New Beginings

Christmas and New Year is not a very productive time for us artists.Family commitments and festivities take up all our time, leaving very little scope for painting or even blogging. Still, I have not been completely off grid- I have been spending my spare time on things that are equally important but get pushed back usually in favour of painting! I am talking about things like website management, communication, setting up emails and newsfeed; plus all important- learning to make videos of my process. Videos have been on my mind for a long time. People have asked me again and again if I did tutorials and I always said 'not yet, but may be in future...'! It seemed a bit intimidating and frankly speaking, I did not know how was I going to record myself ! Recently I decided to take the plunge and bought myself a tripod.Only then I realised that recording myself was actually the easiest part! Now I needed to figure out which software was easiest to use for editing, and how to obtain it.Most free software come with hideous watermarks - you only realise it after you have downloaded the damn thing and gone through the setup. After doing this step multiple times I finally was able to zero in on Videopad .Then there were compatibility issues, compression issues, optimisation and of course, learning to use the tools to do actual editing.
I have now spent countless hours on this and still haven't come up with anything that is even remotely presentable. I will keep working on it till I get it right but I wonder if any of you do it and have any tips for me.
The daylight is quite poor these days and this might be affecting the quality.My daylight lamp gives out a strange flickering light when I watch the footage on screen. I think I need to put off the recording until there is decent daylight.

In between these tasks I managed to sneak in this little giraffe last evening .It was very spontaneous- I let my hand takeover  my mind, working without thinking about it. Very light and breezy, lots and lots of water and very few colours.Hope you enjoy this.