AwfulAspiringArtist: Hello! As you can probably tell by my username and image drawn above (using my phone, which took about as long as Infiltrate did) I'd like to be at least a decent artist, trouble is, as with most beginners, I'm not particularly good at it. I'd like to get better but I'm not sure where to begin, so I just have a couple of questions for you artists out there: When did you first begin to draw? About how often and for how long did/do you draw a day? What do you draw? When did you really start noticing improvement? Thanks for viewing this and I hope at least someone responds so I'm not making a complete twat of myself in posting this
scoopski: Hi! I've still got plenty of improving to do as well, but I'll help the best I can:
I began doing pixel art three or four years back, and went to higher-resolution art a few days ago. These days I draw every day for a few hours upon waking up, and it's usually Katia because she's fun to draw. As for improvement, it's hard to pick out a specific point, but the thing I'm seeing most looking back is cleaner linework ever since I started listening to Bob Ross in the background. Your mileage may vary on that one though.
As a sidenote: Hating one's own art is just a part of being an artist. Don't let that get you down, because your art looks pretty good already imo
Un_Mapache: I'm a beginner artist too, but I can give you this advice:
To get good at drawing, you'll need 2 things: Technique & practice.
To get practice you just must keep drawing. Everyday, just keep practicing.
Technique is something you learn. It doesn't matter your style, or what you want to do, the fundamentals of art are the same (volumes, shapes, perspective...) Learning this stuff (via youtube tutorials/art career/any other kind of artistic learning) is key.
Once you know or at least start understanding the fundamentals, your practice will get more and more effective over time. And, even when you make bad art, you'll know WHY is it bad and what to do to fix it in the future.
TL;DR: Learn the basics, use them to get better. Then repeat ad infinitum.
Zargothrax: A bit more confidence please! ;)
Well, I’d rather not tell when I first started drawing as it would be pretty depressing. What matters is mileage, not how much time passes during that.
While I don’t really consider myself an „artist”, or „good”, I think I can still answer when I started noticing improvements.
When I started out, I thought about drawing as just lines next to each other. Drawing lines at the correct angles, differences and curves. Breaking this mindset and thinking about drawing as projecting a 3D body onto a canvas brought significant improvements (without this, drawings are kinda flat on the plane of the paper). What I mean is this: You have an idea in your head, though you can’t imageine all of it in your head, as bodies are complex (for now, I take it you want to make good figure drawings). So it is important to draw actionlines and boundingboxes, to indicate for us the pose, and what space the figure will occupy in 3D space. The point of the guidelines and such is to connect the imagined model in your head with the projection on the paper. If the connection breaks, you’ll notice that you just don’t know where certain lines should go in order to make the bodyparts have the desired orientation in 3D space. This also means that you should be familiar with 3D space. There is a free course here [url] http://drawabox.com/[/url], you don’t even need to make an account or anything, it’s just there. A few things about it: It’s long, and not very exciting, but clear, and your goals will be nonambiguous.
An another revelation was settling the „what came first, the chicken or the egg?” question, where the chicken is the pose, and the egg is the anatomy. One way of drawing is if you start building up the body from one point, say the head. The proportions and the anatomy will most likely be correct, but in the end you may notice, that this is not the pose you wanted (99.9% of the cases, the pose will be much stiffer than you imagined)! The other way is to start drawing an overly simplified body first, that has the correct pose. The problem here is that without points of reference, such as where certain muscle groups connect, where certain joints are, it is difficult to guess how long the limbs, or the torso should be, where the legs supposed to start, etc. Nonetheless, the second approach is the correct one. Realizing and using this improved my drawings significantly. By the way, the gesture of the figure makes much more of an impact on how „good” the drawing is percieved than nailing the muscle groups and every single bump on the body. How to practice this? Do so-called „gesture drawings”. Google it, watch youtube tutorials about it, others have explained it much better than I could. To be fair you still need some anatomy knowledge to make good gesture drawings, such as how the legs and the arms connect to the body exactly, but not too much.
