/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

>>4237733
Im 21 already and havent commited as much as i should have in the past and wonder if i even have a shot at improvement by constant practice anymore being /beg/ as i am. Other people my age must be leagues beyond me and i cant help but feel there is no way to catch up or come close. Or just make it good at all.

>>4237733
I haven't drawn consistently since high school
however, many times since, there's something that just "clicks" and I can do something better
but I was already good according to other people

>>4238539
>21
turn 30 and if you still suck then rope

>>4237733
He probably wasn't doing studies to specifically learn and practice his fundamentals, rather he was likely drawing just to draw and slowly getting better, slowly figuring things out on his own. You definitely learn much faster at an art trade school or atelier because you have professionals looking over your shoulder, ready to stop and redirect you when you do something terribly wrong, or be there with good critique when you've got an issue. Plus you have the other students around you to help you out or show you techniques or whatever you're missing.

Anyways you can be self taught and do just fine. Look at Kim Jung gi, he learned perspective by drawing tanks all day during his time in the military. Now he shits out amazing pieces cause he got those fundies down and has a good visual memory.

It's just about focused study, Anon.

>>4237733
Drawing six hours a day for what I think has been a week now, idk though my heads fucked from sleep deprivation. I can see a lot of improvement in my figure drawings and I can draw a skull decently

>>4237733
Honestly, that mindset that your skill level is merely determined strictly by the number of hours you put into it, is absolutely wrong. It is still a good mindset to have, because it usually makes you work, but it's simply nothing I really ever saw backed up by my observations. There is at least one intrinsic parameter in every human that limits how quickly they can pick up new things and how efficiently they improve, especially in an autodidactic fashion. If left alone, some people simply plateau and never move on. Other people have new ideas, reverse engineer other people's work and can figure out how to get there. You don't need to explain it to them, they just know how.

Call me arrogant etc, but I know that I am on the stronger end of this spectrum. Especially when I was younger I motivated a lot of my peers to draw, and they would have much better work ethics than me, but they just didn't improve at all. They drew the same things over and over, made the same mistakes over and over. They all assumed I must spend crazy hours on it to be as good as I was, but the truth was that I simply never even consciously thought about practicing at all. I only ever drew when I felt like it, which really wasn't that often.

I always wondered what it is, and from what I gathered, it is just about understanding your objective and your mistakes and how and when they happen. Some people suck at drawing and when they look at the result they can only really judge that is sucks, but they can't narrow down what about it sucks, so they simply can't determine a path to improvement. These people are absolutely dependent on a teacher to help them out and on technique to closely guide them through a drawing, so that the degrees of freedom and complexity of the task is effectively reduced. I know quite a number of artists that literally never spent a minute on "fundies" but are still much, much better than anyone that obsesses over those.

>>4238564
Mind, I'm not writing this to discourage anyone. There's more to art than mere technical excellence and while I know artists who effortlessly improved with pretty much zero explicit external influences, I also know people who really struggled to get their technique down to an acceptable level. Those people also have great ideas and create inspired works.

So, my point is: Some people are like sponges when it comes to learning, other people need to struggle, they need teachers, books and technique to progress. While from what I have observed in my life so far makes this pretty obvious to me, I also observed that both types of people can succeed and both have a valuable take on the craft.

>>4238564
Passion + good visualization skills + intuition = talent. Intuitive people either pick up fundies on their own through childhood works or learn it incredibly quick and easily in a short time of dedicated practice, good visualizers will literally sketch in their heads and can place themselves inside their work, passion is a reactor that keeps an artist going and working.

>>4238564
>I know quite a number of artists that literally never spent a minute on "fundies" but are still much, much better than anyone that obsesses over those.
Care to share some examples?

Trying to learn anatomy, figure drawing is difficult. Hopefully getting a screen tablet will help with my line control, and having an extra monitor means I won't have to alt tab to look at my references.

>>4238539
>Im 21 already
A baby.

>>4238539
that's so retarded that in 10 years you will be mad at yourself for wasting time thinking that. it's so fucking dumb that if you knew better you would want to bash yourself in the head with a hammer for even thinking it. just draw consistently and in 4-5 years when you're STILL barely an adult you will almost certainly be decent

>>4237733
If you only do head studies from reference then you will never progress beyond that.
Ignoring fundies completely is a mistake. But thinking that you have to learn linearly and master one level of fundies before progressing to the next is an even bigger mistake. That's how you become a Proko or Istebrak or Volen CK, mediocre forever and never producing any actual artwork. Sometimes you need to experiment and do things that you're not prepared for, that's the only way to grow.

>>4237733
Honestly I think VolenCK is just an exception to the rule.

>>4237733
>only got him to /int/ level
Mid to high /int/ is basically ready for professional work.

>>4237733
>Regardless I will continue, I'm just afraid that I'll hit a road block without realizing before it too late to realize.

Yeah, you will. That's what art is about. There will be plateaus, even the best artists hit plateaus. When that happens you work your way through it by challenging yourself with new and different ideas, and trust you'll get past it one day.
I'm not going to lie, this is a weird fear to me because I've always drawn regardless of the prospect of failure in the future. I wanted to draw for the sake of drawing. Why are you drawing right now? To get good someday? Ask yourself: is that by itself a powerful enough motivator to sustain a prolonged interest? Because that's what it's going to take. The whole "journey not the destination" cliche is real.

VolenCK strikes me as a guy who has no artistic ideas. He's drawing, but not really engaging with the world of ideas, or with the raw material he references. He's hoping for that day when he'll be good enough to do the original work he always wanted to do, instead of seizing at it at every opportunity right now. Why else would he draw a "monk" in this insipid fashion and post it on his ArtStation?

