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my progress has always been slow because my brain is bad and so is my body. i'm always fighting chronic pain and i'm always fighting ADHD/depression/anxiety, which leaves me with very little tolerance for frustration or feeling like i'm bad at things. i've also been slowly unraveling the fact that i suffer from dyscalculia, which for some sufferers makes it harder to judge distance, size, etc. at a glance. i've never been able to do that shit. it's part of why i'm so afraid of driving-- when someone says "start getting ready to stop 100 feet before the stop sign" i don't know what that fucking means. i don't LACK visual memory, and i don't think i have aphantasia, but i'm definitely weak in that department, too. basically my brain and body are fighting for me to be bad at drawing but i am always fighting to be good at it.
my biggest obstacle has always been frustration. i can't grind. physically or mentally, it just doesn't work. i miss my figure drawing classes, but i don't miss homework or deadlines or any of that.
since 2020-ish i've made some wild progress and i think i can attribute it to 3 things:
1. i started posing and tracing over 3D models
first with Daz 3D, when that was the only thing i knew of that was free and had poseable/kinda adjustable models. then i moved up to DivineDoll, excellent standalone software. then i got into Clip Studio Paint, with its huge library of user-made poses. (2020 is when i got myself a nice tablet and started using CSP.)
"tracing is cheating" is a common mentality of the inexperienced and immature. obviously you shouldn't be yanking from other artists, that's rude and shitty. but tracing reference that's made to be reference is fair fuckin game and pros do it all the time. it's also a skill! the way i do it these days is a lot more like just using the model as a base sketch and then doing a second draft over it. if you just follow the lines exactly, you'll end up with that weird stiff WikiHow look, and your style won't show through. but if you learn to use the model as a guide, more as reference for where things should be and less as an exact outline of what you should be doing, it's super helpful. basically it's like looking at reference without the part where i look away from my reference image and my brain instantly dumps everything it was seeing.
learning to pose the models also teaches you a lot. you learn what angles things look more or less readable at. if you start using furniture and other environment pieces, you learn how to compose a scene. it cuts out a lot of the trial-and-error (and thus a lot of the physical pain and frustration, for me). i had given up on learning to draw hands well; now i can freehand a lot of hands quite nicely because i've been tracing them from 3D models for years. there's still stuff i struggle a lot with-- the head at angles can be a serious chore, and i'm still not great at foreshortening, but i occasionally even get that stuff right. and the more i do it, the closer i get to being able to do it consistently. my visual library is getting a lot stronger.
2. i started very intentionally eating nutritious meals of visual media
since 2022, i've had an almost-weekly ritual with a local friend who is also an artist. we get together on one of our days off and we watch six. hours. of. anime. straight. i am not kidding. almost every week we do this. i think less than this would be sufficient but this is what works for us. and while most of our picks are based on What Sounds Good, we also kinda pick stuff with the intent of like, what we want to be studying right now. this keeps us from hurting ourselves drawing too much AND feeds our creativity. i set up a game controller to take screenshots, and now i have Too Many Anime Screenshots. i dig through them all the time. i need to draw x. where have i seen an anime do x? how do the pros handle this in like, a low-detail readable way?
i'll admit my diet is MOSTLY anime and manga-- that's my bread and butter and it's what i'm leaning on stylistically for my current big project. but i've been aiming to get some other stuff in there. i have a separate weekly event online where a couple of friends and i watch anime AND some tokusatsu now, and i try to get some western animation/comics and live action movies into my brain on at least a semi-regular basis.
the most important part, i think, is that i approach all this stuff WITH INTENTION. i'm always looking for something i can learn. it doesn't hamper my enjoyment at all to do this, tbh it's more fun for me to think about/analyze the artistic choices made along with the thing i'm watching.
this has expanded my taste, my attention span, my visual library, and it's taught me a lot about story structure.
3. i stopped trying to make finished pieces all the time and mostly focused on sketching a lot
nothing made me get better at drawing the Iron Company cast faster than working on an animatic.
i can't look at it now. it makes me cringe. you can dig it up from my youtube channel yourself, it's still there. but that project was like hey. go go go go. you do not have the fucking time to linger. just get something down that is GOOD ENOUGH and then do it again and again and again.
another practice i've been maintaining is whenever i think of a cool/funny idea, or see a meme where i go "haha that's my characters," or whatever, i sketch it real quick. sometimes, if i'm tired or in pain, i don't even sketch it-- i just pose some models on a canvas for later and then come back to it when i'm feeling better. doing a bunch of goofy little sketches got me farther faster than years of feeling like i had to finish things. you can just come back to stuff later even if you can't do it to your satisfaction right now.
i didn't really have a greater thesis here but since it's unfortunately top-of-mind this week again due to sifting through a bunch of AI trash on itch looking for ren'py tools, here's a brief rant: this is part of why i have no fucking sympathy for people who turn to generative AI because they "can't draw," and why i'm disgusted by the suggestion that AI is "helpful for disabled people who want to make art." i'm disabled and i've been finding ways to do this shit myself, ethically, without using the water-guzzling planet-cooking plagiarism machine. i struggle a lot with my work, and the satisfaction i get from my successes is worth infinitely more than the hollow reward of telling a computer to do something and having it spit out an approximation of what i wanted. it's not that people who use genAI "can't draw". it's that they don't want to actually confront the amount of work, failure and problem-solving that drawing presents (which is fine, i don't wanna learn plenty of things) OR they don't want to pay an artist to do work they need done (which is not fine; fuck off). i have chronic pain in my drawing hand, my brain clinically sucks at lots of stuff in a way that makes drawing way harder than it would otherwise be, and i'm finding ways around it. fuck, when i had a CTS flareup last year, i made Potion Stand Story mostly without drawing, and i did it without lowering myself to using genAI for anything. struggling has, in its own way, expanded my horizons. so i'll always take the struggle of making art myself over the fantasy of a computer doing it for me.
