artists' cafe

this is a safe place! Here, I will talk about my art journey and discuss on how to improve your artstyle. Feel free to ask an discuss on anything, I will try to reply you as best as I can!

[maicrocozm]

trying to do weekly planner doodles! 🌸

[eyeheartsheep]

Alright guys, hot take for every artist on here:

NEVER draw anything from memory. Never, ever. “But the greats didn’t have to use references!” Bullshit. Do you know how hogwild they would have gone to have access to a box that just had pictures of anything they could ever want to draw? Da Vinci had to pioneer entire sciences SPECIFICALLY so he could have references that literally weren’t documented before. He must be turning in his grave to know that there are UNIVERSITY STUDENTS that stubbornly refuse to look up the anatomy of a hand when he had to dissect dead people and shit.

[decaffeinatedartisthug]

this is so true! people often mistake stealing art to having a reference! we cannot draw anyithing from memory, we have to have an inspiration!!

[decaffeinatedartisthug]

be kind

hi guys! the other day I happend to stumble on a page on Instagram where a poor artist was being harrassed because she wasn’t a professional. also, people was saying she stole an artwork maenwhile it was just a redraw (and she gave credits, too!). 

I just wanted to remind everyone that you have to be careful of what you say on socials, because people can be very discuraged by it! always be kind, even when you are giving advices. Also, as I was seeing here on Tumblr, please DO NOT a) give hate on the characterization of an OC or c) be negative on somebody’s style. Everyone can do what they want with their OCs! Also, if they do mistake try to help them, but remember that we are all learning! an advice is good, a threat is bullying! If you don’t like it, scroll away. we don’t need your toxicity in the art community anyways. also, do not act superior, even if you have more experience than the other artist!

The best thing to do, is beaing suppertive of the other artist, and help eachother as good as you can do!!❤❤

[vickisigh]

froppy!

my print shop 💗

[emortal-l-deactivated20250308]

"Hi, please stop scrolling if you are tired of Africa being ignored"

https://linktr.ee/Allqueer

If you ever considered yourself an ally to POC and specifically movements like Black Lives Matter, share this information with your followers.

"Global struggles are everyone's struggles." - no matter the cause, no matter the country.

@Allqueer

Linktree. Make your link do more.

Addition:

[decaffeinatedartisthug]

How to train your hand

Sooo... I’m not dead, yay!!(●'◡'●)

I’m sorry for not being “present” these weeks but school sucks and I had tons of assignments to do... 

Anyways! What I noticed as soon as I rose from the dead, was a reblog of one of my previous posts of someone saying how difficult and overwhelming it is to draw digitally when you are so accostumed to drawing in traditional. This got me thinking that a lot of baby artists tend to have the same problems, even when they start to draw normally. So, I wanted to give some tips on how to train your hand to draw in different situations and materials! 

1. Sketchbooks (ONLY OF TRADITIONAL ARTISTS): okay, let me get this straight: your sketchbook is your training ground. This means, it has to be comfortable to draw into, but it must also be suitable for your artistic enhancement! So, choose a sketchbook that has papers made with materials that you are comfortable drawing on. It can be in spiral-form or bound (like, book-form), it doesn’t matter, it has to be comfortable for you. Here’s a tip: do not draw on ruled paper when you are starting to draw! Lined paper does not help your spatial reference or your anatomic study. Instead, you can use blank (even the printer ones!), dotted or squared (even if I don’t really like them either, because they make your drawing process a LOT more difficult) papers.

2. Ballpoint pen or pencil? (ONLY FOR TRADIOTIONAL ARTISTS) so, the eternal dilemma: is it better to use ballpoint pen or the normal pencil? for me, both are really good drawing materials. From my point of view, the ballpoint pen allows you to train your hand AND your brain without even realizing. In fact the ballpoint pen doesn’t allow you to erase, so you train yourself to fix errors without erasing and be more precise when you are drawing. On the other hand, the pencil enables you to work on your skills without the fear of making mistakes. So, what I suggest, is an healthy use of both so that you can use pencils to make precise works and ballpoint pens to doodle on your sketchbook.

3. Be constant (DIGITAL/TRADITIONAL ARTISTS): repeat after me: training is gaining! This means that through constant exercising you will be able to impove in your art very fast! Think of your artistic skills as if they were a muscle such as the ones you use to bike. If you learn how to bike but don’t exercise yourself for a long period of time, you will always know the theory and the base concepts, but your muscles won’t support the activity as long as they would if you did it every day! The same concept can be seen in the artistic world, but in this case the muscle is your brain! If you train your bain to do some gesture or draw in some specific way every day at leat for 10 or 15 minutes, you will be able to improve in your art in a very short period of time!

4. This also means: Do not rush! (DIGITAL/TRADITIONAL ARTISTS): Improvement will be seen, but you have to be patient and give you and your hand some time. Great artists are not the ones that improve faster, but the ones that have strong bases. There is no simple way, no tutorial that will help you become Leonardo Da Vinci in two days. My art journey is still on process, as the one of everybody, and to arrive to the point I am here now, I had to train myself for eight years.😊💕

[cornflakesdoesart]

all the cozy commissions from 2020

Kofi/ Printshop / Instagram / Twitter URLs in my blog description!

