#im starting to get back the drawing flow so... hopefully more stuff this week... and.. get the drums and fanfare ready..

[todayisafridaynight]

'tumblr i told you to stop sniping my post quality' translation: 80's sequel to this so click for better quality

[appaeve]

Hii, I'm absolutely enamoured of your art! The style is so neat and expressive, the colours a delight and overall aaah, you're amazing, looking forward to see your future works :D

I have this question (I hope it doesn't bother you, feel free to ignore in case), have you attended any art school/academy or are you self taught? Because I'd love to learn how to draw, and I know that practice is the key, but I feel so lost thinking about what I should practice exactly. I think that a course would help, but at the same time I think it wouldn't since art is mostly yours to develop and vibe with yanno. Hope you're having a nice (insert moment of the day here)!

hi! first, thank you sm! I know it doesn’t seem like much but compliments regarding the funky way I draw make my day :). And for the second thing- nope! I attended public school that had a basic art class that you drew maybe a still life in and moved on in 8 weeks to do other extracurriculars like gym. Later on I did get the chance to learn some digital/photoshop stuff and paints for more serious courses but yea! mostly self taught :)

Next bit is LONG so we’re breaking it up:

aaaa ok so now when I heard of the “I’d love to learn how to draw, but I feel lost” I resonated with that BIG time. “Starting art” or in your case stating how you wanted to learn how to draw is a personal process that i wholly believe will be different for everyone. For me I started by drawing on rocks I found in the backyard as a kid and grew from there. To jump into drawing (for my personal method!) draw what your interested in or what you enjoy, and then mix that with some studies. Maybe an OC one day, and the next you’ll practice hands/ something from life you don’t really wanna draw. But! by doing this you build skills and grow- then when you redraw that OC maybe their anatomy is better or you drew a nice background with it. Once you learn the basics of some elements of art then you can stylize them!

“Well what do I study?” Anatomy, color theory, composition tricks, fundamentals of art, etc. are all pretty broad things to focus on! I would try to divy it up, maybe you practice shoes, or plant studies one day instead of the whole human figure and a forest painting. Keep it simple and fun, you’re learning and sketches aren’t meant to be perfect! There’s no “order” on what you should study first. As for taking courses vs going with flow with art/more self taught, I would say that if you have the opportunity to learn from masters- take it take it take it. I would never consider learning or taking inspiration from artists cheating. Of course I wouldn’t recommend copying an artists work (and CERTAINLY not positing it online) but maybe as a study draw a work that is based from them/their style and learn from it. I look at the way I draw noses for certain characters and they remind me of they way “x” person drew them, yeah? bits and pieces of inspiration and other artists work helped me create my own art that is personal to me :).

WHOOO okay finally last thing- going back to the no “order” bit. Establish goals! lets say you wanna draw characters first, then I would recommend looking up videos of drawing body types or tutorials online. Maybe clothes next, or you wanna learn to draw trees and do a whole week on that. Some people practice everyday, others do it like once a week- and that’s ok! Art shouldn’t be super stressful methinks. If you think taking an art course is good for your artistic journey, then do it. If you think practicing everyday but more self-taught (still use references, im the biggest hypocrite when it comes to this but they’re so so important), then do it! Yeah I might be throwing in what I personally do as an artist (but I’m still VERY much learning too!) however it is your choice to decide what path is best for you as a creator. Hopefully some of this helped! it seemed like a very genuine ask that I appreciated and wanted to give my input to the best of my ability :)

[uniformbravo]

ffuckcingn Part 2 where i talk more abt resolutions But This Time Writing

So 

some resolutions in terms of Not Drawing. non art related goals. i really want to start writing again? like, definitely not as serious as art, this is like a personal enjoyment kind of thing, like a hobby? idk i guess it doesn’t matter really but ok basically, i have all those millions of documents in my phone right. all the thousands of fic ideas that i have but can’t get myself to write? i want to. write them,,

not all of them, probably definitely not all of them but i mean, i made this to-do list for myself, because i kind of have this thing i do that’s basically become tradition at this point where at the end of every semester im always scrambling to get finals done and while im doing that i get The Procrastination Urge where i suddenly get super excited to do everything that isn’t my homework, so i write it all down in a to-do list for after finals week is over & then i have Goals for the break in between semesters so i have stuff to do instead of just taking a thousand week-long depression naps, right. i mean, whether i actually ever do the things on my lists is another matter entirely but The Point Is i make them and i have them & on the most recent list one of the items is “write at least one fic & post it”

