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how did you stop drawing stick ppl
6 years ago
so here's smth i've been thinkin about right: the one golden beacon of how everyone improves at art is practice. we all been knew. but the issue is that "practice" doesn't describe...... anything. neither does the vague notion of "life drawing" or "studying", becus these are just the names ascribed to specific routines, not the nitty gritty or mindset behind how you absorb new information from them or how you as an individual go about best learning them
to simplify, i've got this question for yous guys: what particular methods have you found most helpful in improving your art, outside of the obvious Draw A Bunch and Use References? and if those were the ways you did it, how did you, the individual, do it? e.g. if you learned from from using references, what were you looking for in those references? where did your focus drift; to color, form, construction, perspective? what methods did you notice made your use of references go from Meh to Hell Yeh?
this question is a little vague maybe, but you don't have to agonize over an answer. i'd just rly enjoy knowing what goes thru other artists' heads when they're actively working to improve. we can steal from each other, it'll be a blast
my contribution: when i'm familiar with a subject, i focus on what the parts actually are, but when i'm studying from life i try and think of them as abstract shapes that follow a variety of rules. i.e. an eyeball in a regular drawing is an eyeball, but from a photo study an eyeball is a wet sphere that would react x way to y lighting situation, and tends to look like z in perspective. i shift my mindset for practicality's sake because otherwise i warp and exaggerate proportions
to simplify, i've got this question for yous guys: what particular methods have you found most helpful in improving your art, outside of the obvious Draw A Bunch and Use References? and if those were the ways you did it, how did you, the individual, do it? e.g. if you learned from from using references, what were you looking for in those references? where did your focus drift; to color, form, construction, perspective? what methods did you notice made your use of references go from Meh to Hell Yeh?
this question is a little vague maybe, but you don't have to agonize over an answer. i'd just rly enjoy knowing what goes thru other artists' heads when they're actively working to improve. we can steal from each other, it'll be a blast
my contribution: when i'm familiar with a subject, i focus on what the parts actually are, but when i'm studying from life i try and think of them as abstract shapes that follow a variety of rules. i.e. an eyeball in a regular drawing is an eyeball, but from a photo study an eyeball is a wet sphere that would react x way to y lighting situation, and tends to look like z in perspective. i shift my mindset for practicality's sake because otherwise i warp and exaggerate proportions
So, a lot of my improvement has come from me doing something 100+ times over. Which makes me improvement probably ungodly slow compared to everyone, but it seems to work best for me.
It was around this year where I started watching youtube videos focused on professionals creating character designs and such that I've began compiling huge amounts of refs just to do one thing. I've always sorta reffed like 1-3 pieces, but now I find myself looking at a collage of like 30 pieces to just do one thing lol. It seems to be helping me a lot though. We'll see how well it's working in another year or so.
I also might tell my partner to strike a pose for me, grab his hand and hold it some way for me while I draw it out. It's almost obvious I reffed him in some pieces because they'll be notably better :,D
I simply cannot even fathom the "break it down into shapes and apply these rules" for some reason. I'm able to start lining straight away if I choose too, but I'm doing my best not to and trying to mimic what everyone else does with rough sketches. I can't tell if it's doing me favors, but it must be.
idk who originally said it (chuck jones maybe?) but i think of the quote "every bad artist has 1000 bad drawings inside of them, they just have to get them out" a LOT. rly summarizes to me why practice makes perfect but also takes time
reference material is sexy and so are professional artubers. i always feel it's better to have a lot of wells os inspiration to draw from, not just so nobody can get huffy at you if your piece is a little too samey compared to the original (peak pettiness i know), but because you have more fo a wealth of information. knowing more about how something looks or works is never a bad thing
tbh breaking things down into shapes never helped me either, at least not in the abstract. i can't just go around making everything out of spheres and cubes, i gotta know how something actually looks as complex muscle groups n shit before i discover how to construct it. hey if something works for you, keep doing it. the only methods of working in art that aren't ever cool are copyright infringement and ending up with a shitty product
Like successful art is made of so many "channels":
subjects/visual library
composition
anatomy
shapes/proportion/stylisation
color/saturation
values/contrast
If I want to improve subjects I focus on my everyday travels outside and watch out for the exciting in the mundane. I write ideas down on my phone. Ask myself what I'm passionate about. I collect tons of refs and make moodboards. And I look at a lot of art.
If I want to improve composition I copy good refs and reduce shapes and work in black & white.
If I want to improve anatomy I study muscles. Traditionally preferably, not digital. (Captain obvious here for your rescue.)
If I want to improve shapes/proportion/stylisation I open https://www.quickposes.com/en and do the gesture drawing challenge. Traditionally preferably, not digital.
If I want to improve color/saturation I do photo studies - but don't necessarily care to get the shapes right for this.
If I want to improve values/contrast I do photo studies - in greyscale. (Captain obvious strikes again.)
