/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

Is your practice just random things, or guided in some way (ex by a drawing text like those recommended in the first posts of the Beginner thread?)

bet that's your problem.

If you can't draw, you might have something wrong with your hands. Check out a doctor. I see that you might since you don't capitalize your letters either.

>>3469508
Welcome to the club fuccboi. Get used to it.

>>3469519
>>3469508

The dicc-succing melting garbage art club? What you guys need to do is show us your art and I can tell you right away what the problem is. I wont be an unhelpful asshole either i promise.

>>3469519
This

>>3469536
Not OP but I'll take the crit. I wanna draw cool comic book shit similar to Dave Rapozas "Starveil" but I don't know what to do past the point of basic sketches, My color choices don't look good and whenever I put down lineart it seems to make my drawings uglier than the basic sketches, which are already pretty ugly imo. I just wanna draw appealing looking characters and then maybe stick em in some environments after.

>>3469559
I don't know how to not make this look so shitty, besides my drawing being bad it just looks to like... clean? I dunno.

>>3469508
You're too focused on improving. Try to relax and have fun drawing more my dude.

Here is the secret to gitting gud

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_(learning_method)#Deliberate_practice

>>3469559
Cool practice, I see you drawing things with flow and motion and trying out different perspective. Meanwhile, this >>3469563 looks quite bad as you know, I think a case of 'i inked/colored it and now it's ruined', try to preserve the line of motion when you convert something to lineart and as for coloring in a way you find appealing look for tuts/streaming by digital artists whose coloring style you like (that's a separate skillset you'll have to learn, unrelated to just drawing) and remember to include a nice range of value when you color.

Keep learning until you get depressed and burned out, then you won't want to draw ever again.

>>3469508
if you think your not making any progress try looking at one of your older pieces compared to one you just did.

>>3469508
I'll give you the secret to getting good so stop whatever the fuck you're doing now and pay attention.
Grab 30 or so images that you think are absolutely amazing. Select and organize those images as if you were the one who made them and you were putting a portfolio together. Make sure they are similar in stylistic approach (i.e. don't get one image of an anime loli and another of a renaissance still life; make it consistent). I'd personally use 3 or 4 different artists at most. More than this usually results in a stylistic clusterfuck, even if subtle.

Now that you have these images organized together, copy them. As closely as you can. The colors, the textures, the proportions... everything. Copy as if your life depends on it.
After you're done copying one, close the copy, close the original and start a new canvas. This time you're not going to use reference, you're going to try your hardest to recreate your copy as best as you can without looking at the original, and only based on the experience you got while first copying it. Once again do it as best as you can as if your life depends on it.
Once you're done with the second copy that is from imagination, open the original again and compare. Be methodical here, you don't want to give yourself an "A for effort", you want to spot as many inconsistencies and mistakes with your copy as you can.

Repeat the above for every image in your "fake portfolio" until your copies from imagination are pretty accurate and closely resemble the original. Might take quite a few attempts for each image, but it's fine, keep doing them.
Once your copies look accurate and you can consistently copy those images from imagination, start doing it again, but this time don't just copy the original image. Instead, make a very similar image to the one you copied, but change something in it. You can keep the colors and change the pose, or change the colors and keep the pose, or change the design, so on so forth you get the idea.

Cont.

>>3471216
After you've done all those steps for the 30 or so images you've selected, You'll realize that you can combine and rearrange any combination of elements from those images in a new one, and change it to your liking. Not only that, but you'll also be able to make it look consistent with the copies from imagination you did. Consistency is key.

>"Oh but anon, that way I'll never develop my own style and artistic independence."
This is not true! At some point in the process of doing your copies from imagination, you'll realize that doing a perfect 1:1 copy is impossible. Once that happens, you'll start being a little bit more flexible with your differences, as long as they look consistent enough with the original. You will get style variation whether you like it or not. Even more so when you're changing your copies on later iterations.

>"Oh but anon, what about the fundamentals? Shouldn't I be doing pages of cubes and gesture drawings first?"
No. Stop it.
The "fundamentals" are tools for learning. No one cares about gesture sketches and anatomy studies besides other art students. They are not the end goal!
Learn whatever you need from the fundamentals as necessity forces you to. Can't light this face properly like in your reference? Maybe do a little sketch of the different anatomy parts of the face. Can't figure out how light works from this angle you've changed? Maybe pose and light a little 3D manequin to see how it works. Colors not working well even though they're on the right hue range? Maybe your values are fucked...
You'll get the fundamentals you need as you do it. There's no way around it.

