created
May '22last reply
Jun '22- 42
replies
- 1.9k
views
- 15
users
- 58
likes
- 7
links
Improving art isn’t as simple as “just making it better”, but your style seems to be doubting itself. The lines and colors are cartoony while the proportions seem to be aiming for realism. This can be a fine stylization, but it seems like it isn’t being done on purpose. That’s just nitpicking though. One way to help improve is to focus more on shaped than lines
How do I make the colors less cartoony? I'm definitely not going for a "cartoon" style. Though I wouldn't describe what I'm making as realism either, more comic style.
How to make your art better?
Have you tried making things different? Think about the parts that you dislike about your art, then proceed to think, is the method what is annoying you? Is the result? Can you do something different if the current shape is not of your liking?
Try experimenting even if you have those feelings of "I don't want to fail" / "I don't want to make something I don't like", there is no one pointing a gun at you therefore, you can make mistakes, you can redraw as many times it takes you until you're satisfied.
Have you tried checking out the internet? Different videos, tutorials, classes, different artists from all around the globe sharing their methods and even with different teaching techniques or procedures. So in case you can't understand someone or their ways are not comfortable to you, you can always check someone else. Those who don't search won't find, it's a matter of typing, watching, trying, theorizing, coming up with conclussions, repeat. And even, sometimes there won't be answers ready to satisfy you, or to explain to you how to do things exactly so you are satisfied with your results, sometimes there is not even an answer and the only solution for you, it would be do things differently than you're used to, even if you don't know how.
You won't become better in a matter of weeks, or months, or even years. Everyone learns at a different speed and not everyone can use the same method, so there is no need to struggle nor get anxious as if there is a time limit. But you can be analytical, you can judge your work and you're the one who should know what to fix based on the things that you dislike in order to like them, what is that you hate about your art and then try to change it, but in order to do so you need to leave your comfort zone and do things differently.
As well, don't compare yourself to others, if you compare yourself to others then ask yourself what is that that you like about other people's artwork that make you hate yours. Try to replicate, try to study the art, try to watch if possible how others do things so you can have an idea and try to incorporate things to your practice, see what elements can you incorporate, or what elements you discover you can do in more ways than just one.
I cannot give you exact paths or answers, as I'm the kind of artist that back when started and asked more experienced artists, the only reply I got was: "Keep practicing" (just that, not even half of what I typed here lol)
Then that's when it clicked to me "What should I practice?", but I didn't receive answers, therefore, I had to come up with them on my own, I had to become critical of my own work and carve my way up
The thing is I can't really think of things that are overly wrong about it, but when I look at other peoples art I realize what I'm drawing is noticeably worse than that.
Can you link to an artist that you really love - the person whose art style you want to have? It would be easier to give pointers knowing what you're going for.
Also, I'd highly recommend doing studies of the professional art you like and think is great. It's easier to understand what's going on when you try to replicate it rather than just looking!
That’s darker, desaturated is closer to gray than closer to black if that makes sense.
The line in the middle shows what saturation means. I’m not trying to imply you need to make all your colors muddy and gray, but making most of them a bit more desaturated except for small areas you want to really pop will definitely help achieve art that is a little easier on the eyes (sometimes you do want bright colors though, I don’t know when these times are as they depend on you, though)
You say that by comparing yourself your work is "noticeably worse" and yet you cannot point out one single thing about what it is what you dislike about it? Have you tried then asking what are the things that you like about other people's work? Why you consider them "noticeably better"?
If you cannot make a good use to comparison nor make it a tool for your own benefit, then you'll need to stop comparing yourself to others since it's only autosabotage and just a way to discourage yourself and making you hate your work and current abilities more.
The internet is vast, whatever you wanna learn to later incorporate in your work is there, coloring technique, color theory, lightning and shadows, textures, prespective, depth, anatomy, different styles, even drawing in traditional instead of digital or mixing both techniques, or even more methods, etc.
Creativity is not only having ideas about what to draw, but as well the innovation of solving problems, but you won't be able to use creativity if you don't nurture yourself, Creativity requires knowledge, learning and studying so you can later apply it to anything you're struggling with and as well, creativity strikes when you're already working, instead of hoping that others gives you concrete answers to questions that you can't even give a proper shape (And even if you did, there aren't always answers that are 2+2=4).
