#I'm gonna spend this week looking at some more tutorials <3 I'd love to get better at how I colour them!!! | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

soradorauniverse · 7 years

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question for the mun! how did you learn to draw? i'm a basic beginner and i'd love to hear your advice

Yo! I’ve seen my sister mentioning me in an ask ( @theycallmekaibara , how dare you) and it kind of got me thinking of my own process. As far back as I can remember, I think I started off in middle school copying the pokemon from those pokemon guides people could buy at the scholastic book fair™. And other things that I liked. The copies looked half-decent most of the time but every time I tried to draw something original it didn’t turn out well half the time.

Probably around early high school I figured out I wanted to do art as some kind of career so I started searching around like crazy. Reading those ‘how to draw’ books, mostly how to draw manga, tbh, going on youtube, etc and a lot of things I happened to watch or read said pretty much the same things just in slightly different variations.

Those were, ‘drawing every day’, ‘learning the fundamentals’ and ‘drawing a lot, and a lot more other tips I picked up that I’m slowly bringing in to my own practice.

Drawing everyday is simple in concept but if you’re juggling stuff like school and work it becomes hard. You gotta make time for it tho and you will end up seeing the results over time. Drawing for 30 minutes a day for a week you’ll probably be better at the end of that week then skipping and spending 3 hours at the end of the week. You end up seeing results quicker, however, if you combine it with drawing a lot. Someone who draws for 3 hours a day for a month is gonna be better than someone drawing for 30 minutes a day and so on.

Something else I’ve heard recently is that drawing for longer amounts of time a day helps you learn quicker since it takes time to get into a ‘flow state’ for drawing where you end up learning more. Have yet to see proof of that though so I’ll have to get back to you on that one.

Learning the fundamentals is boring and hard but definitely worth it once you start getting the hang of them. Fundamentals are things that are argued about but a few I’ve seen just about everyone I’ve looked at agree to be fundamentals are: Perspective, Form, Proportion, Gesture, Anatomy, Value, Color, and Composition. There are a bunch of tutorials about them all over the internet and in books, so my suggestion it to pick one or two for each and stick to those until you feel like you’ve absorbed the material from them.

Another thing about Fundamentals is that they build off of each other in a way that makes it hard to only study one at a time. Because yeah you get better at one point perspective and you can place things but you go to try and draw something and it’s in perspective but the proportions manage to be all off and you don’t know how to shade and you don’t know where colors go- you get what I mean?

So, my suggestion for that is to either try to learn multiple fundamentals at the same time, maybe having specific days to learn/practice them. Or, spending a couple of days focusing on small aspects of each fundamental and then moving on to the next, because what both of those do is introduce you to more and more complex versions of each fundamental over time instead of trying to become really good at one thing and having the others suffer.

Of course, all of the learning in the world doesn’t help if you if you don’t actually draw. Color is really the only one of those that you need coloring materials for, the rest you can do with a pencil and paper.

The ratio of learning to actually drawing should be something like: three hours drawing for ever hour spent learning. It really helps to internalize what you’ve learned so you can apply it to other drawings instead of going back to learn and relearn things.

Now, for some specific videos to watch.

youtube

It’s 50 or so minutes long but he gets to the point of the video within half the time I promise.

youtube

Do some of these exercises, maybe as a warmup whenever you want to draw, and your line quality will improve so much.

As a last note, what you draw can really be up to you, you can copy other artists works that you like (though don’t claim them as your own afterwards because that is bad) or draw people from photos. I do advocate you do spend time drawing the things you want to draw even if you don’t think they’ll come out nice because you might burnout if not.

#why'd this become so long ORZ #I need to actually practice what I preach #Anonymous

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