Do you have any advice on how to draw couples or how to draw faster? I really want to start drawing more shipping fan art, but couples are a major weakness of mine. I want to draw more often, too, but I have really crappy fine motor skills. And whereas most artists can draw something far above my skill level in just an hour or two, it usually takes me at least two or three days to finish a drawing, & I need at least an hour just for my rough sketch. It can be really frustrating sometimes, TBH.
Oh man, I always feel so under-qualified to give people advise, but I’ll do my best!
Honestly, the best thing is always draw as often as you can because practice is really the only way to improve. I know, I know: “But Aria, everyone says that!” They do, and they say it because it’s true, but deciding what that actually means is somewhat different for everyone. I don’t think anything helped me improve more than participating in inktober since it pushed me to try to draw at least something every single day, so I would definitely suggest sketching at least a little something every day because that will greatly help your fine motor skills.
As far as drawing couples the thing that helped me the most (and continues to) is using references. I am fully self taught so anatomy is a constant battle for me, and the one thing I found that really helped me improve my posing was to literally draw shapes over existing poses so that I could see how the skeleton actually worked. Even straight up tracing things like hands and body shapes can help a lot because it helps your hand recognize the actual motions needed to recreate that (obviously don’t claim traced stuff as your own but it can be a helpful learning tool as long as you don’t solely rely on that). Recently I did learn of an awesome blog that will actually help you with posing and such so check out @theredlinestation for some fantastic free advice! The hardest thing for me was always seeing things that were wrong with my art but not knowing how to fix them so this sort of blog could really help with that (although I don’t know if they have a mod that specializes in cartoons yet or not).
Drawing faster really just comes with practice (tons of it), and I really wish I had a better answer than that because I still feel like I draw slow lol, but really it just has to get to a point where drawing takes less thought and is more instinctual. Reality is that no matter how frustrating it gets if you want to improve you just have to push through it and try to produce something even if it isn’t the result you wanted. I can’t tell you how often I still get frustrated with my art, and as painful as it is sometimes the best thing to do is just erase it and start over, but if it’s something you really want to exist then never give up! The feeling of finally bringing that art to life is the greatest motivator ever ♥
I hope that helps at least a little!
