This episode is divided into 3 sections. First is a rant about Instagram cheaters who take advantage of people's inability to know who unfollowed them, they mass unfollow a lot of people in order to seem like they follow very few but gain a lot of followers themselves.

The second part is about translucency of paint in paintings. My teacher has said to me that paying attention to paint translucency will take my art to the next level.

The final part is a segment where I analyze the storytelling elements in 3 of Bouguereau's paintings. Bouguereau often pushed one or two of these elements per painting for maximum impact. 

I start off with an inspirational quote by my Instagram friend @drawingbyivy on how important it is to follow your dreams and I share some drawing tips that are applicable to traditional drawing and digital.

The second half is about the 6 compositional elements that Bouguereau used for his storytelling mechanics. I talk about the attention element and also how you could make one element dominate by altering the other elements of the picture.

I talk about the mistakes I made in my latest Billie Eilish portrait process. I talk about a few points from the critique I got for it from Matt.

In the second half, I talk about what really worked for me in my Margot Robbie portrait vs the Billie portrait.

Some great points discussed.

Both of these paintings can be found at @aktracer on Instagram

https://instagram.com/aktracer

I carry over from the last episode and talk about my compositing experience in more detail in this episode. Most of compositing is about matching values and colors in the images and making them work together. I talk about how to achieve this in Procreate with curves and compare it with Photoshop.

In the second half, I talk about my insights in how to advance your craft once you can execute and produce a fair amount of realism. This section is called 'beyond photorealism'.

I talk about my new experience at working on my Gal Gadot x Cyberpunk composite which is meant to be a reference for a new painting. 

I also quickly touch upon a key technique in rendering which I never thought was intuitive initially but completely improved my quality of rendering in Procreate. I figured out this technique by reverse engineering paintings by Stam Quito

I talk about my vision for success for me personally and end with some things I absolutely love drawing the most!

We start by jamming on pairs of words, a great way to brainstorm on artistic ideas.

We discuss some random points from the book "Steal like an artist" by Austin Kleon. 

- Faking it till you make it, 

- In the beginning obscurity is good

- Gary Vee's concept of the 'zit', how to find the guts to share your vulnerability

- sharing your dots, being in a vibe

And a few more random rants

In this podcast I share my process for the painting RED in audio form. I made it a point to eliminate redundancies with the episode titled Process as much as possible and try to bring something new to the table.

The progress slides complementing this audio will be up at

https://aktracer.com/red

Today I fully explain my markmaking philosophy as it relates to realism in digital painting. There is more to it than just a soft edge, hard edge and textured edge and using corresponding quality of brushes for each one. I talk about how to get ANY brush to work for you in realism even if you had to use just ONE brush. 

In the second half of the episode I share the points from the critique Matt gave me, of my last Taylor Swift painting titled R.E.D. I made a TON of mistakes, believe it or not and there are fixes to it. Some really great points that will go straight in my front pocket.

We end the episode with my 2 cents on Procreate vs Photoshop for digital painting.

The first half of the episode talks about the mindset of mastering something and I share my appreciation for seeing depth in tasks in an almost meditative way, the way Elicia Donze sees it.

In the second half, I talk about how I started digital painting from scratch, I share pieces of key information that I caught from tutorials, Skillshare, YouTube, the trends in my journey up until the point of today where I now do pure realism art.

Catch my chronological progression in digital painting and the artists and courses I learned from, I share a ‘mark making’ philosophy for Procreate: the 3 types of brushes you need in digital painting that you could accomplish any art style with. 

The drawing process I've been documenting on Instagram, now repackaged in audio form. 

Discover my holy grail of portrait drawing, along with bits about replacing the nib of my Apple pencil.

I am currently nearing the end of my Taylor Swift piece for Lauren and I might title it "R.e.d". When you hear me talk, that's the piece I'm talking about.

Check out my Instagram July 14, Sunday to see how it turned out.