The third thing I can think of is this: Drawing can be learned, but not tought. It doesn’t matter how much KNOWLEDGE you have on bodybuilding, you’ll need to do curls to grow your biceps yourself. KNOWING what to practice is important, because you can improve much quicker by doing meaningful excercises rather than screwing around aimlessly, but these excercises only help if you do them. This is the part I really struggle with, and I’m aware, that fixing this „part” would improve my skills tremendously. So I can’t give you any advice on this topic because I’m also bad at this (Even as of now, I’m typing this wall of text instead of practicing). Instead, I’ll give you someone else’s advice, maybe it’ll help you:
Make imperative goals. Or how do I say this. Goals that describe the HOW more than the WHAT. The latter would be for example „I want to be good at drawing” (this is WHAT you want to achieve). Every time you look at your drawings, your assessment on the matter would probably be „not yet”. Which is near perpetual state of failure, until you can finally say „yes I’m good at drawing”(and you’ll quit before that probably). The former would be for example: „I want to get better at drawing every day by practicing 1 hour every day” (this is HOW you want to achieve). Or practice anatomy 20 mins a day, then 20 minutes of gesture drawing, then 20 minutes of drawing an unfortunate khajiit. Or whatever timeframe suits you. Notice that in this case every day when you successfully draw for 1 hour is a victory. Big difference. Don’t forget to pat yourself on the shoulder every time you succeed.
Oh, and this might sound obvious, but you can only learn to draw if you don’t hate drawing. If a certain excercise or drawing becomes a huge chore for you, stop doing that. Maybe try it again later, but know when to say no.
Also some say that being part of a friendly community can be quite encouraging in pursuing a hobby. The boruu is a great place in this regard, for the most part. So as for this advice, you’re already on track.
DOOMGUY11: They are just lines my teacher says.
And he is right, you just got to do it and practice. And I may not be the one to give tips but by practice I got better in a month keep drawing!
Toryu-Mau: @Zargothrax: "It doesn’t matter how much KNOWLEDGE you have on bodybuilding, you’ll need to do curls to grow your biceps yourself." - Zargothrax - 2018 -
... Totally quotable, M8~ >):^D
I agree with all the pointers ya lined out, as I've encountered those very same realizations up to date, and I feel the tip to make "Imperative Goals" is the most important one. Gotta get that dopamine rush to keep the pen hand dancing, eh?
>):^]
AMKitsune: Might as well throw my opinions into the ring as well.
There are a number of different ways to learn, some working better for some people than for others.
Personally, I advise drawing what you want, when you want to. Improvement comes with practice and practice comes naturally when you enjoy it.
Also, don't be afraid to use references. To begin with, you'll probably have difficulty getting proportions right which can be quite a barrier to things looking right. As humans, we're very tuned into what looks normal proportion wise, which is why when a character is drawn with slightly disproportionate legs or a smaller than usual head, we instinctively pick up on these things as being somehow wrong.
Secondly, sketch out the poses and positions of your scene and characters as roughly and as many times as you need to before you're happy enough to flesh it out with additional details. Your whole image is based on this this crucial step, so if you go ahead and start adding details, colour and whatnot before you're completely happy with the base structure, you're going to be stuck with an image that's only as good as your original posing and proportions. Spending the additional time tweaking and refining your sketches can raise your picture up from being a 'good' picture to a 'better' picture. Have you noticed how many 'quick sketches' by experienced artists can seem so much better than fully coloured and shaded works by less experienced ones? That's usually because of the better posing and proportions that come with all that additional practice.
Thirdly, when using references to help you with posing and proportions, don't just copy what you see into your own work, but pay attention to what looks good and try to get an idea for 'why' it looks good. The more you do this, the more these 'unspoken rules' will become second nature to you and you'll find yourself needing to use references to get good results less and less. I'll give you an example, if you google image search "human face drawing", you'll find loads of really well done drawings of faces. The reason these all tend to look so fantastic is because their artists generally have a fantastic understanding of human facial structure and proportions. If you imagine one of these images, but shift the eyes apart a bit and lower the mouth a touch, it wouldn't look nearly as good. I'm not saying that you need to be able to draw anything like these other artists for your work to look good, but as you practice and endeavour to improve your work, this is the sort of thing that you'll naturally improve at over time. You might not actively notice yourself getting better as the process may be slow, but if you periodically look at your older work and compare it to your most recent stuff, you'll be able to see how far you've come. If you analyse your work even more, you'll be able to tell what you're not so good at and where you could use additional practice. As any artist will tell you, there's no short-cut for this. It's just a matter of keep going and pushing yourself to make something better than you did before. Having fun while doing it just makes the whole process all the easier .
Finally, be prepared to create a new account at some point, because the name "AwefulAspiringArtist" isn't going to very suitable as you get better and better .
I hope that was of some help to you, and best of luck with your artwork.