my biggest obstacle has always been frustration. i can't grind. physically or mentally, it just doesn't work. i miss my figure drawing classes, but i don't miss homework or deadlines or any of that.
since 2020-ish i've made some wild progress and i think i can attribute it to 3 things:
1. i started posing and tracing over 3D models
first with Daz 3D, when that was the only thing i knew of that was free and had poseable/kinda adjustable models. then i moved up to DivineDoll, excellent standalone software. then i got into Clip Studio Paint, with its huge library of user-made poses. (2020 is when i got myself a nice tablet and started using CSP.)
"tracing is cheating" is a common mentality of the inexperienced and immature. obviously you shouldn't be yanking from other artists, that's rude and shitty. but tracing reference that's made to be reference is fair fuckin game and pros do it all the time. it's also a skill! the way i do it these days is a lot more like just using the model as a base sketch and then doing a second draft over it. if you just follow the lines exactly, you'll end up with that weird stiff WikiHow look, and your style won't show through. but if you learn to use the model as a guide, more as reference for where things should be and less as an exact outline of what you should be doing, it's super helpful. basically it's like looking at reference without the part where i look away from my reference image and my brain instantly dumps everything it was seeing.
learning to pose the models also teaches you a lot. you learn what angles things look more or less readable at. if you start using furniture and other environment pieces, you learn how to compose a scene. it cuts out a lot of the trial-and-error (and thus a lot of the physical pain and frustration, for me). i had given up on learning to draw hands well; now i can freehand a lot of hands quite nicely because i've been tracing them from 3D models for years. there's still stuff i struggle a lot with-- the head at angles can be a serious chore, and i'm still not great at foreshortening, but i occasionally even get that stuff right. and the more i do it, the closer i get to being able to do it consistently. my visual library is getting a lot stronger.
2. i started very intentionally eating nutritious meals of visual media
since 2022, i've had an almost-weekly ritual with a local friend who is also an artist. we get together on one of our days off and we watch six. hours. of. anime. straight. i am not kidding. almost every week we do this. i think less than this would be sufficient but this is what works for us. and while most of our picks are based on What Sounds Good, we also kinda pick stuff with the intent of like, what we want to be studying right now. this keeps us from hurting ourselves drawing too much AND feeds our creativity. i set up a game controller to take screenshots, and now i have Too Many Anime Screenshots. i dig through them all the time. i need to draw x. where have i seen an anime do x? how do the pros handle this in like, a low-detail readable way?
i'll admit my diet is MOSTLY anime and manga-- that's my bread and butter and it's what i'm leaning on stylistically for my current big project. but i've been aiming to get some other stuff in there. i have a separate weekly event online where a couple of friends and i watch anime AND some tokusatsu now, and i try to get some western animation/comics and live action movies into my brain on at least a semi-regular basis.
the most important part, i think, is that i approach all this stuff WITH INTENTION. i'm always looking for something i can learn. it doesn't hamper my enjoyment at all to do this, tbh it's more fun for me to think about/analyze the artistic choices made along with the thing i'm watching.
this has expanded my taste, my attention span, my visual library, and it's taught me a lot about story structure.
3. i stopped trying to make finished pieces all the time and mostly focused on sketching a lot
nothing made me get better at drawing the Iron Company cast faster than working on an animatic.
i can't look at it now. it makes me cringe. you can dig it up from my youtube channel yourself, it's still there. but that project was like hey. go go go go. you do not have the fucking time to linger. just get something down that is GOOD ENOUGH and then do it again and again and again.
another practice i've been maintaining is whenever i think of a cool/funny idea, or see a meme where i go "haha that's my characters," or whatever, i sketch it real quick. sometimes, if i'm tired or in pain, i don't even sketch it-- i just pose some models on a canvas for later and then come back to it when i'm feeling better. doing a bunch of goofy little sketches got me farther faster than years of feeling like i had to finish things. you can just come back to stuff later even if you can't do it to your satisfaction right now.
i didn't really have a greater thesis here but since it's unfortunately top-of-mind this week again due to sifting through a bunch of AI trash on itch looking for ren'py tools, here's a brief rant: this is part of why i have no fucking sympathy for people who turn to generative AI because they "can't draw," and why i'm disgusted by the suggestion that AI is "helpful for disabled people who want to make art." i'm disabled and i've been finding ways to do this shit myself, ethically, without using the water-guzzling planet-cooking plagiarism machine. i struggle a lot with my work, and the satisfaction i get from my successes is worth infinitely more than the hollow reward of telling a computer to do something and having it spit out an approximation of what i wanted. it's not that people who use genAI "can't draw". it's that they don't want to actually confront the amount of work, failure and problem-solving that drawing presents (which is fine, i don't wanna learn plenty of things) OR they don't want to pay an artist to do work they need done (which is not fine; fuck off). i have chronic pain in my drawing hand, my brain clinically sucks at lots of stuff in a way that makes drawing way harder than it would otherwise be, and i'm finding ways around it. fuck, when i had a CTS flareup last year, i made Potion Stand Story mostly without drawing, and i did it without lowering myself to using genAI for anything. struggling has, in its own way, expanded my horizons. so i'll always take the struggle of making art myself over the fantasy of a computer doing it for me.