Going to say you are at the basics of art. You need to learn gesture drawing, the form of the human body, take a life drawing class, practice a lot, and then worry about a style or look for a comic. Your journey is just starting, don't put the cart in front of the horse.
I actually found the saturation setting on my drawing app and turned the saturation down, and that's how I got the colors I did. Like I turned this setting all the way down and it turned a solid grey color. Turning it darker doesn't actually make the colors less vibrant in my opinion, and instead he looks like he has the same colors on his body, but in a darker room.
Then practice, educate yourself, investigate those aspects and figure out how to make your art look better. As well, incorporate all the things you're learning, even the ones you dislike, realism, shapes, inanimate objects are important as well.
I am not sure what to say about your style because I am not sure what direction you want to go in. The first one looks like Doug
Which has a more cartoony and “rubber hose” look.
Cartoon, anime, realism, etc. whatever style you are going for, it doesn’t hurt to study anatomy and do gesture drawings. There is a saying “you have to know the rules before you break them”.
I would also recommend just experimenting with a bunch of different styles. Good practice is drawing your characters in other people’s style. It will help you see the little details that goes into someone’s style and sort of makes you look at things from a different perspective.
I also would recommend pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. This does go hand in hand with experimenting but I am also asking you to draw things like hands and shoes and other things like that. The only way I got better at drawing hands was forcing myself to draw them.
That is called still life. That is the start of fundamentals. You will learn pressure control, perspective, lighting, and arm/wrist movement. That's where you start. You can't just go straight to more advance art not having a foundation or you will just learn mistakes and reinforce them by repeating them. Patience. No one learned to draw well in a year or two, it takes decades.
Life drawing can sound lame and boring at first, but what you're doing is learning to see the subject and recognize details and apply them to a drawing. These are super important skills as a good basis for drawing. You will be able to apply this skill to figure drawing, coloring, gestures, lighting, etc, all sorts of things as you level up as an artist. The more you do stuff like this, you'll see vast improvements in your art. Like many other people said, it takes a lifetime of learning and nonstop practice. Even professionals at the top of their craft still practice life drawing to keep their basic skills sharp. You can't build a solid house on an unstable base.
I am aware of what a still life is. But the way the class assigns them I don't think they're very helpful. I don't feel any better at drawing than I was at the start of the class, and drawing the negative space of a chair felt like a waste of time to be since it wasn't connected to anything else. I don't feel like the still life's made me any better at shading and value than I was before drawing them either, and even if they did I mostly draw digital art.
The point of negative space drawings are forcing your brain to look at things from a different perspective. Most beginners tend to just see and draw things as outlines but struggle when it comes to making those outlines look right. Negetive space has you look at shapes and the shapes within forms.
Like if you struggle with hands, knowing negative space can help with this. Instead of seeing it as this complex thing, you are seeing it simply as a shape.
That's because the teacher is trying to train your brain to observe the world and see how objects are placed in a space. It also helps you learn about composition lines which can help with observation. If you start doing complex shading to a drawing with bad composition, it's not going to look right.
Ok, I'm going to treat you like an adult as I don't know what age you are. If you are taking a still life drawing class and you are not getting better, that is on you. There is only two reasons. One: you think you have already learn about the stuff in class and have nothing more to learn from the class set-up. This means you just need to push yourself and ignore the class. Work on what you need to work on. Unless you are drawing photo realistic art, you can still learn. Two: The teacher isn't teaching correctly. This is a hard one as it's very easy to blame some one else for you not learning. But ask questions. See where you are weak and ask the teacher to help fix it. It's their job. Be the best in your class, blow away the teacher with how awesome you are. Go above and beyond.
My point is you need to just sit down and draw in a formal setting. Stop drawing character like the above. You are not at a point that is going to help you. Your form needs work. A class gives you a structure to learn how to draw as you work on things in a set progression. Drawing is not talent, it's a skill. Skills need to be learned.
I think it's my fault actually. I struggled to get these drawings done in a timely fashion, and ended up getting them in late and having to rush them for that reason. So I guess that limited my ability to learn from these.
Okay. But I feel like the negative space thing could still be seen through just the outlines, just in reverse, and a better way to learn is to try making art without lines.
