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Another reply to someone on the MangaRevolution forums asking how to learn to draw better, reposting here in case I want to refer to it later.
TELOPHASE INFODUMP HO!
Practice and observation are essential to learning how to do art, but there are other things that can help you improve as well. Note that is not instead of practice and observation, it is in addition to.
Yeah. It's going to be hard work. Damn hard. But improvement in ANY art, craft, or skill, takes hard work. If you're looking for something easy, art ain't it. Content yourself with drawing stuff for your own happiness and don't worry about improvement if you want easy. Ain't nothing wrong with that.
But if you are not satisfied with your skill, and you want more, you're going to have to commit to work. Especially if you want to improve quickly, or you're considering going pro. You can do it slowly, and improve over years and decades, or you can focus and apply yourself and improve over months. It all depends on how much it's worth to you.
Anyway.
One way: get your artwork critiqued, especially by a professional. I AM NOT KNOCKING AMATEURS OR THEIR CRITIQUE (and I am not saying that all pros know what they're doing when it comes to other people's art, either!): it helps a lot to get different opinions on how a picture should proceed. It's just that there tends to be a different approach from people with different levels of experience, and you shouldn't restrict your crits to just one or the other. In my experience, amateurs tend to give me good crit on how to improve an INDIVIDUAL picture. The pros give me advice on how to improve ALL my pictures - they're better at examining a whole body or work and seeing the general trends of good and bad, which tends to be better for me in the long run.
(BTW, all crits are opinions. Unless you're getting paid or a grade and the person paying you or grading you wants you to do something, in which case it's now become a lesson in How To Act Like A Professional And Satisfy Your Client. Which is an important part of art. But you need to exercise your OWN critical eye on all advice you get, and decide what applies to your work and what doesn't. )
How do you get pros to crit your work? Take an art class, especially in a medium you're unfamiliar with - sculpture, phtography, graphic design. That makes your brain go out of your comfort zone and stretches it, giving you new ideas that you take back to your preferred media. Get more exposure to different art teachers, also - every one is different, and many are crazy in different ways, so you need to expose yourself to a wide variety of opinions and teaching styles.
Go to SF, anime, or comic conventions and bring your sketchbooks or portfolio - many artists are willing to look at one or more artworks of yours and give you advice (especially if you buy a print or commission from them!). Also, watch them as they work at their table. Ask them, if they're amenable to conversation, what their process is and why they're making the decisions they're making. Think of the cost of the convention as tuition - it's special training, as the martial artists call it. :)
Get a table yourself at a convention and open for commissions, or offer free commissions online to people. The requests will kick you out of your comfort zone, and the sense of being obligated to give someone the picture will give you a deadline and pressure to get it done and get it right.
Look at art. Not just online. Go to the library and get one of those huge, back-breaking tomes that reproduce full-color plates of paintings and sculpture. Look through it, making note of what you like and don't like. Do quick sketches of the paintings to (a) remind you of them later and (b) work out how the artist solved problems. If you're lucky enough to have a university with an art department that has showings of student art, or are near an art museum, go there and look at the stuff. It's a modern art museum and you hate modern art? No prob! Go there and figure out why you hate it! Pick one piece and stare at it for a while. Is there any small thing you like, or at least don't hate, about it? Put yourself into the mind of the artist. Why did he or she do that? Look at the texture, color, and composition. Bring a small sketchbook and sketch it out.
Also, start critiquing other people's work. And not "This is nice" or "The anatomy is off." WHY is it nice? WHAT is off about the anatomy? HOW can it be improved? If your crit is just one or two sentences, that's too short! Nobody says you need to actually *give* the crit to the person, if you're worried about them exploding at you. The important part is developing and exercising your critical eye, not how the person takes it.
