I've seen your art and animations for a while and I think it's great and wonderful work, what advice can you give to someone who is starting out in the art world?
Thanks friend! This is honestly such a broad question, I don't know if I can give you a useful boilerplate answer. But I can sure try.
Here's my best shot: "Art is a marathon, not a sprint." is a mantra I come back to over and over again. Understand and accept and try to get excited even, over the fact that the journey is long, and there's so much to learn, and you do it by placing one foot in front of the other, one step at a time.
Don't skip out on fundamentals, but don't become a slave to academia either. If drawing cubes gets boring, switch it up and draw your favorite anime characters making out with each other. Art is supposed to be fun, life enriching, soul nourishing even! And you gotta hold on to that or you risk burning out.
Study and practice, and remember that you should be studying things in order to apply them immediately. The enormous, glaring flaw in my approach starting out was my obsession with covering all of my bases before I even started trying to draw or animate anything, like I was gonna be able to keep all of these secret, hyper specific, super power art skills in my back pocket to whip out whenever I needed them. But learning everything at once with no direct application means no retention. I can't tell you how many boot camp sessions I put myself through, trying to learn every muscle and tendon in the human hand, only to find that none of it really stuck long term because I wasn't putting my money where my mouth was and actually practicing all that theory.
This approach effectively sets you free. You can draw anything, make anything! When you struggle, or need to use tutorials and references, those are your windows to learn, and apply what you learn directly and immediately. And that’s how you grow!
There are so many resources available online to follow and learn from, so get ready to experiment and try everything, and do so with the knowledge that there is no one size fits all approach to art. Take what you can/want to take from the people who inspire you, but unless you're deliberately challenging yourself, do listen to your gut and work in ways that feel natural to your artistic skill and thought process. Your brain is your brain! Stay flexible and plastic as you learn, keep the advice that works for you, write it down for future reference, and when you try something that doesn't really work for you, see if you can nail down why. Write that down too! Course correction is a normal part of the process.
And save all of your old drawings! Future you will be so proud of how far you've come a couple years down the line.
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