Five Pencil Method

Posted on February 20, 2015 by David

The Five Pencil Method is a website providing both free and commercial training resources relating to pencil drawing.

The artist and illustrator Darrel Tank presents the training based on his own methodology. The core of the five pencil method is, not surprisingly five pencils. Darrel promotes the use of only five grades of pencil from the lightest 4H through 2H, HB, 2B to 4B. He also avoids the use of tortillions often used to spread graphite and produce contours and shading.

The underlying ethos has been to make drawing accessible to all without breaking the bank. The pencils, paper and other tools used in the course are easily sourced and the fact that you, as the student, are able to use the same materials as the teacher helps by making the experience as close to that of the teacher and makes the hints and tips provided throughout the instruction directly relevant to your own work.

There is an active user community to provide help and advice for all, from the absolute beginner to professional artists.

There are a range of courses available from the website store covering graphite and colour pencil drawings.

Darrel himself makes it clear that too many people are put off art by negative comments and critical snobbery. The emphasis is to enjoy what you are doing in a supportive atmosphere.

If you have ever thought about drawing as a hobby try the free lessons and you could be surprised at how much you can achieve.

Checkout Darrel’s work at these links

The Five Pencil Method

Five pencil method – Facebook

Darrel Tank – Facebook

Youtube

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Ben Hewlett Harmonica Course.

Posted on February 14, 2015 by David

Ben Hewlett is a professional harmonica player and teacher and chairman of the National Harmonica League.

Last year Ben created an on-line harmonica course for people interested in learning how to play the harmonica, provided by Udemy.

The course is a comprehensive programme of video tutorials and practical exercises that take the student from first principles to complete tunes and advanced techniques.

Yesterday Ben announced that the course content is about to double in size.  For existing students there is no additional cost to access the new material but the cost of the course for new students will increase so now is a good time to consider signing up to get the maximum benefit of the new material at the current price, particularly with the Udemy 30 day money back guarantee.

Take a look and try some of the video previews.

 

 

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Have you tried a MOOC?

Posted on June 23, 2014 by David

For many years I have been using on-line resources to train up on a wide area of technical subjects including, scripting, programming, XHTML, CSS etc. Some of it structured courses, most just a collection of reference material and examples.

Recently I have been exploring the fairly new concept of MOOC’s,Massive Open On-line Courses. Over the past six months I have completed a number of courses covering a broad range of subjects, from Community Journalism, provided by the University of Cardiff to An Introduction to Chinese Culture from South China University of Technology.

It has been an interesting exercise and is rapidly becoming a regular pastime for me, opening up areas of interest that I may never have discovered otherwise.

I have been using to providers, Futurelearn and Open2Study, both of these are portals to a variety of courses, Futurelearn is predominantly Uk and European University provided courses, Open2Study is supported by the Open Universities Australia and course are from Australian and Eastern Universities.

MOOC courses are a combination of video lectures, written material and tests. Students can interact with each other and course tutors in discussion groups and forums. From my experience a course usually requires from 2 to 4 hours a week to complete and the fact that material is available via PC, tablets, and mobile devices, make it fairly easy to make use of any downtime to progress with the course. Most courses have a scheduled duration and you work at your own pace but within an over all course duration, others are completely open and you really have no time constraints.

Certification in most cases is limited to a certificate of completion of participation so of limited value, however, from a personal perspective, it’s the acquisition of knowledge that is important.

If you want to try MOOC’s for yourself visit either Futurelearn or Open2Study, or Google MOOC and take your pick, try something that interests you and give it a chance.

Happy studying.

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Scrivener – more than a word processor.

Posted on May 11, 2014 by David

I have used many applications to write with but they all had one thing in common they were word processors.

Writing could become a nightmare of switching between the text being written, source material, reference material, research notes and so on. Trying to keep all the relevant inputs available and accessible could quickly become a nightmare.

I started looking around for applications or systems that could streamline the job and I happened upon Scrivener, developed by LiteratureandLatte.

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Srivener Screen Shots

This software does not fall easily into a common category, it a word processor but not quite, a database, organiser, filing sytem etc.

What really attracted me to Scrivener is the way that so many individual aspects have been combined into one package, word processors expect you to start at page 1 and write in sequence, with Scrivener you have greater flexibility.

At the heart of Scrivener is the Project. There are a number of default project templates supplied such as Novel, Short Story, Non fiction and various scriptwriting options.

The project defines how the various features of Scrivener are preset, you can modify these project templates or create your own. Once done you can quickly start new projects from your new template.

To the right of the picture above you can see the Corkboard View. This view allows you to see summaries and notes for each part of your writing and you can re-order them at will.

All your reference material can be stored in the project, documents, pictures links etc can all be added.

Once completed you can compile your document, basically convert your individual sections of chapters into one document. The interesting thing here is that not only can you produce standard documents but you can also publish to e-book and kindle formats.

For me the ability to write in multiple mark down and then compile to HTML makes preparing docs for the web very straight forward.

This is only a quick glimpse at a very powerful application and it really does need a hands-on exploration to fully understand the useful features that are provided.

You can download a free trial of Scrivener for MAC or Windows.

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Posted in General, Software, Writing | Tagged , | Leave a comment