What do you do differently now?

[kaetana]

1) Ever since I got a tablet I do almost exclusively digital drawing...I have fairly shaky hands so being able to zoom in helps me get better line quality than I ever could drawing on paper haha
2) I got a lot better about using lots of references to help things look more accurate, including having dedicated folders for all my characters with face reference at lots of different angles (I'm kinda faceblind and before I started doing this, I could never draw a character's face the same way twice)
3) I've gotten gradually more bold with my shading, and working on trying to understand light from different directions rather than always doing the same directly from the front light I used to do

[GesuGesu]

Younger:
1) Draw eyes first, then rest of body
2) Either could only draw girls, or had a phase that I could only draw guys.
3) Actually tried pretty hard on originals with themes and composition
4) Traditional pencil, fineline, then pencil crayons on letter paper/sketchbook
5) Drew nearly once a day or more

Now:
1) Draw whole body sketch first, then fill in details
2) Draw anything for money. Guro, fetish, etc. I prefer drawing guys > girls in general
3) Usually draw people's OCs. Occasional fanart. Rarely original for the sake of original
4) 95% digital. I dislike wasting paper, so I avoid drawing on paper in the first place.
5) Draw maybe once every 2 months in bursts of 3-8 artworks at a time within a week.

[liann]

I realised I love the process more than the result so... no copy paste for me. But then again, I think I kinda slowed down when it comes to drawing because I'm starting to pay more attention to things.

[darthmongoose]

I had a lot of hangups when I was younger about doing things "properly", as if following some proper traditional artistic pipeline is what makes a person's art professional...

• I always drew on a drawing board with a sliderule and t-squares etc, painstakingly hand-drawing panels
• I worked in black and white, inked with fineliners or even dip pen
• If I had to draw an indoor scene, I drew a room plan and spent ages drawing out 3 point perspective guides.
• Only one pass of pencils, no fixes.
• Flipping? What's flipping?
• "I don't use digital textures or effects, they look mechanical" (aaaagh)
• Coloured using copic markers or washed out looking overlays on uninked pencils.

Of course, hearing what actual pros worked like was like "wait, what? They cheat!? Am I allowed to cheat!?" and so I embraced the mindset of: "If it's legal, it's not ripping off somebody else's art and isn't making the art look worse... DO IT" prioritising anything that makes the art fast to create and easy to edit (because oh boy, clients love them some changes...). Over years working in the industry, I've streamlined things a lot.

• Clip Studio is MVP. Using the panelling tools I drop in a 1-panel layout then use the panel cutter to make panels in seconds that automatically mask my lines to stay inside them.
• I pencil digitally, using as many layers of pencils as I need, flipping, and editing pieces to get things looking nice.
• I ink digitally using a nib tool I've customised to have expressive line weight far beyond anything I could ever get with real pens.
• For indoor and other hard environments I reference from 3D models to speed up the perspective drawing and to keep them consistent across pages
• Digital colours and use of (carefully chosen) digital textures if needed.
• Speech bubbles done using the shape tool in Photoshop so they're easy to edit, dropped into a folder with a stroke applied to everything in it so I can quickly copy-paste and edit bits to speed the process.

[Pandastrophic]

I don't enjoy creating illustrations as much as before.
I feel like all my good work is behind me and I haven't been able to move forward in a really long time.
My artblock has been so bad and I feel creatively bankrupt.
I used to create 3-4 illustrations per month and now I can barely finish just 1. Which is a problem because high-res illustrations and PSD files are a patreon reward and I always feel bad because I'm not giving patrons enough.
The above is mostly related to my illustrations, my current comic is the only thing I still enjoy working on and look forward to.

For the comic:
I used to lineart with pencil then I moved to digital since it's faster.
I used to draw backgrounds myself but then it was so time consuming and I started using photos instead, photos I take myself of streets, parks, public places, etc so now I have a large gallery of references and photos I can use freely.

[yansusu]

There's actually a lot more than I would have thought:
1. I switched from typing to speech-to-text (I had to because of health reasons and hated it at first but now I've gotten used to it)
2. I switched from writing traditional novels to web novels (so I don't finish whole volumes anymore before posting and people will have to live with a lightly edited first draft)
3. I switched from single PoV to multiple PoV

[CodeMonkeyArts]

I pretty now stick to purely digital since that is what I use to color my work. No more sketch books and stuff for me!

I also stopped caring what other people think-

...ahems I stop caring AS MUCH about what other people think and draw and share my art for my own amusement.

[AbelDraws]

• I'm actively trying to draw more and improve with backgrounds in general now (drawing a comic is the perfect excuse for that, you have to draw them even if you don't want to x'D)

• I also don't "paint" my drawings anymore. I get better results using a refined cell shading with gradients here and there to make sure the lights and atmosphere of the drawing look nice than spending a million hours painting the drawing x'D (This only happens because of my style tho, I absolutely love splash art-like drawings and they're painted, it just doesn't work as nice for my style atm. It's also way faster.)

