#ask and ye shall receive unprompted blah blah blah ing from lisette

[lucky-draws]

Hey!! Your art is awesome :) Where did you learn to draw? Did you go to school or are you self taught?

Hello!! Thank you so much!! :D

It's a bit of both really, I mean I studied art at gcse and A level (which I guess is basically the UK equivalent of us high school level?? Idk how to describe it since school systems are different in every country lol) but I've not studied it at university level or like a proper private art school kind of place or anything.

But also, and I this is gonna sound cliché or whatever, I guess I've been drawing since I was little so aside from school lessons I've had many years of practice of just kinda figuring stuff out for myself basically.

(LOL and I would also say that sometimes school art lessons weren't always that useful, especially for a couple of years when we had rly bad teachers lmao. We did some stuff that was beneficial like life drawing classes and such but in my experience so much of our time was spent writing a load of fake pretentious bullshit instead of actually being taught how to draw LMAO but that's just my feeling...I could write more abt the way art is taught but I won't xD)

Right now I'm not studying anywhere, so I'm working on getting better at drawing by myself. I only really post my fanart on this blog but sometimes I do other stuff like exercises and anatomy studies that I don't post, which are helpful,, maybe since I'm already waffling I'll mention a few things I find useful to do in case it's if interest to you or anyone else? Under the cut tho, since this is getting long LOL

Observational studies/drawing from life is something that's very useful I find; just in terms of generally training yourself to look at something and try to represent it accurately and learning more about what things, textures, shadows, etc actually look like. Lately I often take a sketchbook out with me and do things like sketches of people or buildings or studies of plants, flowers etc. None of them are masterpieces, but it's just the activity in itself that's fun. Sketching people or animals forces you to be quick, because you don't know when they might move positions or leave or whatever, and being able to quickly and confidently get down the basic lines and forms of something is a good skill to have and to practice.

I also enjoy human anatomy and figure drawing so I'm trying to get better at that. Anatomy is a huge subject and it's too much sometimes to get hung up on trying to learn all the bones and muscles; a while back I got myself a textbook and found videos with that object in mind, but eh. I realised it's kind of a little ambitious when there are still so many things abt drawing in general I still don't know how to do, so I'm going to leave properly teaching myself detailed anatomy until later. Running before you can walk kind of thing, maybe.

That said though, doing a few studies now and then is still very useful, just learning a bit at a time and gradually getting used to remembering certain aspects about drawing the human body is progress enough.

In school, life drawing classes were pretty useful but I don't have access to any rn sadly. However, and this is not a #spon or anything jfjffj it's just what I do, I like this website called line of action which has photo references for artists to use; obviously there are countless sites like it but I like this one because it provides you with a timer tool kind of thing, so you can set it to 'class mode' and it will give you images to draw from in stages of 30 second sketches, then moving to a minute, then longer 5-10 minute studies and so on.

Even if you don't know shit about muscles and whatever, just observing the human figure from the outside (via images on the Internet if you understandably do not have access to real humans to pose for you lmao) and drawing it a bunch of times is still beneficial. The other I day I realised that ab muscles were confusing to me, so I literally just googled male abs and copied from a few pictures, just noting how they look, what basic shapes to remember etc.

Another good exercise that I haven't done for a while actually is to do some continuous line drawing, which means drawing something without taking your pen off the paper. For a subject you can use something/someone from life or just a picture on your computer or whatever, but basically just focus on keeping your pen/pencil on the page without lifting it, it's really useful in building up, like, confidence in your line work I guess, and it can look pretty cool actually, because it makes this kind of squiggly effect.

I'm just answering this on mobile right now and don't have time to post any pictures, but I'm thinking I could always post some of my studies and practice work now and then. Some of them will be messy LOL but I guess it might be a good thing to show this kind of stuff instead of finished, polished pieces all the time idk?

Anyway this got long and you didn't rly ask for it sorry chjfnfkf but thank you so much for the ask!!! Hope you're having a good day :-) ❤️