How to Draw

So, I got a PM on Newgrounds from someone asking my opinion on their art and how they might improve. I ended up typing a bit of a novel and I thought I’d copy it here in the hope that it might help out some other people too.

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Let me ask you two things, first of all, is my ART THAT BAD? i mean, i know that i suck, but i’ve seen worse on the Art Portal, i mean, its not worthy not even 3 Stars? xD

Second, dude, seeing as you are an amazing ilustrator, what do you suggest for me to get better?Besides drawing myself XD. Thanks man, cya later.

(P.S – Sorry for my crappy English, it’s not my primary language XD)

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It’s not terrible, it just looks inexperienced. As long as you like doing it, keep working and you’ll definitely improve. Everyone starts from the same place, trust me. The most important thing you can do as a creative person is develop a thick skin. No one will ever appreciate what you make as much as you do, and they most likely won’t understand why you’re doing it. I know it’s fun to get opinions and it feels good when people say they like something you did, but the funny thing is, by the time you are able to make things that other people appreciate, you won’t really care whether they do or not. The most important thing to do is keep working and take all criticism with a grain of salt. Who cares if no one in the world likes your work; if YOU like it you might as well keep doing it. Why the hell should anyone else’s approval matter, right?

The best route you can take when learning to draw is looking at things in real life and drawing them as closely to the original as you can. It’s not really all that fun, but every time you do it you’ll see big improvements so it’s certainly rewarding. Pick stuff you like to draw (most people like faces, which is why I suggested a self portrait earlier) and really study how it works in three dimensions. Look for the forms, you know? Break it apart mentally into specific bulges and cubes and spheres. The biggest leap any would be draftsman has to make is breaking the 2D plane of the page. You’ll never do that copying other people’s drawings or even photographs because all the hard work is done for you. Don’t worry about realistic smooth shading or textures or colors, worry about making you drawing pop off the page as much as you can.

When you’re starting a drawing, fill up the entire drawing area with the largest forms first. If you’re drawing a face, don’t start with the eyes, start with the whole head. Work from the outside in. Work from largest to smallest. Really study the object and try to figure out how it all works, you know? It’s mental work; you’re trying to unlock a secret. Everything in the world that you see can be flattened into a perfect image, but the mind isn’t scanner or a camera, you never just look at something and draw what you see. You look at something and understand the forms and how they work in 3D space, and that will allow you to draw it perfectly.

Measuring is really important when you’re starting with your investigation. Take a straight object, like your pencil, and compare the size of one piece of an object with another piece of it and trust those proportions. At example, the human torso is usually about 3 heads high. This means if you hold out a pencil and mark off the height of someone head, 3 of that length will be the same height as the shoulders to the waist. Your mind is full of assumptions of how big or small certain features are and that will mess up your drawing until you’ve memorized the real values. You can use your pencil to find angles too, like the angle the eyes tilt, or the angle between the corner of the mouth and the earlobe. Be brutal with your measurements, and if something is wrong, erase it and fix it. Practice drawings are practice and should be beaten into submission with no remorse. If the drawing is full of ugly gray smudges when it’s done at least it’ll be correct.

Also, remember that you are not drawing “things” specifically. When you draw a face, you aren’t drawing eyes and a nose and a mouth, you’re drawing a flattened picture; drawings are incredibly distorted compared to common assumptions of how things look. You brain already thinks it knows what an eye looks like, and if you let this interfere with what you’re drawing you’ll mess up what’s actually there.

Hold your hand in an interesting shape and look at it with one eye closed (this will flatten the image). If you look at it for more than a few seconds and think about it as an image rather than a hand, you’ll start to see strange things. For example, one of my fingers is pointing away from me, and the whole height and width of that finger is the same size as the knuckle on the finger next to it. You’d never think to draw that unless you knew how the finger worked three-dimensionally in space.

I could go on (there are whole books written on the subject, after all) but I think this’ll give you somewhere to start. The most important thing you can do is study the dimensionality of objects. When you sit down to draw things, try to memorize the forms. Look at what you’re drawing for a full minute each time you do, take in all the little nuances, find the measurements, examine the 3D shapes and study how they flatten when you close one eye, then draw as much as you can remember. This’ll stock up your brain and eventually you won’t need references to draw dimensionally.