Paint by Numbers – A great pastime now on your Phone or Tablet
I can’t emphasize the benefits of doing Paint by Numbers and along with some of my previous posts, I discuss this important pastime for health and mental well being. No doubt the Covid pandemic in the past year has rekindled people’s interest in this relaxing hobby and for many good reasons.
If you want to read my past posts on this topic, please visit the links below:
Launch of new Paint by Number app from Google play store (FREE):
Draw the famous Starry Night painting by Vincent Van Gogh – Paint by Numbers series:
Complete list of ALL the Paint by Numbers drawings in Paintology:
https://paintology.com/tutorial_cat/paint-by-numbers/
Let’s dive in and talk about what I know about Paint by Numbers and how I came to love and appreciate it.
As a young teenager many years ago, I loved drawing and was quite good at it. Unfortunately, I did not take it further due to parental push of doing science and maths, so it remained dormant for most of my life. I did attempt to take up drawing and painting but did not have the confidence and felt that the skill was long gone and buried.
It was not until many years later that I came across a Paint by Numbers kit that I purchased from a hobby store and decided to try it out. It was a painting of a world war 2 Japanese fighter plane. Surprisingly the end result was really good and decided to frame it and stuck it on my wall. Many pleasant comments came from friends and family who saw this painting. This was the exact catalyst that I needed to rekindle my drawing and painting hobby and after this enlightening experience, I embarked on a rewarding journey of art and creativity.
Tip for getting into drawing & painting:
Here is one of the most important tip I can give you on your journey to art & creativity and based of my own experience. You need to find or do something that you enjoy and get a satisfied reward from it.
The tip is loaded with some important points and you need to keep this in mind if you want to pursue something that will stay with you for a long time to come. Firstly, you need to enjoy what you want to pursue, otherwise what is the point of doing it, you won’t have any incentive to take it further. Secondly, if you don’t feel rewarded, the actions of your work will not show any progress or delight in order for you to keep you moving. How many people do you know that pick up a hobby only to drop it after a short while. This is because they don’t give themselves a chance to make all those micro improvements that lead to the bigger goal.
Below is a visual aid to understanding how the cyclical behavior of working on your hobby can have a profound impact on your proficiency.
From the visual aid above, you can see that the two important parameters of enjoyment and rewards need to be constantly in step with each other in order to become good in your hobby. It is very important not to set higher and lofty goals at the beginning. This is often the most single reason why most people cannot go beyond a few steps as they are too judgmental on their abilities. It is also important to get positive feedback from other people on your work but they can also defeat your ambitions with negative comments too. If at anytime, you decide that your enjoyment is dropping, you need to reset your goals otherwise you will not be rewarded with the results and your activity moving. If you keep your interest alive and get more rewards, it will work to spiral you into a sense of achievement that pushes you step by step towards high proficiency. Maybe you will eventually get to the point where you will excel many people in the same field. I know this, because I have experienced it in all my walks of life.
Looking back at my experience in the areas of painting and drawing, I found that it’s not easy to maintain the level of passion and rewards consistently. After all we are humans and we need to rest and and rethink our strategy to push our skills to the next level. There are occasions when I skip my hobby for many months or years. However, this is not a bad thing since your mind will have enough information to churn out new ideas and thoughts that can drive you to the next level.
Journey to improving your craft:
Going back to the time where I finished my last Paint by Numbers, I have since then created many works of art and with many different types of mediums. They all include, charcoal, pastels, acrylics, oils, felt tip markers and even watercolors. Once you have acquired the basic skill sets you have the world at you feet where you can experiment and push your creativity to greater heights.
If you run out of ideas and feel you can’t take your hobby any further, it’s only because you have not explored further. Nowdays there is no excuse for not going to classes or having acquired the necessary skills, because you can get all of this on the internet, for example, youtube. The sources of information that you can now routinely find on the internet is huge and almost always, you will find answers to the questions you are looking for. This should keep you engaged and constantly moving to improve your art.
So the big tip is always keep moving and thinking of how to improve and go further than where you are.
Over time, I have gone from traditional medium and jumped into the bandwagon of digital drawing and painting.
What I discovered as I was doing digital drawing is that the world of this medium was almost always ruled by users who were highly competent in graphics tablet and the picture editing tools. Inevitably, you will find that people who talk about digital drawings are always talking about the digital tools to make their drawings. This made me think hard as to why when in traditional mediums we have a pencil or brush and the paints and simply use our artistic skills to make our creation. That is, doing away with all the fancy tools of digital drawing.
Thankfully, there is one app that caters to this growing crop of artists. Especially the group of artists that come from the traditional background as well as many newbies who want to go back to their youthful days of doing drawing and painting.
In this highly innovating technological world we live in, we have seen great strides in gadgets and devices that has made all of our lives very efficient and useful. On the other hand these devices have also caused issues with online social behavior ie. online abuse, hate speech and most importantly taking up much unproductive hours for many adults including teenagers.
I consider productive apps to have a healthy and beneficial impact to our everyday lives and plays a critical part in furthering our knowledge and skillsets and helping the mind. In the world of digital drawing, our phone and tablet have provided a platform to boost our creative outlet. Such an app as you can guess is the Paintology drawing app from the Google play store.
The Paintology app has been developed by a traditional artist that has been designed to push your creative and artistic skills in this new medium. At the end of the day, it is not the tool or brush that makes you a great artist, it is the person making that creation. Nothing can be more true with the Paintology drawing app where unlike other drawing apps, the artistic skills are promoted more than the tools. With this in mind, the Paintology app is packed with video drawing tutorials that will show you how to use the minimum set of tools to develop your artistic skills in this new medium. With this app you can make simple drawings all the way to photo realistic drawings.
The Paint by Numbers method of drawing (one of many to choose from) has been designed to make drawing fun and enjoyable and at the same time improving those important skills necessary for an artist. Remember, what I mentioned earlier that one of the important steps to becoming an accomplished artist is to enjoy what you are doing. With Paint by Numbers using Paintology, you can pick fun subjects to draw while improving your drawing strokes, appreciation of color and helping you to draw freehand.
As you progress through other methods of drawing such as the Trace method, Dot to Dot, Camera Overlay, you will find yourself getting deeper into the domain of drawing and painting. This will only propel you to accomplish the goals you had always wanted in drawing and painting. Take your drawing to another level by investing in a good tablet and a stylus that you can use just like a pen. Forget what all those so called ‘accomplished’ digital artist tell you about digital drawing and requiring all those core skills to using the tools. They are so ingrained with the tools that they picked up over many years where they managed to produce digital drawings, that their conversation always stems from their knowledge of the tools only.
If you are a newbie or an accomplished artist in the traditional medium, the Paintology app is here!
Download the free Paintology app from the Google play store.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.paintology.lite
Happy Painting & Drawing!
Digital Canvas
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