and drawing and drawing and drawing.
If you look at my pictures kind of pre-March last year, March 2020, you wouldn't see that many portraits at all. And I'd never heard of this app so there would be pictures where you'd be like, okay I'm going to draw that person.
When you do it does it just go draw this picture? How does the person know that you did a picture or do they ever even see it?
So I'll take a picture of whatever, my dog or myself, and post it on there as an inspiration photo and with posting it you claim that you're the owner of that picture and then you're saying it's okay to put it on there. There is an inspiration tab which you can see all of the pictures that people that are on Sktchy have posted. Which basically they're saying, hey draw me in a sense just by posting.
Sktchy picks from that pool of people submitting a daily inspiration photo. You can click one of the inspiration photos, you can save pictures that inspire you.
I'm amazed I haven't heard of this yet! It sounds like such a great artistic time waster and I mean that in a good way.
Yeah if you drew a picture that was inspired by a photo there you can click on it and see other people's styles and what they did. Even do a search for, you know, guys with beards or you know if you're looking for a specific kind of pose or picture or whatever!
There's a guy from Denmark I believe who did a class on homemade inks. So he would draw pictures that he made, making acorn ink and blueberry ink out of frozen blueberries!
Did you try to make any of these inks?
I did! So like the blueberry ink, I would have thought that there would have been more to do than just to make your own ink but really he was just proving that you don't need to go to an art store, especially during the quarantine.
So we had frozen blueberries and you defrost them, and then freeze them, defrost them, freeze them a few different times, and then you get all this juice and you draw a picture with it! It's bonkers!
That's it? It doesn't involve adding anything else to it?
You can, which changes the color a little bit but yeah. And in addition to that, he draws with sticks!
This drawing I did was drawn with a stick. I was so pumped! I'm running around like I drew this with a stick!
Here is a Pinterest image for this post you can save for yourself!