How did you get good at art? I'm awful at it and I'm always so sad seeing people who are good at it because I know I'll never be as good, do you have any tips? Or is it genuinely as impossible as it feels?
it's not as impossible as it feels, i have definitely had that particular insecurity surrounding art before as well. i never really touched drawing at all as a kid because i was dyspraxic and it frustrated me to try to use my hands for stuff, and then going into adulthood i generally had the assumption that it was, if not something 'intrinsic', was the very least a skill you had to learn early on or not at all. that is, of course, nonsensical. Visual art is not anything special, it is a hobby and craft like any other, and a skill that can be learned. the main reason it is difficult to pick up as an adult is not because of anything unique to it so much as the fact that it is something with a high societal standard such that the early learning process is difficult to afford yourself grace about- people know what technically 'good' art is 'supposed' to look like and then compare themselves to that harshly. In my case picking up drawing in my mid 20s was kind of just an exercise in choosing a skill that i thought would be particularly challenging for myself, whatever i was least suited to in order to try and push myself and a lot of how i treat studying it is in a kind of detached and clinical matter. i think that is a good lens to go about practising- making more personal or creatively involved pieces is difficult if you are frustrated with your technical skills, and improving technical skills is difficult to do if you are running up against grander visions you wish to communicate. The first thing you're going to want to do is make a list of goals that are narrower than just learning how to draw. Do you want to be able to draw people and characters, if so, what kind? human, robot, furry, doll etc? let's say, for hypothetical purposes, you (character i'm inventing) want to draw doll girls. from there you can better prioritize what kind of things you want to work on that would be relevant. so what's relevant to dolls? well, youre going to have to learn how to draw people, but you're also going to have to learn to draw doll joints, which is going to benefit from studying perspective and drawing 3d shapes, and you're going to need to learn how to draw pretty dresses for your doll girls, so you're going to want to figure out how to draw fabrics and ruffles and stuff. if something you're studying becomes overwhelming just keep breaking it down into smaller parts until the bit is small enough you can chew it. with that said, broad advice will only get you so far, and i think one of the hardest things i had with the early phases of learning how to draw is that visual artists, by in large, have really poor communication skills when it comes to what they do and how they practice, which makes it very hard to figure out what you should be specifically doing concretely, so i'm going to try to organize my thoughts here and maybee add a couple of recommendations for material i work from. Also, I have to break this post into several reblogs, because when i tried to post the whole thing as one chunk it didn't work so. give it a sec there are going to be some reblogs sorry about that. twitter style (1/5)
(2/5) warmups So now you, [OC im inventing that likes dolls] have your goals, what do you actually study? what does your routine look like? well first you want to start with warmups- really simple things, do not worry about this part too much, if you have to overthink it it is not a warmup. things i usually do for warmups involve just like. drawing two points and then connecting a line between them, drawing a bunch of lines in a row as straight as possible (which is not that straight don't get too hung up on that it will get straighter) of varying thicknesses, try to draw some circles and then get frustrated that drawing circles never gets easy. hop on spinning cube.com and draw some cubes, and then try drawing some other simple shapes too. What warmups look like will vary from person to person and it's something that will kind of change and evolve but the most important part isn't what you're doing specifically so much as developing a routine with something that you can put as little thought into as possible. for a while part of my warmups was to draw a little reimu doodle every day too, but as my standards for myself got higher my ability to not get frustrated by drawing a reimu really quickly meant i stopped doing that and just focused more on doing 3d shapes, for example. it needs to shift with your needs. Also, I generally hate hate hate the advice "do it bad" because it's usually condescending and discouraging, but this is one specific area where i think it is useful to internalize- you are not trying to draw anything well, you are doing motions, you can worry about getting detail right or wrong in the actual practice.
