hii I absolutely love ur art so much it inspired me to learn how to draw🥹 do you have any drawing tips that could be useful for beginners? or anything useful that helped you develop your current artstyle?
Ahh that makes me so happy to hear!!! 🫶🫶 I fear my advice is kinda generic but it’s something I think is important: don’t worry about how your final product holds up to experienced artists, instead, enjoy the speed in which you’ll improve because genuinely that’s something I miss.
The same way you need to find a method of study/practice that worked for you in school/sports, you have to experiment on methods of studying for art too. Like there’s a lot of advice telling beginner artists to just “study fundamentals” but HOW you study them is an entirely different beast and is different for everyone.
My two favorite methods of learning/improving depend on if I’m in a creative mood or not:
Creative mood: pick an art fundamental, try to spot it in my favorite artists, try to understand how and why they use it, understand what I like about their technique and why (this step is very very useful to having fun and expressing yourself in the future), and finally: try my best to make my own piece using what I’ve learned and referencing multiple pieces by the artists I’m studying. (I think this method is technically considered a master study but I think focusing on an art fundamental while doing this will make it less overwhelming)
Uncreative mood: pick a fundamental, fine reference images, narrow down subject matter, just draw what I’m looking at. Game-ify it: draw 100 of something before you can move on. Try fun pens. Draw the same thing multiple times to see if you can make it look better each time.
Also I will say: I paint semi realistic now, I technically started semi realism pretty young, around 11 or 12, but I HATED the finished product every time. It’s been a while since I was a beginner but I think jumping directly into semi-realism is a steep and overwhelming learning curve for art when you’re brand new and it’s easy to be discouraged by the results. What I did was develope a cartoony anime style alongside my semi-realism. The cartoony art was easier to see improvement in when I was young and kept me feeling motivated. Also both styles will feed into the improvement of the other, art fundamentals are fundamentals!
Also finding your art “embarrassingly ugly” is a good thing. It means your brain and eyes are very sharp in terms of analyzing art, you just gotta get your hand caught up. It’s unfortunately something that doesn’t go away, I still have it when my progress stagnates for a while, you just gotta learn that discomfort in your art = surefire improvement if you diagnosis what’s causing the discomfort.
Do NOT throw away your older art when you improve btw. I know looking back at older art once you improve and can now clearly see all the flaws will make you twitch but it’s genuinely one of my biggest regrets. After enough time passes, your old art won’t look bad anymore, you’ll just feel pride at your improvement and all the flaws will just kinda look cute.
Anyway sorry that was a lot of yap. It’s been a while since I’ve been a beginner but I definitely don’t think age and art progress is related cause even though I’ve been drawing for as long as I remember, I was doing some straight bullshit up until my brain was old enough to form a thought of “wait locking in and being intentional is an option??”.