/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

and this one kind of ended up looking like a dove. Kind of wish I really did do a dove

>>4014010
I was shit and learned nothing for a long time as an 9 year old, but when I started using reference at around 13-14 is when I first started making improvements. Needless to say this has made me very big on the use of reference for beginners. /ic/ is very good for telling people to use reference, hell it's what people are already mostly doing in this thread, so I don't think I need to say this, but If you're using reference you're on the right path.

After that I started learning proportions. Appearantly some people say to do gesture studies or something, but I just went straight to trying to memorize drawing anime grills from scratch. You do this by making up proportions, testing them to see if they work, repeat. You use a lot of reference in the process. For this it's just developing a method, memorizing and getting used to it.

2 of the greatest developments early on was the discovery of depth, and trying to make it look good. depth is well, depth; but for trying to make it look good, well. When you're focused on developing a process, you're focused on technicalities and proportions. Eventually you gotta learn to not put yourself in this out of touch mindset, and are instead just focused on the drawing at hand, for good quality.

I stagnated a lot. I didn't like drawing, I was bad at it, and it took a lot of energy to do as I was so slow and didn't understand things in any simple way that works. In other words I was doing something wrong, yet I kept forcing myself to draw, and feeling bad that I wasn't drawing even though it was crappy. [tip; you cannot sustainabley do something hard, so don't expect it. if something is hard, you need to make it easier if you want to sustain it.]

Never gave up in perpetuity tho, eventually I got smarter and found better methods of figuring things out (troubleshooting, trying find a simpler way). Fixing all the little mistakes I learned, 1 by 1, until here I am, finally, finally making progress. Thank God for the wisdom.