3/5 studies
Now that we're warmed up we can start chipping away at some actual learning material. so, [hypothetical you wants to draw dolls] that means you are going to need to study anatomy. I have personally found that the morpho: anatomy for artists series of books is one of the most convenient sources for this- the actual anatomy itself is somewhat simplified, and if you really want to focus on having really detailed anatomy in terms of like. you want to draw bones and muscles and stuff as accurately as possible, you are probably going to want to look at some medical textbooks and stuff too, but i wouldn't advise starting there unless you are someone that already has an interest in medical stuff. if you do use morpho, i specifically recommend starting with the simplified forms book, and not the more general one, the general one is actually really challenging, and simplified forms will give you something to chew on that is less overwhelming. also, typically morpho books are divided into four segments- head, torso, upper body, lower body- so don't just go through it front to back, go through each section, doing bits and pieces at a time. just do your best to read the little tips it gives you, and copy the images until you think you are getting a better understanding of it. Some people will say that the way you should go through it is to just draw one of the figures over and over until you get it perfect and then move on- do not do this. it is better if you go back to something but get a better variety. you will only frustrate yourself if you try to get it perfect. i have gone through many of the morpho anatomy guides several times over about two years and i still go back to them, and if i had been too focused on getting my studies perfect i just would not have gotten as much studying done. now with that said, other books i like in the morpho series are the hands and feet one, the fat and skin folds one, and the joint forms and muscular function one, but really it's just down to what you think you are struggling with and want to improve and moving from there. now, other things i like to do with these books include what i call a kind of. 'visualization' study? i find something i struggle with is drawing anatomy without a reference available (normal) so i like to also take various forms from this and do something where i will first copy it, then hide the image and try to draw it again as best as i can remember it. doing this is a bit frustrating and i wouldn't recommend putting that into your routine right away, but it's an exercise to keep in mind for later.
now with that said, anatomy books will only tell you so much, and will only give you so much to work with, so i think in addition to these kinds of studies something you are going to want to get into the habit of is picking out the specific things you think you understand the least and then looking up guides manually. fair warning, art youtubers are your enemy. they can give you good tutorials and stuff, but take everything they say with a grain of salt. you will be using youtube art guides, it is kind of an inevitability, and it will help you in some ways, but make sure not to respect them as people, they are dislodged from reality and say shit like "yeah, do it like this and you'll have that all figured out in a week or maybe even a day". The disembodied voice of an art tutorial youtuber mainly just exists to invent new things for you to be self conscious about. ahem. with that said, just looking up, say, hair drawing tutorial on google can help, i also at some point made a pinterest account, which is a website i cannot parse for the most part but it is kind of an invaluable resource for art guides that got screenshotted and reposted there with the added benefit of no one is talking at you. So if, for example, you want to figure out how to draw gothloli dresses to put your dolls in, [oc that i invented that likes dolls], i would just use my website of choice (in this case pinterest), look up 'gothloli dresses', gather some i like, then look up 'dress drawing tutorials', take any breakdowns i think are interesting, maybe 'fabric drawing tutorials', whatever you might need, and put then you can use those as studies.
also, i know the morpho series is the only one im recommending here for a beginner starting out, but don't be afraid to peruse for other art and anatomy guides on like, libgen and stuff. you can spread your wings and just try and repeat to see what you like. that's just what i like to use.
(4/5) ummm i don't know what to call this next section i come from a music background so when i scheduled this early on i used to call the 'studies' section 'etudes' and this section 'repertoire'. this is basically just where i talk about the more involved study stuff.
So, with that all out of the way, there are two things i'm going to recommend integrating into your practice schedule here. the first one i'll quickly mention going over is figure and gesture drawing. this part is really intimidating because it is something you are going to want to time, and whatever times are recommended for a specific interval of figure drawing, early on you are going to be taking way longer than that. im getting ahead of myself, this and this are a couple of sites i use for this, what it basically amounts to is they will have databases of models in various poses, and a timer going that switches it. i generally like to set it to the 30 minute class mode, which will give about 10 poses with a 30 second timer, 5 with a 1 minute timer, 2 with a five minute timer and 1 with a ten minute timer. you will notice that 30 seconds is a really really short timer. that is because this exercise isn't to teach you how to draw people well (that's what anatomy is for). it is mainly an exercise to get you thinking about Where a body is when it is bent or moving in certain ways, and to force you to break the body down into manageable shapes. for the ones with a longer timer, it lets you build more on those basic shapes, and it helps you distinguish the order of the basic building blocks. your 30 second drawings are not really going to look like a person, and you often won't even the get basic shapes down at first, and that's okay. if you are struggling, just try doubling the time at first, but don't start too long- it has to feel a bit rushed, and it has to be faster than anything you can get looking detailed. what i like about this exercise also is it gives you a really strict block of time you have to work with. i don't know, i wouldn't necessarily start with this one right away? it really really frustrated me at first. but i want to have it out there as an option for you.
