Notion for Artists and YouTubers - Intro PART 1

Now that I've decided to pursue art more avidly, and since I started my YouTube channel two months ago, I'm also needing to organize my data ... and a tutorial for Notion on YouTube grabbed my attention! 

Notion is a totally online note-taking / wiki / database / to-do list system that is rapidly becoming popular! I'm not really keen to have my content totally online rather than on my computer (as the Notion setup is), BUT my option before I bumped into Notion was Excel, which just wasn't jiving as it doesn't have visualizing ability for the art I've created. So when I saw the YouTube Notion introduction, I could instantly see how I could alter the content to make not a recipe board but an art gallery! 

During the past semester I was totally swamped as teaching online is intensely more demanding than fluidly walking in and out of the classroom along with the students. And during the early weeks of the semester most of us were actually putting in four hours to every hour in previous semesters, and that is with content already created for the most part!  Why so long? We had to learn how to video, render, upload ... then we had to make videos as well as learn online teaching software, take attendance AFTER a video session or homework upload, answer tons of emails, make quizzes or tasks every class to engage the students and once a week give homework feedback. Most of this had been done IN the classroom and now we had to do so much behind-the-scene teaching prep! Arg ... but I loved the challenge ... and became a better teacher for it!

And now a YouTuber! 

It's thanks to covid-19 that I started my YouTube channel! I actually wanted to start it two years ago but didn't know how to film and that seemed daunting, but covid eliminated the fear of producing and of starting ... and so now I'm a creator! A YouTube creator!

And I'm also a LumaFusion video jockey ... and now a Notion user for organizing my art and video content! Wow, it's been a productive semester!

Here's the link to my fifth YouTube upload and my first tech training video, proof that I've mastered (to some extent) both LumaFusion and Notion!

A Notion video by TerraCotta! My YouTube channel is finally moving forward!

And the thumbnail:

Pigment App: After 2 months

After two months of using the Pigment coloring app, I can say that I have really improved artistically! Pigment is my first artist community, and so seeing other artists and their work really made me rethink how I draw and paint. So the three ways I've most improved are in color theory, shading, and special effects.

COLOR THEORY: With my watercolor on real paper I noticed that colors were more vibrant if I layered colors, e.g. painting with blue and mixing in a touch of adjacent color like green to complicate the color and heighten the impact. That effect I've really worked with in Pigment and now many of my picts have layered colored. Am sure this will make my colors in future paintings on physical paper pop even more than before!

SHADING: I never realized it before seeing my Pigment paintings next to paintings from talented Pigment users that my paintings didn't have much shading. So I studied many other artists' paintings and then tried to emulate their shading techniques, and all I can say is ... this has been the biggest game changer in my development as an artist on Pigment, and I'm sure on physical paper! Wow!

SPECIAL EFFECTS: I'm a traditional watercolor artist, meaning I don't want hard edges, I want soft transitions with realistic colors, and I want to let my edges merge in with one another. However, on Pigment we are coloring outlines, which means there will be hard edges, something that doesn't appeal to my senses. Also many artists cutesify their paintings with the special effect brushes--airbrush in halos, laser in lightning, paint in wood tones and then outline petals with another color (again the hard edges), add dots, and pencil markings, bubbles, brilliant clouds .... and so I adapted to this often non-realistic style but a style that is used for marketing, style posters and modern stylized art. I like it and have frequently use it now--it's a style immensely popular with the Pigment community because of the many special effect brushes which are loads of fun to use--but I rather doubt these special effects will carry over in my future watercolors on paper. I'm still a traditionalist at heart, but the learning has been wonderfully developmental as can be seen by my most recent Pigment paintings below:

My most recent and best painting to date, inspired by a one-color painting challenge (my color: copper in the metals palette)

 

Oh the fun I'm having on Pigment!

(not sponsored information, just a reaction to the encouraging community of artists!)

First Paintings on Pigment, a Coloring App

The coolest apps I downloaded after getting my new 2018 9.7” iPad with compatible Apple Pencil were Procreate for drawing, Notability for note-taking and Pigment for free-style coloring. Oh the fun I’ve had in the last few weeks with Pigment! Notability is great too, but Pigment has been so much fun that I have yet to use Procreate. Painting a pict before crashing at night or over the recent four-day weekend has been a chillaxing treat!

So following are some of the picts I’ve colored in my first month of wonderful (time-wasting) Pigment:

By far my most popular painting!!!

 

 

Oh the fun I have had, and it's been great 

for learning more about color mixing!