[clyde-anti]

skin color ref because some of yall non-black poc and whites keep fucking up as if yall don’t know there’s other shades of brown when u racebend for woke points or something 

(non-black artists please reblog)

[nebbie91]

Please reblog regardless of your race/ethnicity.

[inkandego]

heres a chart I made for myself showing diffrent undertones and how that affects the skin if anyone’s intrested

[vigaishere]

Use this to make a skin palette in your art program!

[queenofthefaces]

Also! This photography project by Angélica Dass has thousands of photos of people, with a Pantone color assigned to each! It’s very helpful as a resource !!

Humanae — Angélica Dass

Humanae — Angélica Dass

And some examples of the project!

[decaffeinatedartisthug]

How to appreciate your sketchbook

Don’t we all have a hate-love relationship with our sketchbook? For me, it was always the "aesthetic” part thet bugged me: I wanted to have a certain style (AKA the Anime one when I started drawing) but my artistic skills were not matching with my expectations, so when I wanted to draw, everything about my art ruined the aesthetic I wanted so badly. Therefore, I hated my sketchbook, but through time I learned how to appreciate it, even though I still have some grundges against my own art!

1. Sketchbook is not a synonym of perfection: you surely heard this one before, but let me remind you: mistakes lead the path, perfection is the hallucination at the end! No-one’s art is perfect, because it’s just how humans are: imperfect! Don’t buy another sketchbook only because the first one has an ugly “first page”, but try to make the second one better. 

2. Covers are fun: you can’t possibly change my mind on this matter. Sketchbook covers are the best! Some people hate them because you generally have a lot of planning to do before making the actual cover, butn for me, it’s such a fun process! You have to plan, yes, but you can experiment, present your OCs so that everyone notices them, draw strange poses... Also, the actual planning helps you to organize your ideas! Your cover can also be very simple or not thought through: let yourself be free to be extravangant! Here are some ideas you might like! And here are some video of DrawingWiffWaffles meanwhile she is doing her sketchbooks covers! She makes it seem so fun!

(NOT MY ART)

3. Fanarts: even though I always say to not to concentrate on fanarts, I didn’t say that fanarts are bad for your art  or your sketchbook, for that matter. In fact, drawing fanarts makes you relize your real art potential and enjoy what you are drawing. This leads you to appreciate your art more, and therefore your sketchbook. Here are some examples of what I mean! 

(NOT MY ART)

[decaffeinatedartisthug]

How to study references

In one of my previous posts I talked about how to choose references, but I never explained what to do when you find the perfect reference. “Obviously draw it!” Well, yes but no! ( •̀ ω •́ )✧ When you first approach a reference, you obviously want to draw it, but previously it’s very important that you study your photo. And I don’t mean watching it in detail, but break it into minor concepts. Studying is very important when you first start to draw, also because it helps you to memorize the concepts that make the reference, so that in the future you might not need one!

1. Photo Reference: to be as clear as possible, I decided to do this process myself. 

this is the reference that I chose, particulary beacuse of the lights and the lack of background :) What I did after choosing the ref, is breaking it into geometric shapes an straight lines.

This process doesn’t have to be detailed, it’s just a way of looking how the shapes can form a figure. The trick is to look at the lines as they are: lines. Don’t think about the whole picture, concentrate on the single line.

(please excuse the poor quality of the image, but my computer is terrible!) what I did, is taking the single structures and lines one by one and remodulate them so that I could make a (basic!) sketch of the whole thing. I did not trace, as I don’t really like to do it, but ONLY FOR STUDY PORPUSES, you can do that too.

2. Art Reference: so, this is the hard part. Or rather, the part that seems the hardest. The whole thing is: you have to study the techniques, but leave alone the initial composition, so how to do it? It’s really simple! Let me explain:

let’s say you really like this artwork, and you want to try to imitate the artist. What you want to do, is doing the exact same thing we did with the photo: break it into pieces and remodulate the whole thing. 

see how i “absorbed” the artist’s style in a new way? obviously, this is only one of the ways of studying an artwork! you can study artworks on numerous levels: lights, anatomy, brushes used ecc...

[behindheremeraldeyes]

I am officially trying to learn a bit of drawing! My objective is to be able to make some nice SasuSaku art and It’s so hard! I just can’t seem to put everything together and make it look nice!

Any tips? Please?

[decaffeinatedartisthug]

hi, happy to help! First off, let me remind you that if you want to start to draw to become an artist, the first thing you should do, is studying anatomy and the first bases to face structure. You can start doing this using references (check out my other post where I talk about them) and art tutorials. Then, when your hand is trained, you can start doing fanarts to embrace your learning! At this point, try to stay organised: try to not put too much elements together and try to use what you studied. But let me remind you: try to not always do fanarts! Hope this helped :)

[k-eke]

Eat your veggies or else ….