Now i'm kind of holding out on what is fundamentally the most important type of exercise, but you are really really going to want to start doing copy studies of art you like. What these look like is going to depend on what you want your art to look like. in my case i draw a lot of my inspiration from manga, so a lot of this was just taking manga panels i liked and trying my best to copy it as closely as possible. but you don't have to just pull from professional sources either, basically just any art that crosses your dashboard that you really like and want to take inspiration is something i recommend doing a copy study of. do you have any favourite artists? find some of your favourite art and do a copy study of it. this type of practice has unambiguously been the most important type of study for me. i think like 60% of what i ever learn comes from realizing an artist was doing it by copying them during practice. Oh, while im thinking it, i recommend downloading pureref, it's just a really easy way to organize art references. I have like. hundred of things floating in there that i can grab and when i see something i like and throw it in there. oh, also, something to keep in mind, early on, something that can be a little helpful is tracing studies- this is much more limited, and won't teach you that much about construction, and hasn't been something i have found helpful for a while but tracing something is a good way to figure out something that i specifically had trouble with early on, which is the line weight itself. even if you can copy something as accurately as possible, something you're going to notice is that the lines themselves are going to look wrong to you. there isn't really a lot of helpful advice on this which i found really discouraging early on, especially because the way i grip a pencil in order to be able to hold it without dropping it is kind of. way too hard so a lot of my lines end up way way way too thick and stuff. tracing can help with trying to practice muscle memory for the actual lines, so often early on the loop would go find art i like->trace it->then try to copy it without tracing. this stuff is also useful for building confidence- if you can trace something, it means you can physically make the lines, you just need to be able to copy it. and if you can copy it, it means you can assemble the lines together, you just need to be able to construct your own stuff and figure out how to visualize from practice.
so with all that said and done, the typical gameplay loop is probably going to look like this try your best to draw something->pick out the things you found hardest or the things you like the least about that->from there you can decide what studies you should focus on for a bit->study that material from anatomy books, online guides, etc,->do that for a few days or weeks and then try to draw something again, reassess where youre at with those challenging things, figure out what was hardest there, and then just keep building from that loop as a background process, and then let new parts of your study routine add and subtract themselves from there.
(5/5)
Now, these days, i usually like to make a sort of study guide at the start of the month that looks like this
where i basically just try to keep track of study goals, amount of time ive spent practicing, etc. you will probably not want yours to look like this at first, that is way way way too much. but maybe showing you my schedule can help a bit to get an idea of what you want to do? i need it to be clear i don't do all of this every day also. you can see there in the calendar i am usually doing 1-4 hours of practice a day (though i missed a lot of days because it's been a rough month) and all that would not fit into there. but having a generalized study guide like this is a good way to make things a bit more bite sized and manageable. and most importantly of all, building a routine is more important than amount of time studying. you do not want to start yourself with a goal of like. "i will practice four hours a day". you want to start with "i will try to draw every day, starting with like, 10-20 minutes a day" and then 'try every day' will probably become more like five days of every 7 and that's good and fine. i personally never studied for more than 20 minutes in a day for the first like. five months i started this project. build it up slowly.
in general, your biggest enemy is going to be yourself being critical of your own stuff. in general the way people talk about art is kind of stupid, there is a really toxic air artists have built around it that makes them think it's more important than it actually is, and technical proficiency is both socially constructed nothing more than a tool. art itself is just another form of communication, and another reason i hate that 'do it bad' is advice that pisses me off is that a lot of people don't realize that 'beginner' art is genuinely really interesting and good in its own right, not in spite of a lack of technical training but because of it. The first few months someone starts learning how to draw is where some of the most exciting stuff happens because there is this really interesting way where you are trying to find ways to communicate information and often come upon very creative and interesting solutions. things that spawn from a lack of knowledge early on is a lot of what evolves into the unique stuff that makes up someone's style later on. the trouble is no one is worse at seeing this than the beginner artist. it's tough and it's hard to be critical of your own stuff but at the end of the day, it is also really really fun and rewarding to learn stuff. if you find yourself getting frustrated, take a step back, come back to it later, there is no rush. scheduling your time is helpful, but do not ever set yourself a goal of 'i need to be able to do this after x amount of time'. I'm kind of meandering at this point because i don't know how to end this. š<skull emoji. run away.