Honestly, and I know this goes against what a lot of people are saying, I don't think you necessarily have to go through all of traditional drawing training to be good at drawing anything. Now, that does depend on what you want to draw, like if you want to draw almost perfectly realistic or semi realistic people it would be helpful to learn how to draw the folds of fabric and measure facial proportions like would be taught in a still life class.
Personally, I've been drawing for quite a few years and have only started taking classes within the last year. I think that the still life classes certainly helped me, particularly with backgrounds, but I think I was able to find my style beforehand. The only thing I could say about your drawings right now is they feel like you don't have a specific style in mind so they don't look confident. But that's something only practice will fix. Experimenting until you find what you like to draw should come first in my mind. While knowing how to draw realistically is nice, if someone wants to draw very stylized, I don't think they absolutely need to know how to draw a still life first.
Just keep practicing. You could watch some how to draw comics, manga youtube tutorials, or speedpaints.
There are 4 simple things you can do to improve your art, things you don´t need
a course for:
-use reference
-try to draw with more dynamic lines
-try to make everything you draw 3 dimensional
-colors: every color you are using is 100% saturated, you can check that in your drawing
app, pick a color and just put the saturation to 30% instead of 100%
Draw the same picture you drew with the lady holding the 2 guns with a reference.
Choose an interesting pose. Not straight on, try a reference which already looks interesting
and dynamic. Put it next to your drawing or try the line of action to train that.
Then try to draw with shapes instead of drawing the outlines, that will take a while
to learn that but that´s something that will make your art look better in the long run
here is a good resource for women holding guns
Sorry, but in that gun girl drawing I made she’s propelling herself into the air with grappling hooks, something that none of these poses are of, so I don’t think any of these poses will work for me since they’re all on the ground and stuff.
Art is more of a mindset than anything. Learned that the hard way. Unfortunately, nobody's born with these skills. It takes dedication and patience and the right attitude before putting the pencil on a paper.
I did plenty of mistakes and one of them comparing others and also, it's better getting things done than getting things perfect. By the way, perfection does suck. Imperfections make the work better.
Whether you call yourself good, bad, better, worse, all that crap doesn't matter as long as you're working on it. What are you afraid of? Sucking? I suck, as well, but hey, that doesn't matter.
Let me share this that got me back to drawing and got my confidence back:
My art went from this:
to this:
In 17/18 years.
Unfortunately, it doesn't happen overnight and everyone of us have their insecurities but I found ways to channel them. Use more of your mind when working and less emotions... keep the emotions in check and be the one who's in control.
Do I still have work to do? Absolutely. Learn structure... anatomy... find tutorials... find references... shading and most importantly... do art for you and once you get feedback... take the things that YOU need and leave the ones that don't matter that much. Work on it every single day. It's okay to be a bit selfish as an artist. It's gonna be a bumpy ride and make most of it. Work with what you have right now and improve on it and worry about the other parts when you get there.
Even if you made mistakes, OWN IT! Be proud of it!!! "YEAH! I DID THAT! WHAT ABOUT IT???"
Toss the "I can't do it" mindset in the trash and put on "BRING IT ON!!! I'M FUCKING DOING IT!!! I'M GONNA KICK ASS, BABY!!!!"
Many have given you answers, to simply make art better you have to draw alot! Just draw a lot what you want to draw, look at real life to learn anatomy better, to find what you like and want in a style you can always save pictures of those artists you like and break it down to what you like with their styles, is a person drawing eyes a way you really like, study that, is someone else drawing lines a certain way, study that part etc and eventually what defines you will show.
But those things will change a lot as well, you wont just wake up the next day and suddenly have your defined art style, the more we learn the more our style changes/evolves 
So when aiming to just generally improve at drawing, one of the most helpful pieces of advice I've found is:
Learn to draw fast first.
So before you get bogged down in trying to make every piece look very finished, or fiddling with small details on a piece, first get into the habit of drawing lots of small sketches; try to make it a daily habit or at least a few times a week. Get a sketchbook or a big digital canvas and just fill it up with sketches of poses, faces, things you see, just anything at all. These sketches are just for you, so they don't need to be perfect; if you make a mistake, just try again, maybe with a different approach, or note what you want to do differently next time. Do timed challenges like "I need to draw this in 5 minutes" and see what you can do with a timer. This will push you to think about the entire shape of the thing you're drawing first and teach you which details and lines do the most heavy-lifting.
