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How Pale Silverpoint and Metalpoint Drawings Really Are?
Looking at online images of silverpoint or metalpoint drawings, you will probably notice that many of them look very light and pale. Is this the norm? Why are they so light? And most importantly—how comes that only some metalpoint drawings look so pale while others appear much darker? Different computer monitors display images differently, thus you cannot be certain whether some artwork appears on your monitor the way it was intended to look like by the artist who scanned/photographed their work. Moreover, with image editing software like Photoshop, it is possible to alter how light or dark some digital image looks like. So how do these drawing actually look like in real life?
Advertisement Failure: Commercialized Patriotism
National flags can be a common sight in advertisements. Most countries have some national holiday, some kind of independence day when patriotism gets monetized and used for profit. This is the day when the state will put up flags everywhere, organize some fireworks, maybe even a military parade. This is also the day when many private companies jump on the patriotic advertising bandwagon. Flags or flag colors and shapes on the product packaging, flags in window displays, flags in shop isles. We all have seen this. But why is this happening? Do shop owners really have such strong patriotic feelings that they must utilize every opportunity to display a flag somewhere, or is this just commercialized patriotism—a hypocritical lip service that happens, because marketing people hope to earn a bit of extra cash this way?
Why You Shouldn’t Mock, Imitate or Joke About Other People’s Accents
Most people agree that discrimination is bad, this means we shouldn’t mock somebody else’s accent. It is rude, it is offensive, it enforces prejudice, racism, xenophobia, and classism. “But I’m not mocking all the Russians as a group when I make some joke in which I use a fake Russian accent,” some will say. “I’m not insulting anybody, I just made a joke, it is harmless,” they will say. Unfortunately, this is often not how people whose accent was imitated will feel about it. Somebody can perceive suck jokes as offensive. In the worst case scenario it is possible for people to develop anxiety and feelings of insecurity about speaking if others commonly joke about their pronunciation. People can internalize the stigma about their own accents to the point where they hate the way they speak.
Metalpoint Drawing Tutorial: A Step by Step Guide to How I Made the “Snarling Wolf Tribal” Artwork
This tutorial is going to be a step by step guide in which I explain how I made my “Snarling Wolf Tribal” metalpoint drawing. This drawing was made with 24 karat gold, palladium, and aluminum, but the same instructions would be applicable also for making a silverpoint drawing (the word “silverpoint” is used when a drawing is made with silver).
Metalpoint Drawing: Snarling Wolf Tribal
This is a metalpoint drawing of a snarling wolf in profile. Image size is 8×10 inches. It is made with 24 karat gold, palladium, and aluminum. The more commonly used name for this drawing technique is “silverpoint,” but since I didn’t use silver for this artwork, I’m using the term “metalpoint” instead.
Portrait Commission in Metalpoint
This is a metalpoint drawing. It’s size is 8×10 inches. It is made with 24 karat gold and aluminum. Metalpoint drawings are made by dragging a piece of metal across a surface prepared with an abrasive ground. It’s somewhat similar to drawing with pencils except that the drawing surface must be akin to a very fine sandpaper. This drawing is a commission, my client wanted me to draw his portrait.
Silverpoint Art Beyond Silver: What Other Metals Artists Can Use For their Metalpoint Drawings
Silver is the most commonly used metal for creating metalpoint art. Even when discussing this art technique, the word “silverpoint” is used more commonly than “metalpoint.” Nonetheless, there are multiple other nice metals for silverpoint and metalpoint art that an artist can use instead of silver. This is going to be a guide to various metal options that are available for the metalpoint artist. In addition to silver, artists can use also other metals like copper, brass, bronze, aluminum, zinc, bismuth, nickel, tin, gold, platinum, palladium, or even harder metals like titanium or niobium.
Review and Comparison: Golden Silverpoint/Drawing Ground versus Roberson Silverpoint Drawing Ground
Silverpoint (or metalpoint in general) is a somewhat rarely used art technique, therefore only a few companies offer ready-made art materials for this technique. In this article I am going to review and compare two ready-made silverpoint grounds: Golden Silverpoint/Drawing Ground versus C. Roberson & Co Silverpoint Drawing Ground. Both of these drawing grounds are acrylic based, but they use different abrasive powders, hence the differences between them are very pronounced.
Tribal Badger T-Shirt
Here is a photo of the “Badger Forge” T-shirt I just got in the mail. I create custom stylized animal artworks for a living, and most of my clients commission me to create logotypes or tattoo designs for them. I enjoy seeing where and how my clients use these drawings, and this time I got something especially cool. My client, a knife maker for whom I had created a tribal badger logotype, used my image for some T-shirts. He sent me one as well.
