When you’re making some art you usually need something to make a mark - while drawing or painting. And you need something to make the mark on. You could use pencils ✏️, crayons, pastels, pens ✒️, brushes, watercolour, acrylic, oils and many more… even your fingers 👆! For surface you could use the ground, walls, paper 📄, canvas, bottles 🍾, furniture, clothes… the list is endless. You could draw with your fingers and hands on sand. And that’s exactly what sand sculpture artists do!

When I started drawing every day, I went ahead and bought some expensive art supplies. I loved doodling and drawing …

As you might have heard, it’s been raining hard in Bangalore for the last I don’t know how many days. We do get a respite from it for a few hours but then it starts all over again. Nice excuse to stay indoors and rolled up in a blanket. The rain does have a way of bringing out the vibrant greens all over the place.

So here’s a photo I took of the middle-aged tree just outside the balcony. It has some glorious leaves. Most of the times it is the little things that bring the greatest …

(I’ll be writing about my experiences with drawing, but I believe what follows is applicable to many of the fine or performing arts)

Drawing is fun

When I first started drawing I must have been tiny and I don’t remember it at all. Kids draw with whatever they get and they draw whatever they see around them or they just scribble. They are not very good at it, even if the parents think they gave birth to a Monet or Van Gogh 🙈. Who can blame the parents though, here’s Jackson Pollock’s “Autumn Rhythm”. All I’ll …

What?

Hello there 🙋‍♂️🙏! I’m Abhishek Mishra and this is The Art Noob, a newsletter about learning to draw and paint.

I started learning drawing and painting late in life, and the journey so far has been so interesting that I decided to document it in a blog/newsletter so that others may benefit or learn from it…

or maybe just have fun laughing over my blundering, bungling, inept, klutzy, gauche efforts …

Why?

I’ve been doodling for years, and I’m a hobbyist photographer for close to 15 years. A couple of years ago I was with my mom …

Wrote this utility for my son's studies today with html + bootstrap + jquery, <500kb, loads from cache in less than a second. Deployed with https on netlify+github. All in less than a day's work.

Now deployed at printworksheet.abhishekmishra.in.

I've also added Java support to picoturtle. Here's a program to draw a rather groovy tunnel. Java code follows.

import in.abhishekmishra.picoturtle.Turtle;
import in.abhishekmishra.picoturtle.TurtleState;

public class Tunnel
{
    public static void cuboid(Turtle t, double b, double w, double h) {
        t.forward(b);

        t.right(-45);
        t.forward(h);
        t.back(h);
        t.left(-45);

        t.left(90);
        t.forward(w);

        t.left(-45);
        t.forward(h);
        t.back(h);
        t.right(-45);

        t.left(90);
        t.forward(b);

        t.left(-135);
        t.forward(h);
        t.back(h);
        t.right(-135);

        t.left(90);
        t.forward …

Recently I added C# .NET support to picoturtle. I was playing around generating waves... here's an example based on the sine function. And the C# Turtle code follows below.

using System;
using picoturtle;

namespace cspico
{
    class MainClass
    {
        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            // Create the turtle before using
            Turtle t = picoturtle.Turtle.CreateTurtle(args);

            if (t != null) {
                // Your code goes here

                t.penup();
                t.setx(0);
                t.sety(250);

                for(double i = 0; i < 500; i+=0.25) {
                    t.setx(i);
                    double sin = Math.Sin(i/15);
                    double y = sin * 100;
                    t.forward(y);
                    t.pendown();
                    int col = Math.Abs …

Here's a gif of PicoTurtle on MacOS drawing a fern.

TODO: fix giphy link doesn't work anymore