Maybe you could join in the "Sketch a day" thread on the forums to keep motivated (but sometimes the quality of some people's sketches might feel intimidating, and I understand that. No pressure!). Some people like to keep their sketches mostly private (like me), but pretty much every artist should do them, whether they show them or not, or keep them or throw them away.
Get some good art books too. I think the art book that taught me the most is "Drawn to Life" by Walt Stanchfield. It's all the lecture notes the legendary animator used to train the animators who sparked the Disney Rennaisance in the 80s and it's just packed with wise advice for cartoonists. Another one that's FREE because it's old that's dated in attitude but still probably the best anatomical drawing book is Figure Drawing For All Its Worth by Loomis.
Also, please enjoy my tutorial hoard that I've collected on Pinterest:
I leave you with words I wrote at 11pm one night a number of years ago that went viral and then people started selling it on mugs and things without my permission:
Yes, certainly. I think that still life practice really is only needed for artist with more realistic styles that want to get even better faster. I think you can figure out a lot of things on your own without a class and a lot of professional artist, particularly those making a career online, have never taken an art class. Depending on your style and how fast you want to improve, taking classes isn't necessary at all
Refs are suppose to help you understand how to pose a character if you are stuck. Sometimes you might not find a perfect match to what you want and you may have to piece things together. But also just understanding anatomy and how a form exists in a space can help.
This is small details that can make a big difference
If you are looking for more of a cartoony style, I recommend looking up character sheets for animated shows. Just because something may look simple, it can still be drawn in a way that holds weight.
Quick question, how long did that sketch take you to make? The one I made took about an hour at least, maybe 2, but I know you definitely did not spend that much time drawing this or you wouldn't have done it.
I don't remember, maybe a few minutes, like 3. It's a rough sketch so those are not suppose to take a long time.
This is sort of what you practice with gesture drawings, where it's more important to get the form and worry about the fine details later.
When I do lineart, that takes a bit longer to do. But I always work from a sketch so I know what I am doing.
If I could do it that quickly my comic would be close to over by now. I never had a second step, I'd just fill in the person shaped color block and that would be it. I even had copy/paste models of the heads at all angles so I could drop them into the scene and draw the face on it, and only 1 of the 4 main characters faces took any effort to draw.
You might find this thread useful. It shows some of the preplanning that people use when making their comics/art.
Imma go ahead and disagree with anyone who says you don't need to study realism if you don't want to draw realism. My art usually looks6 like7 this3 - but the only reason it looks cohesive is because I can also do8 this10. A style is basically your brain's filter on how you perceive and re-interpret reality. You can't apply that filter when you don't understand what the things you're trying to re-interpret look like and/or what they do.
Now there are certain... more advanced things in drawing realism that you don't necessarily need to know how to do well if your goal is to stop at a particular style, but knowing realism will ALWAYS translate to better stylization (I don't, for example, render things super well... I theoretically know how to do it, but due to injury problems I choose to not devote my limited drawing time to something so time-consuming. I get around it because my art is stylized and I essentially just hide my weakness inside something I'm better at, but I would absolutely produce better stylized art if I felt more confident in rendering real objects).
To get better at art, you will need to train yourself to think about the 3-dimensional shape of everything you're drawing. Life drawing, studying shapes, drawing "boring" objects allows you to study something that's a more simple shape and understand how the light and its environment interacts with this shape. Eventually you will be able to piece these shapes together into more interesting objects, and over time your brain will automatically break down everything you're drawing into simple shapes and re-assemble them into a cohesive whole that looks "right" even though everything about it is technically "wrong".
Art is kind of like any other skill - you have to do the boring, grindey, learning bits and actively think about what you're doing while you're doing the boring learning bits. It's tough and it's not a whole lot of fun. But the reward is being able to draw things and feel pleased about them. You don't have to throw yourself into the doldrums (although if you want better art FAST, this is how you do it). You can just start with simple, quick studies thrown in-between working on more "fun" projects. You can also throw in the studies into your fun projects (though I don't recommend it). Do a shape and a couple 2-3 minute gesture studies as warm-ups before you draw - and remember, you want to stay ACTIVELY engaged with your study and what you're doing, instead of allowing yourself to go on autopilot and hope to get this boring thing done quickly so that you can do something else.