The Pink Tax or Why We Need More Gender Neutral Consumer Products
Back when I was a child, everybody in my family used one and the same shampoo bottle. We also used the same bar of soap. Growing up, the first time I saw a TV commercial advertising separate shampoo “for him” and “for her,” I was puzzled. Why would men and women need different shampoo? We all have hair, and we all have to regularly wash it in order to keep it clean. It’s just hair and we all have it, so where’s the big difference between male and female hair? Growing up, I didn’t pay close attention to the shifting shampoo placement in stores. Thus I was unpleasantly surprised when I suddenly realized that shampoo, soap, deodorants, etc. products are now placed on separate shelves for men and women. How did that happen? Why didn’t I notice the shifting trend in product placement? More importantly, do men and women really need different and separate consumer products? And why do male and female products do not cost the same, why does gender-based price discrimination even exist?
What We Can Learn from Vintage Anti-Suffrage Postcards and Cartoons
As an artist, I find very interesting artworks that are meant to promote certain messages. Some messages are good or at least harmless; others are pretty nasty. This time I am going to analyze vintage anti-suffrage posters, postcards, and cartoons and take a closer look at the exact messages found in them. As you will quickly notice, some of these ancient and outdated ideas are still alive even in our more modern society a whole century after the initial artworks were created.
Advertisement Failure: Be Ashamed not to Buy
You rarely see advertisements, which give facts, technical specifications, and an explanation why some product is going to be useful for you. Instead, marketing people prefer to make annoying appeals to emotion. Advertisements tend to be made with the assumption that buyers are irrational, impulsive, and their emotions are easy to manipulate. I’m long since used to marketing people underestimating my intelligence. Most of the time their appeals to emotion are just annoying. Occasionally, however, they get outright disgusting. This is one such example—people are told to be ashamed for not buying some crap.
Advertisement Failure: Birds and Bottled Water
I perceive advertisements as interesting for the same reason why also the psyche of serial murderers can be interesting to study. It’s useful to know your enemy, isn’t it? Being familiar with common marketing techniques and tricks has some practical benefits. I’m not naïve, I won’t claim that I’m immune to being influenced by advertisements just because I have read a few books about marketing. Research indicates that also people who are familiar with some marketing trick can still fall prey to it anyway. But, hopefully, being educated about marketing will make me at least a little bit less likely to make foolish financial decisions due to getting manipulated by a masterfully crafted advertisement. So, yes, I do find advertisements interesting, and I study them. Every now and then I spot some really bad advertisements that make me cringe and feel repulsed by the product. Here’s one such bad advertisement that invokes from me the wrong associations.
History of the Always Changing Female Beauty Standards
Humans have always tried to prescribe how the perfect female body ought to look like. Simultaneously, they have also been unable to stick to any specific beauty ideal for a prolonged period of time. Beauty ideals have changed significantly throughout the ages. Nonetheless, society has always tried to enforce whichever fad was prevalent at some time period, and whoever deviated from some standard got labeled as ugly. In this article, I will provide a short history of female beauty ideals throughout the ages. As you will quickly notice, what we consider a perfect female body in 21st century differs from what people considered beautiful in various other time periods and cultures. Once you realize the fleeting nature of beauty standards, you are forced to consider them in a new light and examine their tenability. Are we really justified in our clinging to some beauty standard and striving to change our bodies just to conform to the ideal? Or maybe we should rethink our obsession with the prevailing fads?
How Each One of Us Can Help Reducing Sexual Harassment
Whenever sexual harassment happens, there is a victim and an abuser. Often there are also witnesses and observers—people who saw what happened, people who were nearby during the incident. Usually witnesses don’t intervene—they don’t defend the victim, they don’t confront the abuser. I believe that, whenever we see another person getting harassed in front of our eyes, we shouldn’t stay passive and silent any longer; instead we should speak up and tell the abuser that this kind of behavior is inappropriate and won’t be ignored and tolerated.
Body Hair: Hairy Female Legs
Growing up, I always felt the society pressuring me to conform. It wasn’t always verbal directions to behave in accordance with the accepted norms. Sure, I have often been explicitly told to “behave like a normal woman,” but it doesn’t need to be explicit. Humans are subject to peer pressure. We follow social cues in order to fit in. Conformity is simply something humans do. Whenever I was in a room with several other people who all behaved in the same way, I felt the pressure to conform and imitate their behavior.
10 Reasons Why You Should Talk to People You Disagree With
Living inside an echo chamber might feel comfortable. Preaching to the choir whenever you express your opinions might feel reassuring. Nonetheless, I intend to argue that we should intentionally step out of our comfort zones and try having discussions with people who disagree with us and whom we don’t really like that much.
Why the Society Wants You to Feel Ashamed
Human sense of shame, embarrassment, and humiliation is a purely social construct. There is nothing inherently embarrassing about any situation that a human being might experience throughout their life. This brings up the following question: why do people perceive certain specific experiences as shameful?