Amateur artists often create watercolors and charcoal sketches in relative isolation, sharing their work only with family, friends and classmates.
But the growth of online communities and Weblogs for visual artists enables them to easily show off their work to a potentially worldwide audience.
A number of artists have created sketchblogs – essentially, scanned images of sketchbook pages, with brief commentaries from the artist. Until I stumbled on a sketchblog by a guy named Aaron (www.tigerbreath.com/sketchblog), I never realized this blog genre existed.
Intrigued by Aaron’s versatile and creative melange of color illustrations, pencil drawings, animations and other works, I wondered whether the sketchblog was, in fact, anything more than his invention. I searched Google for “sketchblog” and, sure enough, I found hundreds of sketchblogs, from Monstercake (monstercake.blogspot.com) to the Small Pax Sketchblog (www.smallpax.com).
I was captivated by the talents of these blogger-artists, many of them amateurs.
And sketchblogs represent just one of the ways artists share their works online. Other spots, such as WetCanvas! (www.wetcanvas.com), a popular online community of artists, bring together artists of all levels of ability and interest.
“Before the Internet, it was not easy for amateur artists to meet other artist friends and share artwork with people who can be helpful and encouraging,” says Kerri Lynn Eustice, president of WetCanvas!, whose 66,000 members come from around the world. “With WetCanvas, any amateur artist can log in and become part of a vibrant community of artists.”
As with other online communities and Weblogs, those for artists often blur the boundaries between professionals and amateurs. In perusing sketchblogs, I was sometimes stunned to learn a site was run by an amateur. The same goes for a spot such as WetCanvas!
“Artists in all mediums and degrees of expertise use WetCanvas,” Eustice says. “That is part of the allure.”
Stop by WetCanvas, and you will find “channels” for just about any type of medium or subject matter, including acrylics, colored pencil, fantasy, landscapes, pastels, portraiture and still life. The site receives about 110,000 visitors a day, according to Eustice. More than 3.8 million comments have been posted in the community’s forums.
These forums provide an exciting way for artists to connect. One member, from Bangalore, India, recently posted a “WIP” (work in progress, that is) of a castle and a landscape. As the drawing is based on a photograph, she posted that, too, as well as a blown-up detail of the clouds in her work.
Perhaps the days of the solitary artist, suffering in a garret, are nearing an end.
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