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the seal inspires me in more ways than one

1.5×2.5" 🩶 5 minutes 🩶 favorite part: the seal's face 🩶 hardest part: the sun glare spots

Today's Seal Is: Just Chilling

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drawing architecture may be the bane of my existence but i sure am a sucker for a cool building

10 minutes 🩶 1.5×2.5" 🩶 favorite part: hmm the skyline 🩶 hardest part: the entire lower half of the building

National Museum of Qatar, by Jean Nouvel (2003-2019).

Doha, Qatar.

© Roberto Conte (2024)

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got halfway through this one and realized i'd gone horribly wrong somewhere so i erased everything only to realize that no actually i was fine and i have no idea how i thought i'd screwed up but i just erased all that for no reason. anyway, here's a lego seagull

2×3" 🩶 lost track of time due to aforementioned eraser mishap and also having to stop in the middle and finish later 🩶 favorite part: that wing on the left 🩶 hardest part: fuckin' angles, man

lego seagull

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10min each 🩶 2×4" 🩶 hardest part: the stretchy bits 🩶 favorite part: drawing the outline of the rolls in the pan went a lot more smoothly than i expected and required almost no erasing

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I spent way longer on this than I meant to, but it was fun!

20 minutes 🩶 1.75 × 2.5" 🩶 hardest part: getting the flowers to look like anything at all while also letting the ground around them have some texture 🩶 most fun part: those mountains! shading them was relaxing, and it may have taken two tries each (did things too big at first) but i did both the skyline and the waterline in one continuous stroke 🩶 fun note: i expected to feel exacty the opposite about the flowers and mountains fhan i did

Lake Gosau, Austria *by eberhard

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BIRD

5 minutes 🩶 2×2" (the bird is one inch tall!) 🩶 hardest part: getting the wings at least kind of even 🩶 most fun part: i'm so happy with how the talons came out! and the eye's making me laugh

Osprey

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5 minutes 🩶 1.5×2" 🩶 thing that's bugging me: i did not give myself room to make the booty peach big enough whoops 🩶 favorite part: the shading

From 1969 to 2008 John Margolies photographed the eccentric roadside architecture and ephemera of the US. @librarycongress bought the lot, a total of 11,710 colour slides, and lifted all copyright restrictions on them. Here’s our highlights: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-margolies-photographs-of-roadside-america

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so many circles!

15ish minutes 🩶 3×2"(ish?) 🩶 thing that's bugging me: angles of circles hard! 🩶 favorite part: the cubes on the table were fun

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I think part of the issue is the inherent incompatibility of "wanting to be a good artist" vs "wanting to make a specific piece of art." Every artist probably has a bit of both, and no one talks about the conflict between them.

Becoming a Good Artist involves a whole lot of boring drudgery. Practice your line work. Do endless studies of specific facial features - one person's mouth in a bunch of expressions, a bunch of different people's eyes, and so on. Spend ten minutes filling pages of your sketchbook with 30 second figures. Draw the the bowl of oranges. Okay, do it again but faster. Now slower.

A lot of people come to art via fandom, which is great! But if fanart is the only art you're doing, well, practice makes permanent. If you're only ever drawing Blorbo and his friends, you'll end up having a hard time branching out when you go to draw someone who looks very different from them. At the same time, I know telling people, especially young people, who are drawing fanart for fun that "hey, if you want to be good at this, you have to make a lot of not fun art, too" is going to push them away from art completely. No one wants the drudgery, especially when they spend their whole day sitting at a desk doing other drudgery.

I think my best advice, as someone who's very much still learning all this myself, would be: If you're doing fanart, try not to limit yourself! Don't stick to one fandom, if you can help it. Try to have at least some live action stuff you like so you can work on your realism (which will help you see the real shapes of things, which will in time help you see different non-realism ways to depict those things). If you like animation, try to draw from fandoms with very different styles. Copy from other artists. If you can, keep a little sketchbook with you and doodle things in real life that catch your eye, too. And ideally, when you see a nose that looks nothing like Blorbo's, you won't find yourself saying "well, this is the only way I know how to draw noses, so I'll draw it like that because it's my style." (Style isn't about not knowing how to do something any other way, after all.)