And just as important: what WORKS with the picture? What did the artist do correctly? Look at the other critique left on the picture. Do you agree with them? Why? If you don't agree with them, ask yourself why not. Is it because they're telling the artist what *they'd* do to complete the pic? Or is it because they're looking at the wrong part of the picture? Or are they misunderstanding the purpose of the artwork? Are they approaching it from an anime-style point of view and the picture works better as a traditional style? (Or because they're just insane? There's always a few of those.)*
If someone gives you crit that you feel doesn't fit your picture, or another picture you're looking at, ask them why they say that (politely!). You may find some insight there that allows you to find what's REALLY wrong with the picture and fix it - the odd thing about critique is that many times what LOOKS wrong with a picture is not what's REALLY wrong with it. Those times where you fix and re-fix something and it STILL doesn't look right? It's probably not the actual problem. Stand back and look at the rest of the picture for the REAL problem.
"But wait!" you say! "This is not helping me! I am not learning what makes my own artwork better!" Well, no. Not directly. What you are learning is how to LOOK at artwork and SEE what is really wrong with it - how to break it down into components (composition, color, light, anatomy, rhythm, etc.) and then how to put it back together and look at it as a whole. That is really really hard to do with your own artwork, because you're not looking at it directly: you're looking at it through a filter of your own preconceptions, your emotions, what you were trying to do, etc. Once you can divorce yourself from what you put on the page/screen, it's *much* easier to see what you're doing wrong and what you're doing right.
--
* Example of a crit that I didn't agree with: in art of people there are those of us who think that the character and mood are paramount, and those who think that the accurate depiction of the character is paramount. (And those who fall in the middle, but I'm ignoring them for now.) Over on DA a few years ago I got in an argument with a person (not the artist) who critiqued a picture of Sesshoumaru from Inu-Yasha.
The other person said that his shoulder armor thing was too big. I said no: that the picture wasn't supposed to be an accurate portrait of Sesshoumaru (it wasn't even in Takahashi's style!) - the point was to exaggerate Sesshoumaru's ferocity and power, as his facial expression and the dark, powerful areas of the background indicated, and the exaggerated spiky armor worked perfectly with that.
Neither of us backed down from our position, and the argument eventually ended. Presumably the artist read through it and decided which one of us he or she agreed with and corrected the picture accordingly. Or maybe decided we were both completely nuts and did something else, which is always an option.
TELOPHASE INFODUMP HO!
Practice and observation are essential to learning how to do art, but there are other things that can help you improve as well. Note that is not instead of practice and observation, it is in addition to.
Yeah. It's going to be hard work. Damn hard. But improvement in ANY art, craft, or skill, takes hard work. If you're looking for something easy, art ain't it. Content yourself with drawing stuff for your own happiness and don't worry about improvement if you want easy. Ain't nothing wrong with that.
But if you are not satisfied with your skill, and you want more, you're going to have to commit to work. Especially if you want to improve quickly, or you're considering going pro. You can do it slowly, and improve over years and decades, or you can focus and apply yourself and improve over months. It all depends on how much it's worth to you.
Anyway.
One way: get your artwork critiqued, especially by a professional. I AM NOT KNOCKING AMATEURS OR THEIR CRITIQUE (and I am not saying that all pros know what they're doing when it comes to other people's art, either!): it helps a lot to get different opinions on how a picture should proceed. It's just that there tends to be a different approach from people with different levels of experience, and you shouldn't restrict your crits to just one or the other. In my experience, amateurs tend to give me good crit on how to improve an INDIVIDUAL picture. The pros give me advice on how to improve ALL my pictures - they're better at examining a whole body or work and seeing the general trends of good and bad, which tends to be better for me in the long run.
(BTW, all crits are opinions. Unless you're getting paid or a grade and the person paying you or grading you wants you to do something, in which case it's now become a lesson in How To Act Like A Professional And Satisfy Your Client. Which is an important part of art. But you need to exercise your OWN critical eye on all advice you get, and decide what applies to your work and what doesn't. )
How do you get pros to crit your work? Take an art class, especially in a medium you're unfamiliar with - sculpture, phtography, graphic design. That makes your brain go out of your comfort zone and stretches it, giving you new ideas that you take back to your preferred media. Get more exposure to different art teachers, also - every one is different, and many are crazy in different ways, so you need to expose yourself to a wide variety of opinions and teaching styles.