Probably redundant and nothing new to you. And I probably also sound like I do lots of studies, but I really don't. :'D
i feel like a lot of ppl say they're passionate about art but have a hard time falling in love with it. and the reason i say that is that love, whether it's loving a skill or a person or whatever else, means dedication. collecting ideas, indulging in other ppl's work and photos, making it part of your routine to draw, it's all very passionate
other ppl in the comments, take notes of these things, this is solid advice on how to improve in different areas
I was reading one of those "how to draw" books, this one about the animal kingdom as a subject matter. Most of them really suck, but this one focused on more in-depth explanations, and it was at least 1.5 inches thick. One single line focused on talking about getting proportions right, and that the most important part is the amount of space between the lines, rather than the lines themselves. That's why now when I give art advice, simply as one-amateur-to-another, as I'm no professional, I say the first step is a matter of spacial perception.
Link to that: https://www.youtube.com/user/ProkoTV/videos
With that ad out of the way, two things have really helped me along, and I continue to do these exercises because there'll never be a point where they don't matter anymore.
1. Gesture studies. 1-5 minutes per drawing. Drawing fast isn't always helpful to everyone, but since I started out with a very weak sense of posing and rhythms, I found that forcing myself to draw in limited time really helped me develop those artistic muscles. I use https://line-of-action.com/ to set up study sessions.
2. Cross-contour and drafting studies. The exact opposite of the other exercise, taking a photo, screencap from a video, or a live model, and accurately drawing each form as a box. Sometimes I'll make it as simple as the head, torso, and pelvis are each their own boxes. Sometimes I go into individual muscles and make those boxes. And then drawing cross-contour lines around those boxes accurately to study and learn perspective.
Combining those two exercises has helped me learn how to combine movement and form so that I can learn anatomy and perspective, while also keeping my work from becoming stiff and lifeless. And they're such fundamental exercises that I doubt I'll ever feel like I've 'mastered' them. There's always something to learn! ^^
ppl are so against doing gesture studies, it's ludicrous. they're not as fun as doodling buff dog people i guess, but they don't take very much time by design and you'd be amazed at what you learn from them. tbh i should get back into the habit of doing them regularly lol. other forms of speedart can prove especially useful as well: speedpaints majorly stepped up my rendering game. forcing your brain to hone in on everything you've ever learned about x subject becus ur running out of time opens the floodgates, i guess
cross contour studies are the bees knees, if only becus ur almost guaranteed to learn smth about perspective and proportion from them. frankly breaking any complex form down can prove helpful, especially if you're trying to pinpoint a good "template" to start from when you're faced with the subject in actual illustration
speedpaints both put more and less pressure on you to perform ime. and they're a great excuse to focus in on one detail, like texture, without spending 20 hours on something. best of luck!
It all just... developed slowly.
I was unlucky and unable to learn from books and such i had to learn by watching videos online and use refs from the internet. while it not like going outside and drawing people, it still something, what help me out is having videos and a friend of mine sat me down and taught me about how to do things. because people learn differently. and after having someone teach me you need to do this and that to improve and found a good geature drawing website i have improve slowly. while i still have ways to go to be where i want to be.
A lot of people starting out get discouraged when they don't see improvement which i had my fair share of that when i started in the late 90s through the early and late 00s. the best thing people can do is keep their heads up and have people they can share their art with and talk to as for getting out of the stick person phase i never had a stick person phase really when i was a kid i always copy the sonic genesis box art. so i copy tracing over it so much i had a some what 8 year old understanding sonic was more then a stick it was still crappy art but still. i feel like the most important thing someone can do is to have fun, and not stress over how it looks. art should start out as somthing for fun and if you really enjoy doing it, it can go from being a hobbie to a job.
Sorry my English isn't the best.
that's why i like making journals like this. it's a lot more enlightening to ask other drawpeople what specific methods they study with instead of the generic handwavey "just practice". that always felt like a lazy excuse for advice to me, like it implies i don't practice
everyone been knew that drawing from life is the best option, but you rly can learn from videos and photos. you just have to work a little harder to remember the implied physical space being taken up. i'm also the kind of person who learns best through demonstration. watching people draw what i'm trying to achieve gets my mind working and leads me along better then sloppily trying to deconstruct an unfamiliar subject myself
i remember when i was 13 and made the decision to pursue art as a career, it was at least a couple of years before i didn't absolutely despise everything i created. but that's because our taste for what's good has developed before our skill, and our skill has to catch up with what we see in our heads. absolutely reaching out to other artists is a good thing. not just for the generic necessary critique but also so you have people who understand what you're going through
i agree, if you're having fun it will show in your work. when i look at my portfolio, i can clearly see a pattern. the pieces i enjoyed making the most or that meant a lot to me are always better then the ones i did on a whim or as a commission (sorry clientele but you can't beat an artist's own moodiness when it comes to appealing to their creative nature)
At first I tried to draw from nature, by looking at other people or photos. Then my more skilled buddy pushed me in the right direction by giving me constructive criticism (e.g. legs too short, neck too long, don't draw sausages for fingers). Then I started to look more carefully at the photos I was referencing - paying more attention to the proportions and such. Occasionally I trace over photographs to practice and to break the picture into construction shapes.
I think the most important thing I have to say is - don't be afraid to ask for critiques; they might feel unpleasant at first (you know, listening to someone point out mistakes in your work) but they're very much helpful.
breaking down photos, and ever others' illustrations, is a tried and true method to improvement so long as you know what you're looking for. it's something i've been delving more into lately
critique stings the ego smth fierce but i've heard ppl compare it to medicine or physical therapy and i find the parallels to be very true: it might taste awful, or hurt really bad, but if you do it regularly you'll get better in no time