And, as always, be willing to make bad art.

It's not ideal to only know how to draw one kind of nose, but we also understand that learning how to art is a long and difficult process. If you're too afraid to make bad art, you'll draw the nose the way you know you can instead of the way that nose should look, and you won't get better. If you accept that it might not be great, you'll have the confidence to try. Maybe you'll find yourself saying "hey, that came out pretty good!" and maybe you'll find yourself posting it with a "look, I've only ever drawn these characters before and their noses are different so this is not exactly my proudest work but I tried" disclaimer - but that will probably get you less accused of racism than just giving all the characters the same anime nose (for example).

The drudgery is, I think, very much worth it. But if you're making art for fun and don't want to do it, variety is the key.

I see way too many beginner artists be paralyzed by this notion of “artstyle”. They want all their drawings to be consistent with each other, so they force random rules upon themselves (“i’m gonna draw noses this way” and “i’m gonna color stuff this way” and whatnot) that stop them from going out of their comfort zone and improving their skills. Then they use it as a crutch for their lack of said skills: “no it’s not bad anatomy/same face syndrome, it’s just my artstyle!”

I get that they want their art to have a distinctive identity, but as we all know you have to master the rules before you break them. Learn what you need to learn, don’t be afraid to try a bunch of different stuff and as you improve, trust that your preferences and your personality will shine through. That flexibility will also make you a much stronger artist.

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Attempting to forcibly break my habit of adding just a little more detail and a little more and a little more and just a teensy bit more until the five minute sketch I meant to do took me an hour (and doesn't even look that good) by doing detailed studies, then less detailed, then less.

My kid has requested that I "stop just drawing lips" because it's "creeping [her] out."

actual thumbnail for scale 🩶 i didn't time any of this 🩶 no bugging/favorite parts here i consider this a successful exercise 🩶 reference: i did a duckduckgo image search for "lips art reference" and it linked back to a pinterest and i can't find the original source sorry

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Tranquilized bear falls from tree at University of Colorado.

Photo by Andy Duann

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If a bear falls from a tree and no one's around to catch him, does he have a good time on his trampoline?

no idea how long as i kept getting interrupted maybe 10 min 🩶 3×2" 🩶 thing that's bugging me: perspective on the pad feels off 🩶 favorite part: i like the fur! also how condensing it a bit worked out

Tranquilized bear falls from tree at University of Colorado.

Photo by Andy Duann

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sometimes you have to leave in a minute but hold on you just gotta draw this real quick

1-2 minutes 🩶 5×3" 🩶 thing that's bugging me: it's hard to be bothered over something i did in a minute but my first line for the arm was very much at the wrong angle 🩶 favorite part: i'm pleased with the silhouette for something i did this fast

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3.5" square 🩶 10 minutes 🩶 thing that's bugging me: honestly just the limits of pencil as a medium, getting the interaction between the beans and fur without color is rough 🩶 favorite part: i feel like i captured her expression well

yes your beans are adorable. why is your head all wet

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10 min 🩶 2.75×1.5" 🩶 thing that's bugging me: what did i do to that back paw 🩶 favorite part: the eyes and also i only erased one line the whole time go me

feeding my homonculus

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5ish minutes 🩶 3" square if i drew a box 🩶 it's occurring to me that including "thing that's bugging me" and "favorite part" on someone's photo of themselves might be taken the wrong way so i'm not gonna add that bit on figures i think

When you put a butch bitch on a beach 😜

Photo by @themonsterthing

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A post to the happy couple!

~2.5×2.5 🩶 15 minutes 🩶 thing that's bugging me: forgot to darken the shadows after i attempted the cobbles 🩶 favorite part: the chains

this, too… is yuri