Go to SF, anime, or comic conventions and bring your sketchbooks or portfolio - many artists are willing to look at one or more artworks of yours and give you advice (especially if you buy a print or commission from them!). Also, watch them as they work at their table. Ask them, if they're amenable to conversation, what their process is and why they're making the decisions they're making. Think of the cost of the convention as tuition - it's special training, as the martial artists call it. :)
Get a table yourself at a convention and open for commissions, or offer free commissions online to people. The requests will kick you out of your comfort zone, and the sense of being obligated to give someone the picture will give you a deadline and pressure to get it done and get it right.
Look at art. Not just online. Go to the library and get one of those huge, back-breaking tomes that reproduce full-color plates of paintings and sculpture. Look through it, making note of what you like and don't like. Do quick sketches of the paintings to (a) remind you of them later and (b) work out how the artist solved problems. If you're lucky enough to have a university with an art department that has showings of student art, or are near an art museum, go there and look at the stuff. It's a modern art museum and you hate modern art? No prob! Go there and figure out why you hate it! Pick one piece and stare at it for a while. Is there any small thing you like, or at least don't hate, about it? Put yourself into the mind of the artist. Why did he or she do that? Look at the texture, color, and composition. Bring a small sketchbook and sketch it out.
Also, start critiquing other people's work. And not "This is nice" or "The anatomy is off." WHY is it nice? WHAT is off about the anatomy? HOW can it be improved? If your crit is just one or two sentences, that's too short! Nobody says you need to actually *give* the crit to the person, if you're worried about them exploding at you. The important part is developing and exercising your critical eye, not how the person takes it.
And just as important: what WORKS with the picture? What did the artist do correctly? Look at the other critique left on the picture. Do you agree with them? Why? If you don't agree with them, ask yourself why not. Is it because they're telling the artist what *they'd* do to complete the pic? Or is it because they're looking at the wrong part of the picture? Or are they misunderstanding the purpose of the artwork? Are they approaching it from an anime-style point of view and the picture works better as a traditional style? (Or because they're just insane? There's always a few of those.)*
If someone gives you crit that you feel doesn't fit your picture, or another picture you're looking at, ask them why they say that (politely!). You may find some insight there that allows you to find what's REALLY wrong with the picture and fix it - the odd thing about critique is that many times what LOOKS wrong with a picture is not what's REALLY wrong with it. Those times where you fix and re-fix something and it STILL doesn't look right? It's probably not the actual problem. Stand back and look at the rest of the picture for the REAL problem.
"But wait!" you say! "This is not helping me! I am not learning what makes my own artwork better!" Well, no. Not directly. What you are learning is how to LOOK at artwork and SEE what is really wrong with it - how to break it down into components (composition, color, light, anatomy, rhythm, etc.) and then how to put it back together and look at it as a whole. That is really really hard to do with your own artwork, because you're not looking at it directly: you're looking at it through a filter of your own preconceptions, your emotions, what you were trying to do, etc. Once you can divorce yourself from what you put on the page/screen, it's *much* easier to see what you're doing wrong and what you're doing right.
--
* Example of a crit that I didn't agree with: in art of people there are those of us who think that the character and mood are paramount, and those who think that the accurate depiction of the character is paramount. (And those who fall in the middle, but I'm ignoring them for now.) Over on DA a few years ago I got in an argument with a person (not the artist) who critiqued a picture of Sesshoumaru from Inu-Yasha.
The other person said that his shoulder armor thing was too big. I said no: that the picture wasn't supposed to be an accurate portrait of Sesshoumaru (it wasn't even in Takahashi's style!) - the point was to exaggerate Sesshoumaru's ferocity and power, as his facial expression and the dark, powerful areas of the background indicated, and the exaggerated spiky armor worked perfectly with that.
Neither of us backed down from our position, and the argument eventually ended. Presumably the artist read through it and decided which one of us he or she agreed with and corrected the picture accordingly. Or maybe decided we were both completely nuts and did something else, which is always an option.
no subject
I like the points you made to the commenter who didn't want to go study pictures in a museum. Other forms of artistic expression are the same. The time I spent analyzing C.J. Cherryh's writing style for Yuletide last year was probably the best time I ever spent, as far as improving my writing goes.