YeOldeCuckolde: The best advice I could give you, looking back on my own learning journey - be skeptical of everyones advice. Find your own pace and methodology for creating, study theory and some practical tutorials, but don't strive to copy from them. Art is like math, but with anime kitties instead of numbers - you have to be mindful of what you're doing and how you're doing it. If you're just starting out, don't reach for the stars just yet - get the feeling of a pencil in your hand before you go full bananas with drawing anatomical grids for your academic pose warm-ups.
Generally what I'm trying to say is "study but don't forget to have fun", but I got carried away and now my comment probably seems more cryptic than it should've been, oof
Toryu-Mau: @DOOMGUY11: ... Keep a close eye on this one M8, having an artist on a similar skill level for mutual exchange of feedbacks on progress is a great way to motivate learning new techniques. >):^]
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I began doing pixel art three or four years back, and went to higher-resolution art a few days ago. These days I draw every day for a few hours upon waking up, and it's usually Katia because she's fun to draw. As for improvement, it's hard to pick out a specific point, but the thing I'm seeing most looking back is cleaner linework ever since I started listening to Bob Ross in the background. Your mileage may vary on that one though.
As a sidenote: Hating one's own art is just a part of being an artist. Don't let that get you down, because your art looks pretty good already imo
- Reply
- Reply
To get good at drawing, you'll need 2 things: Technique & practice.
To get practice you just must keep drawing. Everyday, just keep practicing.
Technique is something you learn. It doesn't matter your style, or what you want to do, the fundamentals of art are the same (volumes, shapes, perspective...) Learning this stuff (via youtube tutorials/art career/any other kind of artistic learning) is key.
Once you know or at least start understanding the fundamentals, your practice will get more and more effective over time. And, even when you make bad art, you'll know WHY is it bad and what to do to fix it in the future.
TL;DR: Learn the basics, use them to get better. Then repeat ad infinitum.
PS: Good luck and sorry for my bad english.
- Reply
Well, I’d rather not tell when I first started drawing as it would be pretty depressing. What matters is mileage, not how much time passes during that.
While I don’t really consider myself an „artist”, or „good”, I think I can still answer when I started noticing improvements.
When I started out, I thought about drawing as just lines next to each other. Drawing lines at the correct angles, differences and curves. Breaking this mindset and thinking about drawing as projecting a 3D body onto a canvas brought significant improvements (without this, drawings are kinda flat on the plane of the paper). What I mean is this: You have an idea in your head, though you can’t imageine all of it in your head, as bodies are complex (for now, I take it you want to make good figure drawings). So it is important to draw actionlines and boundingboxes, to indicate for us the pose, and what space the figure will occupy in 3D space. The point of the guidelines and such is to connect the imagined model in your head with the projection on the paper. If the connection breaks, you’ll notice that you just don’t know where certain lines should go in order to make the bodyparts have the desired orientation in 3D space. This also means that you should be familiar with 3D space. There is a free course here [url] http://drawabox.com/[/url], you don’t even need to make an account or anything, it’s just there. A few things about it: It’s long, and not very exciting, but clear, and your goals will be nonambiguous.
An another revelation was settling the „what came first, the chicken or the egg?” question, where the chicken is the pose, and the egg is the anatomy. One way of drawing is if you start building up the body from one point, say the head. The proportions and the anatomy will most likely be correct, but in the end you may notice, that this is not the pose you wanted (99.9% of the cases, the pose will be much stiffer than you imagined)! The other way is to start drawing an overly simplified body first, that has the correct pose. The problem here is that without points of reference, such as where certain muscle groups connect, where certain joints are, it is difficult to guess how long the limbs, or the torso should be, where the legs supposed to start, etc. Nonetheless, the second approach is the correct one. Realizing and using this improved my drawings significantly. By the way, the gesture of the figure makes much more of an impact on how „good” the drawing is percieved than nailing the muscle groups and every single bump on the body. How to practice this? Do so-called „gesture drawings”. Google it, watch youtube tutorials about it, others have explained it much better than I could. To be fair you still need some anatomy knowledge to make good gesture drawings, such as how the legs and the arms connect to the body exactly, but not too much.
