Heyyy!! So, I LOVE your art, it’s so impressive. Truly 💞💞 Any tips for a beginner that is reaalllyy struggling to improve? 😂😅 Thanks for being such an amazing inspiration, all your AUs are so cool!!
Hey thank you so much for your nice comments! 💕💕💕 I’ve grouped your asks cuz I think they all cover the improvement tips area.
As someone who is still trying to improve my advice is tackle specific the areas you want to work on. I know this might sound a bit redundant, sorry if it does, I’m just speaking from experience when I say I got really afraid to try to do hard things or things I was not good at. So I didn’t. And this affected my ability to improve. For the longest time I avoided drawing hands, profile mouths or weird head perspectives or tilts. And... well the only way to actually get good at them is to try them. Repeatedly. Smartly. Even if they don’t come out great at first, you’ve made progress by actually giving it a go.
Now just don’t try it once. Or even on your own. If you don’t know how to do something, there’s a bunch of people on the internet with a tutorial ready, maybe one of their methods will work for you. If you have art friends, a beta artist is a great help. Sometimes we spend a long time looking at a piece for so long we don’t realize what’s off with it anymore but someone else might.
I look up at tutorials all the time, especially for areas in which I’m still a bit green at, like coloring, outlining and certain body proportions. Because I get overwhelmed easily, I try to tackle one thing at a time per art piece. Like in one piece I will just concentrate on hand poses, or maybe the complicated head tilts. Then the next one will have a lighting study. Slowly I try to merge everything I’ve learnt in future pieces. This one is just an example of one that helped me when I was struggling with face structure.
Do studies of different poses, if you’re a bit on the lazy side, like me, 😅 use these studies for far art or fun art pieces you actually want to do. I don’t like to do a bunch of studies and fill a sketchbook page with random body parts, so I use my fan art to improve. I use my comic panels to practice poses and expressions. It’s kind of like tricking myself into studying. Make it fun. 👀
Use references and plan your drawings. Try to deconstruct the reference into basic geometrical shapes to try to understand it a bit better. Things are easier to draw if you understand how an object, being, or space works. Ethan’s prefect practice method helped me a lot when I was working on deconstructing reference.
Ethan is probably my favourite art advice youtuber. So I really encourage every beginner to check his improving strategies out. I honestly don’t follow them all the time whenever I art, but when I start struggling with something I usually follow his advice, film my reference and understand it before carrying on. And I usually get it right or at least so much better than my first attempt.
Then I let go. The importance of letting a picture go for me is something I wish someone had told me sooner. You know when you submit something and by the third day you don’t like it as much as when you just finished? We’ll identify what is it that you don’t like about that piece, and try to fix it on the next one. But move on and try not to dwell too much on past mistakes. Learn from them yes, but don’t beat yourself up too much from them. You can and will do better next time. And if you don’t then try the next time until you get it right. Redraw that old pic if you dislike it so much. Believe me it will be better.
I don’t know if this is what you guys meant as references, but these are just some strategies that have helped me improve lately. And they’re not mine so I wanted to share it from the original source. I hope it helps.
