I know exactly what you mean.

If only I could record my imagination, or have a video-recorder of my dreams - I'd have a gallery full of wonderful movies.

But, alas, I'm limited to my own meager skills. Such is the way of things I guess.

D.O.P.R

The hard part of being an artist is having the vision. If your vision is really that strong... if you can focus on it down to the details... then you've got the inherent talent.

For a lot of people, they may think they've got the vision... and they do to some degree... but they need to be honest with themselves... if they really focus on that vision, the details actually aren't there. It's not solid enough.

But... if you got that part...

The rest is just learning the tools and techniques. Which franky anyone can do with practice. A lot of people get frustrated because it isn't taught to them properly. In general, the quality of art teaching out there, be it from books or from artists or whatever... is very poor. If you can find a good source, you can learn quite fast and well.

Thanks for the encouragement! I would have to still say that yes, the images in my head can get very detailed almost as if I can playback a movie. Maybe if I can find a better outlet about learning to draw I can eventually at least do what I would like to accomplish.

The problem with learning art is that there is no relation between art skill and teaching skill. Most artists have very poor skill at teaching.

You can see this replayed over and over again in virtually all of the art teaching books out there. They're generally made by great artists who have no idea how to teach what they do. In particular, they skip many steps and underlying foundations in the art process because the author has internalized them so much that he can't even think of them anymore.

The result is that people who bought their books to learn become frustrated because they can't make the giant leap over those missing steps. And it often 'convinces' them that they simply don't have the inherent art talent. "Other people can follow the book and draw, right? So there's something wrong with me. I'm not cut out for this."

Fact is though, almost nobody... not even experienced artists... can follow most of the art books out there. There's zillions of 'Learn to Draw' books. And most of them are totally useless.

Watching someone else draw that knows how to is generally much more helpful. But it suffers the same problem. Expert artists skip lots of steps... especially early steps. So when you're watching them, they'll make leaps you can't follow. Unless they have some ability to teach and show you those steps.

Often times new artists are the best to watch because they haven't internalized and started skipping so many steps yet.

And there are a very few good art teaching books out there, too. Flip through a lot of them and skim. If it doesn't immediately make sense to you and start setting off bells in your head, it's not a good book. Art is not rocket science. If the book doesn't immediately make sense to you, it's because it's badly written. Like most of them.

Good food for thought, I would have not thought about watching other newbie artists to gain experience. As for the art books, I had a hint that was the case because people who work in my field suffer from the same fate. We are talented at what we do and skip alot of basic steps but when it comes to teaching someone who has no idea what you just did, it suddenly becomes a mental block explaining everything properly. Programming books are the same way, also... for every 10 I would read when I was still a coder, only 1 of those would actually have a good outline at what one should be doing.

I certainly realize that I won't be very (any?) good early on and it will take months of practice likely to start producing consistent art. My goal would be at least able to draw inked anthro crocs and lizards... if I can accomplish that with reasonable quality I would be pretty happy. Colouring and shading and all the other fancy stuff can wait till later...

Hopefully if I can get this crappy (but free) drawing tablet setup on my computer I can at least get some scraps done.