which i feel like is a pretty decent goal? with the number of fucking ideas i have crammed into my phone’s limited memory it’s not like i’ll exactly be wracking my brain for ideas, and i do genuinely enjoy writing, it’s just. my problem with writing in recent years has been mostly a lack of the required energy & motivation it takes to write out a full story, and i always just attributed that to depression, which is. partly true. i mean it’s fuckin valid as fuck but i think i’ve also come to realize that the reason it takes so much energy for me to write is because i’m a huge perfectionist when it comes to writing

like, im a perfectionist in general, and i’ll get all hard on myself about art too, but i feel like i have a much higher standard for my writing and That’s a big ol’ problem because my current skill level is way below that standard unless i push myself to my limit, which is where the massive energy suck comes from which is why i never write

i’ve seen some very good art advice before which is “let your drawings suck.” you can’t get better if u don’t crank out a bunch of shitty drawings first, etc. etc. and like, i never thought to apply that to writing too??? i’ve always been so caught up in, like, the concept of good writing; i feel like i know what makes a good story and i know the kinds of things to avoid and i know the principles of a successful narrative, but actually trying to put that knowledge into practice, getting into the details and each specific building block of a story is an entirely different process

it’s the difference between visualizing a painting & then actually painting it. it never comes out exactly how you pictured it because you never know what it’s gonna look like before you make it, you can’t know because it doesn’t exist yet. things happen in the process of making it, a multitude of factors influence you as you’re working on it, you know, things you couldn’t have predicted.

what i’m getting at is that me feeling like i know how to write doesn’t mean i actually know how to write and because i thought i knew how to write i felt like anything less than perfect writing was unacceptable because come on, you know this, you can do better than this, and i’ve let that hold me back for uh. a very long time

because the other way i’ve been looking at writing is. there is no sketching. with drawing, you have doodles, sketches and finished pieces. the way i was looking at it, writing is always the finished piece, so it always has to be polished and flawless, and i think part of that might be just the general way people seem to view writing, that it’s either Good or Bad, right. art is fine because everybody’s at a different skill level, everybody’s learning, but when people read something it’s always about “are they in character is the dialogue believable is the plot engaging is the vocabulary descriptive enough etc etc” and if it doesn’t meet most or all of those criteria then it’s a Bad Fic and it’s not worth their time

(which, side-note, i suppose the most significant reason for the difference between people’s attitude towards art vs writing would be the amount of time it takes to consume each one, right)

so i’ve always put this pressure on myself to write to the absolute best of my ability (and then some) or else it was shitty, embarrassing, things like that. and now that i’ve taken enough steps back to realize this, i want my new attitude towards my writing to be just. whatever happens happens. if you’re writing, then you’re practicing, and if you’re practicing, then you’re improving. anything is better than just letting ideas rot because you’re paralyzing yourself with a standard so high there’s no point in even trying to reach it. why try to scale a fuckin 50 ft wall when u can take the stairs, u know?

so this year im just gonna let myself write shitty stories & have as much fun with it as i can & not worry about making it perfect because literally 6 years went by because i wanted it to be perfect & i have fuckin jack shit to show for it. im just gonna Do it

and for my final resolution, along those same lines, i want to work on comics this year. i feel like comics are the ultimate combination of art and writing, at least for me. i need to know how to structure a story as well as put visuals to it, get a lot better at visual storytelling. i want to get a feel for how to lay out panels and how to pace things so that the story flows smoothly while remaining engaging and hitting all the beats it needs to, and just. idk i feel like such a beginner when it comes to comics and if that’s something i really want to do then i need to get started on really learning it, you know?

something that i feel like was helping me was actually redrawing pages of comics that i like; it’s one thing to study a comic by reading it & paying attention to things like layout and borders, but when i started redrawing a page of mp100, for example, i really got a close-up sense of what it’s like to actually... do it. because if you’re actually drawing the thing out for yourself, you can’t skip any details accidentally because you have to pay attention to everything if you want to replicate it accurately (or at least you have to see what’s going on in the original to be able to change it to whatever you want to change it to)

so i think this year im gonna do more comic studies, redraw some pages from my faves to see what’s really going on, and hopefully become more familiar with the process of making comics. i also want to making short comics of my own, which is where the storytelling comes in- the more creative elements as opposed to the technical aspects. i’ve had a few ideas for short comics in the past but i haven’t actually made them for a similar reason to the whole writing thing. just perfectionism in general. i need to let myself make shitty comics to be able to get to the good ones, so like. practice. experimentation. all that kind of stuff

anyway that’s pretty much it for resolutions this year? at least anything relating to art & writing. there are some that im confident i can do and some that im feeling a little shakier about but im at least willing to give them a shot and hopefully by the end of the year i’ll have made progress i can be proud of