Imagine how Mike Mignola would draw a monk. More interesting, right? Mignola is good, but does he strike you as a once-in-a-generation artist skillwise? The man himself admits he was shit tier at the beginning of his inking career in comics. But Mignola has ideas.

Nurture your ideas as well as skills. Draw the things that seem too ambitious, and learn from you failure. Experiment and never become too satisfied with you a good result for too long.

>>4238568
Not trying to crab and I'm saying this without a shred of ill will, but can you pyw? I'm curious.

>>4238729
i guess i should. its still a shame i wasted all that valuable time which could have helped give a better head start for me. that's what made me think of comparing to other people who chose their time more wisely.

>>4238564
i can identify what my weaknesses are from looking at results but i never seem to figure out why i have difficulty in consistency. or just get something down first try. a lot of it is trial and error having to make fixes which wastes time. even if my results can be fine in the end it doesn't say much on how i got there. there's more to it than just the end product.

>>4237733
Its good to take a break.
Let everything soak in in the backround.

>>4238543

Same.

>>4238907
Agreed. Sometimes (oftentimes) you're gonna need to take a step back and just start mentally drawing and visualizing shit in your head. Give your brain time to breathe and internalize what you're doing, otherwise if you keep grinding nonstop you're likely to go on autopilot and neglect retaining your knowledge.

>>4238832
>Why are you drawing right now? To get good someday?
>He's hoping for that day when he'll be good enough to do the original work he always wanted to do

I've been in that place for years now. It's hard to keep the creative mindset when everything you do is far away from your vision and is full of mistakes. I "silenced" everything that is creative for the mindset that focuses heavily on fundamentals. I can't really find the middle ground here, not with the current skills

>>4238564
what you speak of has some merit, but it is something that gradually means less and less as skill improves.

look at chess for example, there was a time when being a grandmaster at chess was highly correlated with having high IQ, 95% of grandmasters from like ~1950-1990 were all basically "geniuses", as the overall knowledge-base widened the natural giftedness mattered less and less. historically, a lot of chess grandmasters were also jewish which goes back to the IQ connection.

today literally any human with the average brain can achieve grandmaster level, it might take 15 years for some and a lot of guidance but it's entirely possible, it wasn't even like ~30years ago.

art is more intuition-based, but the same principle applies. with today's availability of resources and methods to improve by it's 'easy' to get to a master level of proficiency. being the top 0,01% still requires natural ability, but nobody in their right mind is aiming for that level unironically.

>>4238932
Can you post a piece of your favorite art? More exactly, an example of what you might want your art to look like someday. I might be able to offer some advice especially if it's anything close to the kind of stuff I'm into. If it's not, the advice might be of more general nature but who knows, could still be useful.

>>4238977
I like different things but off the top of my head pic rel is something I like, portraits that are technically good but also look somewhat interesting, at least to me

>>4239188
Yeah I figured you might be playing a different ballgame from me. My tastes are more toward stylized illustration like this, I'm pretty shit at realistic faces. So instead I'll ramble about creativity for a bit and what makes that portrait work as well what makes many pieces of art work, in my view. Most or all of this may be obvious or not helpful to you, but it may help someone, idk.

Ultimately, even though that portrait artist and Mike Mignola (to continue my example) are drawing upon almost opposite visual languages, they're really doing the same thing. They're taking the raw material of a subject, filtering it through their consciousness, and interpreting it in an interesting, stylized way. This is what VolenCK and many fail to ever do, and not mainly due to a lack of fundamentals.

Mignola interprets through angular, rough shapes and flat black shadows (I'm simplifying a bit). It creates a distinctly dark, ominous mood when applied to his subjects of monsters, occult, Victorian/Gothic motifs.
That artist interprets through textured brushstrokes, full value range and realism in the face, and a very loosely done or gestural hair/neckline. Appreciate how little fundamental knowledge goes into painting hair that way. It's basically just abstract symbols, textured value swatches.

The message is, the face is the important thing here: look at the face. The overall effect is a feeling of transience, remembrance, or mystery. Very probably the portrait is more visually interesting than it source photo. The style is realistic, but interpretation and therefore some degree of creativity are still occurring.

>>4239363
Cont.

Forget about your mistakes. Nobody's ever as good as they want to be, and knowledge is always insufficient. I like my own work for maybe three days after completion in the best cases. As long as you can paint a portrait without awfully screwing it up, then you're good enough to interpret it creatively.
You have to proactively choose to NOT just reproduce what you see and to not keep relying on the same tired strategies. It's tough to break out of habit, especially when it reveals shortcomings, but it pays in the end to try new things. This may mean spending a lot of time on
a drawing, almost to the point of frustration. Or it may mean lots of quick experiments. I've had breakthroughs from both. But you only gain new skills by trying new things.
The good news is, once you learn a new technique, you won't forget that it worked. Over time, these successful experiments accrue and amount to what is called "style." You start to enjoy drawing because even though it isn't strictly "correct," it's fun for you to draw that way and your work feels more personal.

A final note: it's important to be able to analyze and understand specifically what it is that attracts you to a piece of art. When you understand what you like, you can consciously begin to put it into your own work. I do this by mentally dialoguing with myself. I ask myself a series of questions until I get to the root of the issue. Example: What makes this piece good? > Well, what makes any piece of art good? > etc. Look for recurring elements in your favorite pieces of art. That's a good place to start when you're uninspired.

>>4237733

So is Volen finally getting any comissions/work or what's the score with this guy?

Literally better than 100% of /ic/

>>4239601
how can he be better than himself