serious question- how do you learn to draw? ive never been able to draw ;-; my drawings look like a childs, seriously but i want to get to a good level ive started roughly sketching 15 minutes a day, but is that enough? should i do more? im so lost edjfhd
Professional artists stress the fundamentals. For example, if you wanna draw good anime, you gotta know how to draw a good realistic human figure – knowing the rules before you break them. If you wanna learn about the fundamentals:
Something I personally indulged in was art analyses (Solar Sands is an excellent Youtube channel for this) and just looking at the art of other people and see how they did what they did – things like speedpaints, but with more attention paid to the process.
Also, if you struggle with proportions, I’ve found it’s easiest to consider everything relative to each other. For example, the human hand is roughly as big as the face, and at resting position, the wrists are always a little below the hips. Even if your drawing isn’t 100% accurate to a real human being, applying these proportions keeps it from looking “off”. Just be observant in general! Look at a picture of someone and just… stare at it. Look at the curvature of their neck, the dips of their shoulders, the arc of their nose. Being observant is an incredibly useful attribute for drawing – and if you find yourself hitting art block, seeking out new experiences in the form of travel, media, and emotions can breathe new life into your creativity and give you a richer visual library.
Drawing consistently and practicing is pretty obvious, but it’s also good to push yourself and experiment with art. If you catch yourself drawing the same things, same faces, same poses over and over again and not improving, that could be a sign that you need to try drawing something more experimental.
As someone who’s been doing art their whole life, even though I rarely post mine here, I’d recommend starting with finding a process that works for you. Some people start out with a stick figure base and build up. I like to start by a bubble figure that looks kinda like those pose-able reference men you see everywhere, and then slowly build upon shape that like a sculpture. Whatever makes the most sense for you, do that. You need a process to be able to make art consistently.
Once you have a process, I’d honest to god recommend tracing photos, but building up the whole process over whatever you’re tracing. (Sketch out the setup for your canvas. Block out basic shapes. Break the basic shapes into more complicated ones. Smooth those shapes into something more recognisable. Detail. Etc.) It trains your hand and your eye to know where things actually go in relation to each other rather than just guessing. It also helps you learn to draw what’s there and not what you want to be there.
I’d also recommend learning and frequently using calligraphy. Because it’s basically drawing letters. It helped me a lot with the fine motor control I need for the detail work I do. (Plus I have the added bonus of my handwriting looking super cool)
Above all else, patience is key. My art is barely recognisable from where it was two years ago.
Don’t expect masterpieces to work up quickly, either. I’ll spend over 12 hours on a drawing not even six inches tall.
Wait, do other artists really get upset when people tag their art with the names of their OCs? Why?
The vibe I get is that some people feel doing this is “claiming” the art. Obviously that’s not how reblogs work on tumblr - as long as they’re reblogging and not reposting it’s clear who the source is. But I don’t think they’re even concerned about someone actually claiming the art as their own, it seems more abstract and weirdly metaphysical. As if tagging your art with their OC is stealing something intangible from it.
(Disclaimer for the inevitable bad faith reading: Obviously if someone writes “don’t tag with ocs” on a post it is super rude to do the thing they asked you not to. That applies to anything,from “don’t tag with” to “don’t reblog,” etc. And if tagging with OCs just annoys you, hey, you don’t need a reason to find something annoying. But the idea that it’s inherently violating and immoral is just so wild.)
I had no idea this was a thing, and it’s so weird to stumble on a post where people are talking about this as if it’s art theft.