The third thing I can think of is this: Drawing can be learned, but not tought. It doesn’t matter how much KNOWLEDGE you have on bodybuilding, you’ll need to do curls to grow your biceps yourself. KNOWING what to practice is important, because you can improve much quicker by doing meaningful excercises rather than screwing around aimlessly, but these excercises only help if you do them. This is the part I really struggle with, and I’m aware, that fixing this „part” would improve my skills tremendously. So I can’t give you any advice on this topic because I’m also bad at this (Even as of now, I’m typing this wall of text instead of practicing). Instead, I’ll give you someone else’s advice, maybe it’ll help you:
Make imperative goals. Or how do I say this. Goals that describe the HOW more than the WHAT. The latter would be for example „I want to be good at drawing” (this is WHAT you want to achieve). Every time you look at your drawings, your assessment on the matter would probably be „not yet”. Which is near perpetual state of failure, until you can finally say „yes I’m good at drawing”(and you’ll quit before that probably). The former would be for example: „I want to get better at drawing every day by practicing 1 hour every day” (this is HOW you want to achieve). Or practice anatomy 20 mins a day, then 20 minutes of gesture drawing, then 20 minutes of drawing an unfortunate khajiit. Or whatever timeframe suits you. Notice that in this case every day when you successfully draw for 1 hour is a victory. Big difference. Don’t forget to pat yourself on the shoulder every time you succeed.
Oh, and this might sound obvious, but you can only learn to draw if you don’t hate drawing. If a certain excercise or drawing becomes a huge chore for you, stop doing that. Maybe try it again later, but know when to say no.
Also some say that being part of a friendly community can be quite encouraging in pursuing a hobby. The boruu is a great place in this regard, for the most part. So as for this advice, you’re already on track.
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And he is right, you just got to do it and practice. And I may not be the one to give tips but by practice I got better in a month keep drawing!
- Reply
... Totally quotable, M8~ >):^D
I agree with all the pointers ya lined out, as I've encountered those very same realizations up to date, and I feel the tip to make "Imperative Goals" is the most important one. Gotta get that dopamine rush to keep the pen hand dancing, eh?
>):^]
- Reply
- Reply
There are a number of different ways to learn, some working better for some people than for others.
Personally, I advise drawing what you want, when you want to. Improvement comes with practice and practice comes naturally when you enjoy it.
Also, don't be afraid to use references. To begin with, you'll probably have difficulty getting proportions right which can be quite a barrier to things looking right. As humans, we're very tuned into what looks normal proportion wise, which is why when a character is drawn with slightly disproportionate legs or a smaller than usual head, we instinctively pick up on these things as being somehow wrong.
Secondly, sketch out the poses and positions of your scene and characters as roughly and as many times as you need to before you're happy enough to flesh it out with additional details. Your whole image is based on this this crucial step, so if you go ahead and start adding details, colour and whatnot before you're completely happy with the base structure, you're going to be stuck with an image that's only as good as your original posing and proportions. Spending the additional time tweaking and refining your sketches can raise your picture up from being a 'good' picture to a 'better' picture. Have you noticed how many 'quick sketches' by experienced artists can seem so much better than fully coloured and shaded works by less experienced ones? That's usually because of the better posing and proportions that come with all that additional practice.
Thirdly, when using references to help you with posing and proportions, don't just copy what you see into your own work, but pay attention to what looks good and try to get an idea for 'why' it looks good. The more you do this, the more these 'unspoken rules' will become second nature to you and you'll find yourself needing to use references to get good results less and less. I'll give you an example, if you google image search "human face drawing", you'll find loads of really well done drawings of faces. The reason these all tend to look so fantastic is because their artists generally have a fantastic understanding of human facial structure and proportions. If you imagine one of these images, but shift the eyes apart a bit and lower the mouth a touch, it wouldn't look nearly as good. I'm not saying that you need to be able to draw anything like these other artists for your work to look good, but as you practice and endeavour to improve your work, this is the sort of thing that you'll naturally improve at over time. You might not actively notice yourself getting better as the process may be slow, but if you periodically look at your older work and compare it to your most recent stuff, you'll be able to see how far you've come. If you analyse your work even more, you'll be able to tell what you're not so good at and where you could use additional practice. As any artist will tell you, there's no short-cut for this. It's just a matter of keep going and pushing yourself to make something better than you did before. Having fun while doing it just makes the whole process all the easier
Finally, be prepared to create a new account at some point, because the name "AwefulAspiringArtist" isn't going to very suitable as you get better and better
I hope that was of some help to you, and best of luck with your artwork.
Generally what I'm trying to say is "study but don't forget to have fun", but I got carried away and now my comment probably seems more cryptic than it should've been, oof
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