Darantha

Hi, sorry for the delayed response!

Thank you so much, it makes me so happy to hear you like my art. I've mostly learned through selfstudy sources like Schoolism, but I've also taken a few mentorships through Oatley Academy. The rest is just doing studies and trying to identify and work on my weak areas. For example, someone pointed out that my poses were a bit stiff, which I agreed with, so I've been trying to work on that by doing regular gesture drawings for the past few months.

You have very lovely colours in your art, and I can see some really steady improvement when browsing your gallery. If I were to give you any pointers, it'd be to try and pay attention to how you describe forms in your paintings (as in, shading, highlights, etc). Your two recent portraits are a lot clearer with how the light falls than some of your full figure paintings from August-November. So I think you're already on the right track with that. Saw on the Faelyn artwork that you'd tried to not paint every strand of hair, which is the right idea to have! Painting is a lot about learning where to imply details, rather than actually painting them (Check out old master painters like Sargent, Bouguereau or Winterhalter). Honestly all I can really suggest is to keep at it, use references when you're not sure of how something looks (paint what you see, not what you think you know), and do studies to improve in areas you feel you are weaker. Art is one long process of "Try, fail, try again, fail better". You learn something with every new painting, if you actually strive for it. I don't know if you follow me on either of my tumblr pages, but I do post study summaries there every now and then, if you want some inspiration: daranthaart.tumblr.com/tagged/…

Hope you find something of it helpful! I get a little rambly at times.