[decaffeinatedartisthug]

What is my artstyle?

“How can I reach my own artstyle?“ is one of the most frequently asked questions in the artistic world, mainly by beginner artists. It’s a legitimate question, as when you go through an artistic journey, you expect to elaborate a style that defines you in particular. I, myself, wanted my own particular style, even though, as I said in my previous posts []~(￣▽￣)~*, I usually copied othoer’s art, and, therefore, their style. Fortunately, with my artistic journey I was finally able to form my own style without copying others, but I had to wait too much time, so I want to shere with you some tips on the matter!

1. Learning > Styling: I know this might seem very boring, but it’s a very important point: before developing your own style, you need to improve your artistic skills. You’ll find out, eventually, that through your learning, your style will come out on its own. I know it seems like an excuse, but trust me: through references and improvment, your own hand will do the work for you! So, do not try to speed the whole “learning experience” and trust the steady process.

2. Redrawings: When my skills stareted to improve, I found out thet redrawing it’s actually a very fun process that helps you very much. Now, let me clarify something: doing only fanarts or “redraw of an old artwork”s it’s not always beneficial, but doing from time to time stimulates your commitment on your art and makes you realise not only you are developing an artyle, but that you are improving too! But let me remind you: don’t copy every single detail of the drawing, but try to change it as much as possible (try new eye shapes, new color palettes, new poses)! 

3.  Try different mediums: sperimentation with different mediums is important. Not only this helps you to understand what mediums you like best, but you’ll notice that with different techniques and tools your art will change a whole bunch! Take as an example the POSCA pens: personally, I like to use them to doodle, as they have really chubby tips. My doodle style is awsome, I really love it because it gives me the possibility to study anatomy in a fun and really simple way! I don’t particulary like oil pastels, but with them I tend to work on my backgrounds and draw human figures without a particular lineart. So: EXPERIMENT, EXPERIMENT, EXPERIMENT.

4.  The art of changing:  If you find an artstyle that suits you but you feel it has become “stale”, don’t ever be afraid to pass on a new one. All artists have a “metamorphosis”, it’s a sign you are progressing in your artistic journey! So, along with the mediums, experiment through various styles aswell. As I said before, “stealing” techniques from other artists it’s a very important way to improve, but this also helps you with your artstyle, as you steadly incorporate in your art pieces of other’s artstyles, even if you don’t mean to.  Also, it’s perfectly normal, as I said in the previous point, to have more than one style depending on emotions, situations or artworks. 

[batsyarts]

“tell me the story about how the sun loved the moon so much he died every night to let her breathe”

[decaffeinatedartisthug]

Steal like an artist

One of the things that I found particulary difficult when I started my art journey, is the so-called “refernce study”. At first, for example, I tended, as I said in one of my previous posts, to copy every exact detail of my art references. Also, I liked to use artwork as my only source of inspiration, and not real life references. This one in particular, is the worst mistake you can do when you are learning, as real-life references force you to study how real bodies work. Also, they push your brain to memorize instinctively the real anatomy, and it gives you the possibility, in the future, to not use references at all!

Artworks are good references too, but only when you use them to study how the artist works and extrapolate some techniques.

So steal, but only like an artist! 

1. How to choose real references: this particular point is very important. How do we choose references? It seems like an easy job, but it really isn’t, as most references aren’t very good for your art. For example, let’s see this picture: 

this is a very good reference, as it proposes a very particular pose and natural lights (two things that beginner artists hate but have to learn). Meanwhile, this: 

can you see the unnatural lights and the very simple pose?

These are some pinterests boards and youtube videos you can use to see some more references: Drawing wiff waffles, Angel Ganev, Ergojosh, Paintable

2. How to learn from other’s art: as I said, artworks are an infallible source of ideas and tips. Do not listen to people that say the contrary: artworks are an incredebly important source of improvment if used correctly. How do we, however, learn from them? 

this is an artwork from loisvb, one of my favourite artists of all time. What I like about her style, is the shading and colors. Her palette is so varied, but never ill-fitting. Also, look at the shadows, how she uses them to make her art 3D! Through her I learned how shadows work in different poses and how to make your artworks more interesting.

3. YouTube: One of the many positive sides of Youtube, which is a huge platform costantly filled, is the unlimited number of art channels. Art channels are really helpful, and they are filled not only with tutorials, but also a lot of “sketchbook tours” and “let’s draw together”s. This last one in particular, is a type of video that i’m absolutely in LOVE with, basically because the artist talks about something regarding their art journey meanwhile drawing. They give helpful tips and make you want to draw with them. Another thing that I love, are Livestreams, basically because is the same thing as a “let’s draw together”, but it’s in real time, and you have the possibility to ask questions during the real composition!

Here are some videos you might like!

[raidesart]

💛 Let me know how you like this new portrait! :)

[warandpeas]

Eternal Dilemma

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