If you do all I said, I guarantee you'll progress a lot faster. Biggest problem I see with beginners is the fact that they rarely have a fixed "goal". They'll do some anime, some chinese paintings, some matte paintings... and get nowhere because they weren't really aiming anywhere to begin with.

>>3471216
>>3471217
Good advice. Will be trying this out for the next year.

>>3471217
Those tools for learning help you to understand and break down what you see as well as make you more proficient with your draftsmanship.

No, it's not the end goal, it's practice and learning. If you try to get to the finish line without understanding how the fundamental principles work then you are going to be in for a bad time. Your progress will be slow and you'll end up getting frustrated because you know that you're doing things wrong but you don't even have the knowledge to know what you're doing wrong or how to correct it.
Doing as this anon says is just asking for trouble.

I would suggest studying (studying does include copying) both art you like as well as real life reference, and do fundamental exercises. These aren't mutually exclusive things, do them all.

>>3471238
>Those tools for learning help you to understand and break down what you see as well as make you more proficient with your draftsmanship.
Yes, they do. But without knowing what you're even trying to break down they're useless. I see people doing iteration after iteration of floating figures all the time, but then when they try doing a full illustration it's always a disaster. Then back to floating figures and random pieces of anatomy they go.
What I'm trying to say is that the "fundamentals" themselves shouldn't dictate what you study, it is your end goal that should instead. Studying human anatomy is useless if your end goal is drawing tanks. Likewise the opposite is true. If, through that method, you want to draw portraits, you'll soon realize that you need at least some understanding of various fundamentals involved in it to achieve your goal. It's likely someone doing that would need to learn facial anatomy, lighting, materials, values... so on so forth. But they'd be doing it to achieve a goal, and not just to do a random study of some random thing they might not even apply.

>If you try to get to the finish line without understanding how the fundamental principles work then you are going to be in for a bad time
Exactly, and this is the point.
Since you'll be having a bad time, it'll be easier to know what precisely you need to study to improve it as you have a "goal" reference and the differences are right there in front of you. The point is not to completely ignore fundamentals and that they exist, it's to flush out exactly what fundamentals you need to improve on, and as your need to do them dictates.

>>3471216
>"Grab 30 or so images that you think are absolutely amazing."

I want to try this method. The 30 images you're talking about art 30 pieces of art, and not like real pictures of real people or whatever, right?

>>3471259
I'm the guy asking about the 30 pieces right here, I get you fully, I read all your comments, so disregard my previous comment there. This is really really good advice you gave, in my opinion.

In a way it seems kind of bittersweet though, because it implies that you can't truly create something new, that everything you make will ultimately be from some previous influence of someone else's work, and from the influences of previous artist's work you make your own.

But is it possible to draw from raw influence from the world or from your mind, rather than secondhand through someone else's work?

>>3469563
https://youtu.be/5UD1l-54XDQ

>>3471408
This is a very good video on the subject you mentioned: https://vimeo.com/139094998
Particularly relevant to what you asked are these quotes from roughly 13 min and onwards into the video:
>"Creativity isn't magic, it happens by applying ordinary tools of thought to existing materials..."
>"Copying is how we learn, we can't introduce anything new until we're fluent in the language of our domain; and we do that, through emulation."
>"Nobody starts out original, we need copying to build a foundation of knowledge and understanding."
>"After we've grounded ourselves in the fundamentals through copying, it's then possible to create something new through transformation. Taking an idea, and creating variations. This is time consuming tinkering, but eventually can create a breakthrough."

I do believe it's possible to start completely from scratch and, through exploration draw from "raw influence", like you said. But I think it's pointless and might produce worse results than if done like the quotes above mention.
For instance, we don't need to reinvent math from nothing to be able to create new concepts for it. There's no need to reinvent the wheel when yo could learn it how it is, and then modify it however you want to your liking.
Krenz and Kawacy have very unique styles, yet they're clearly based on anime art. Chinese painters like Ruan Jia and HGJ also have their own unique styles, but it's clearly based on russian fine art paintings, which were based on renaissance, which was based on classical... so on so forth. There's always an underlying combination of influences before a master's work it seems, where they forked their style from.
I believe that if you try to "reinvent the wheel" from the beginner stage, there's a lot higher chance of it not ending up very good at all, or taking exponentially longer than necessary to get good results.

On a side note, if you haven't already, I highly recommend fully watching the vid I linked. It's very good.

>>3471216
>>3471217
>>3471259
>>3473040
This is the BEST advice you will EVER get on IC. First time I see someone who isnt saying shit.

>>3471217
>You'll get the fundamentals you need as you do it. There's no way around it.
absolutely this