Art Shorts: An Artist Interview Blog Series – Question 2

What artist tool do you use the most? How do you use it? 

CHIHARU ROACH, Painting
My paint brushes. I trim them down to very small brushes and paint acrylics on wood panels or rice papers.

VICKI DENAURG, Mixed Media
I use a palette knife the most. I use it for prepping, and also to paint.

BETH CONKLIN, Computer Generated Art
Adobe Photoshop is the tool I use most- hours and hours and hours and more hours in front of the computer.

KATE WILSON, Painting
I use a small spray bottle and a dropper more than any other tool during my current series, Beyond Separateness. I use the dropper to drop ink onto wet watercolor paper, and I use a spray bottle to spray water or watered down inks, coffee, wine, or tea onto the wet paper in order to control the direction in which the ink that was dropped onto the paper spreads.

CHRISTY TURNIPSEED, Jewelry
Honestly, since I work in mixed media and glass, I use scissors mostly and the resin to blend the vintage paper and glass together.

A.L. SWARTZ, 2D Mixed Media
Colored pencils! They’re frequently overlooked as a kid’s medium, but they’re great.

ATHLONE CLARK, Painting
Not to be melodramatic, but the tool I rely on the most is not a tangible one. Spontaneity can be used a tool. I strive to keep my work fresh and full of surprises. When I’m finished with a piece, I want it to be as much of a surprise to me as it is to someone else seeing it for the first time. I therefore rely heavily on the the tool of spontaneity which fosters unpredictability.

JILL SHARP, Jewelry
My creativity. I use it for dreaming, designing, making. But it’s also my best problem-solving tool. In the studio daily I’m confronted with technical design problems to solve, balance to achieve, especially with custom-cut gems and asymmetrical designs, metal to forge (harden) and heat (soften) and I have be creative in setting up the process to best achieve the results I want to create for each design. Other tools are very useful, but it’s the creativity that drives me and also makes me strive for constant improvement, in both design and creation.

BUTCH OGELSBY, Photography
The obvious answer is – light. But I suppose it would be Photoshop in the case.

CHARLES TERSOLO, Painting
I use my projector the most, creating slideshows of my subject the offer different color options of my composition. Much of my art centers on Architecture and archaeology, I gave up designing my own to celebrate the creation of others. While I spend hours using photoshop to pull out color and contrast from my subject photos, the end result is I can create art in any city in the world, or at the edge of any natural wonder, with the same full setup in my studio.

JOEL LOCKRIDGE, Wood
The lathe. I turn pens from a variety of woods, acrylics, and upcycled products.

MICHAEL ZAVISON, Metal
Scrapers

MITCHELL BERG, 3D Mixed Media
I cut a lot of sheet metal in my work and I find that there are many ways to cut this kind of metal, both manually and with hand tools. Personally, I have 16 different tools for this one skill. The one I use the most is a surgical, bone cutting scissors that cuts sheet metal like taffy.