Best advice ever!

The best advice I have ever received from a painter was this: "Draw everyday, it does not matter if you draw only a leaf, or an apple, but draw everyday." This advice I received from a well-established artist, AA Louw, when I was still just a child. This is also something you will read in almost every "How to-book" about art that you can find. To have a good painting, the underlying drawing must first be good, whether you draw with pencil, charcoal or brush and paint. The proportions should be correct, the perspective should be correct and the composition must draw the eye into the painting and keep it moving within the boundaries of the painting. That is when a painting is "eye-catching". A good composition will draw the eye to a focal point, and when the eye moves away, it will immediately be drawn back to that focal point.

The goal of this post is not to teach about drawing and composition, there are enough books written about it. The aim is just to stress how important it is, and to encourage other, and maybe younger artists to draw everyday. Take a notebook and pencil, and draw everything you see. I will post some of my drawings at a later stage.

Here is a painting that, I think, draws the eye into the painting by the directional lines of the road and trees and the viewer's eye tends to go back to the focal point, which is the figure. A friend of mine bought this painting and it is a scene from the most beautiful town in South Africa, Greyton in the Western Cape. By the way, people and animals give life to any painting. You almost always find figures in the paintings of people like Renoir! I think he had some eye-catching abilities.