• Regarding comics, I used to go head on and draw a few pages, find out I didn't like neither how things started nor what to do next and give up. The story I'm working on now is all planned from begining to end since some time ago and now I'm having a blast just worrying about how to tell the story the best way possible.

((Also this is my first time in the forum, hello

[xabelmind]

The best to draw laying down is a laptop with no-screen tablet, but you have to like drawing in no-screen tablet, of course Still, you can put it in your lap, so the laptop screen is in front of you while your arms are working down.

[xabelmind]

Have you considered close that Patreon tier, at least for some time, and do something different? When I feel stuck in one field, I use to go work in others. Maybe it would help

[spadesart]

for some reason i used to shade and lineart with a really thick airbrush and it made everything look kinda blurry and background details hard to incorporate. it took me way too long to realize thinner lines done with a solid/lightly textured brush look a lot better. i also used to make shadows SUPER dark and imo it makes older pages hard to look at. i still struggle with this but i think im doing better?

[Shanny8]

I almost never completely filled a sketchbook page

This. I finally finished one sketchbook about 6 years ago- and started working on 2 more(one is a small one that I can stick in my bag and carry with me; the other is a large one that I drag around to conventions and scribble in it when I'm in lulls between selling stuff)...I've currently slowed down on scribbling in my sketchbooks over the last couple of years- even moreso since I've gotten into a lot of digital scribbling. A lot of my sketchbooks are just that- sketching and drawing/inking; I never do full color pieces in a sketchbook.

When I was doing comic work traditionally I never cared for erasing on the bristol; I'd do all my erasing in thumbnails, then blow them up(via copier) and do the final pencils(via lightbox) in non photo blue pencil, then ink right over it. The blue line would not show up during printing, this became a "way of life/process" for me.

My biggest thing is I try not to waste a lot of energy when drawing/inking/making comic pages. It might be because I'm older and I dont have a ton of energy like I used to, but when I do start working on stuff I'm always trying to find a way to do a thing quicker/faster with the least amount of energy...I do it even more now days with the all the arm issues I've been having on and off for the past couple years.

@fleohr just now starting to get used to doing art on my iPad. Only obstacle I have right now is that I need to "convert" a couple of PS brushes to CSP brushes so that I can exclusively work in Clip Studio on my iPad.

[fleohr]

I would have tried that lmao, but my drawing tablet is quite large and I use shortcuts pretty much a lot too.

That's why I'm use procreate, the gestures and UI made my life so much easier

[fleohr]

Oof, I also had this problem when I switched to iPad, so I'm using default brushes on Procreate. Not sure about clip studio paint, since I've never used it, but I heard on Procreate 5 you will be able to convert .abr easily to .brush and other nice things

(I feel like I'm promoting procreate lol. No paid promotion tho)

[375]

One of the things I never did was actually took a step back from my stories and asked myself how could this be better? And by doing this, I can see what was wrong with the story and why it felt forced. Such as for example, I wrote Love Me Hate Me in third person before hand but didnt really like the way it felt so I switched it up and wrote it in first person. If I was still the person I was years ago, I would've dropped the entire project itself!

[Rhonder]

My post in this thread is a good point of comparison:

The current "version" of these characters (they had existed prior to this but were considerably different) was this illustration from 2010: [image] and now they look like this: [image][image][image] Really, not too much changed at the core. The biggest removals were just toning the outfits down to be less over-designed and like the hair styles LOL (and obviously just being better at drawing in general now). Regarding Rudolph, he's an older OC as well but I think I only had like... 2 or 3…

The biggest stylistic change that I'm really happy with is that I like... used to be allergic to thick lines LOL I had a role model on deviant art when I was a kiddo whose copic marker tutorials I would read, and part of their style that they talked about was using ultra thin fineliners when doing their inking because they were really detail oriented and would add all sorts of intricate decorations and such in their drawings. I loved how they turned out so I tried to mimic that for a long time. The problem is, my style is really really different from theirs LOL varying line weights from thin to thick really suit my drawings more I think. Pretty much 100% of my drawings prior to like 2 years really lack oomph and have weak line work as a result... as can be seen in the pic from 2010 in the linked post.

Another recent change (only started doing this as of beginning my comic last year) is starting to shade with colors other than just darker versions of the same color. Like instead of shading a green with darker green, I've started taking the environment into consideration. Like if it's night time, try shading with some dark blues. If there's dry grass everywhere, dark yellows, etc. So far it helps more often than it hurts, I think.

[Mari]

My writing used to be a lot more hectic. Now it's just.Pauses.Everywhere.So.Many.Pauses.

With art I have not literally improved a single bit since 2013.

[Luminosophy]

I plan out my drawings now and it's made me so much faster. I use geometry construction method and a bastardized version of loomis heads for each figure. Takes out allllll the guesswork. \ o /

[Cavechan]

Well I switched to digital a couple years ago so that is the biggest thing I do differently. :3

[sekabead]

I used to draw my characters putting their hands in the pocket to avoid drawing fingers.

Not anymore! Now I draw their hands hiding behind their back