What is the worst advice you got vs the best advice you got?

I've been weirdly lucky in not getting bad advice, so I'll do a bad take I've been seeing going around: Reference is cheating.

Best advice (I have two): Reference EVERYTHING. & If it takes you 15+ hours to finish a comic page, you're doing too much. Simply.

My middle school art teacher encouraged me to shade with black. No wonder why all my art back then was super muddy looking.

The best advice I got was to really think about my main character's motivation and purpose in the story. It should be more than just them 'growing as a person.' Ask a lot of why questions about their purpose and goals.

Advice wise, I have gotten was along the lines of "You shouldn't write fantasy. Write more in reality as that's better regarded and a better use of your skills"

Thanks I hated it. I hated writing because I was so bored.

Best Advise is really, "Write what you like. even if its not popular or people complain or its niche. It would be better for you in the long run if you just write what you like."

Well I tend to like niche stuff so might as well write niche unpopular things, its more fun.

Writer here.

My "worst" advice was that I needed to add more details to my work. In general, not a bad idea it was just vague. The entire plotline took a week(ish). Describing every single second, location, and outfit wasn't magically going to improve the plotline.

Best advice: to trust my gut. I know how to tell a story. I can recognize important moments and rhythm. I could do it. (The advice was more in line with directing, but the advice still applies)

Worst
Draw everyday.

When I first started to draw a few months ago I took this advice to heart. Since I was jobless at that time, I spent all of my free time drawing and writing. I practiced each of them for at least 5 hours a day, every single day. And I got burnt out real quick. I soon became tired and unmotivated because all the hype I had for myself quickly died down and it simply became nothing more than an energy consuming activity with no noticeable signs of growth. But after a month or so of not drawing anything, I got that hype back and now I feel good.

Best
Tracing is OK.

I've always had the mentality that tracing is the worst possible sin that you could commit as an artist. But I soon realized that tracing is OK as long as it's for educational purposes.

Worst advice: In highschool I was told by an artist friend of mine that my art style wasn't cut out for comics because it "wasn't the sort of thing people liked to look at when they read" (what does that mean?) and that I should try making it more manga-like, so more people would want to read it. I'm still not entirely sure what she meant by all that, but I'm glad I didn't really listen to it, I like my art style.

Best advice: A much better friend of mine is a big part of the reason I started my first comic, since I kept on planning it out and then going "It's not ready!" She told me that making the comic would be part of the process of improving, and that I should just start, instead of waiting forever to be ready, because I would get better along the way.

Worst advice: if you can't come up with a 100% anatomically correct sketch within ten minutes using no reference at all, you better just scrap the whole thing and redo it all again. And again. And again. And again. Can't reach perfection? ...Then give up.

This was from my illustration teacher (which isn't apparently teaching illustration anymore now, thankfully XD). Needless to say, it put me in the condition where I just stopped drawing altogether for 8+ years because there was no way in hell I was going to make a "100% anatomically correct sketch" in ten minutes using no reference at all.

Best advice: "You don't need everything to be perfect. Good enough is okay. Improvement will come as you keep working"

This has pretty much saved my life when it came to comic making. It helped me forgive my own mistakes and keep going forward rather than obsessing over every little detail of a single drawing. And you know what? My digital coloring skills have improved immensely once I stopped being so obsessed with everything being -perfect- right from the start. Instead of spending 3 months on a single drawing, I got to produce dozens of drawings, illustrations and comic pages. And for the first time in years... drawing feels fun again.

Worst:

I had to kind of reach for this one because I can't think of much poor advice I've received honestly This wasn't so much advice as me following a tutorial religiously despite it not being compatible with me but,

Thin, detailed linework is king.

Probably the most damaging tutorial tip that I ever saw when I was younger that stayed with me for years and stunted my inking growth for ages was this artist that I really looked up to on Deviant Art. She had posted some coloring (marker) and inking tutorials and since I used the same media I studied and followed them for years without thinking about how they worked with my style. The coloring tutorials were actually pretty useful and taught me how to do some neat things with alcohol markers! But the line art tutorial... wasn't incorrect, certainly, but basically she talked about in depth about how she preferred to use the thinnest possible fine liners (like .003 and .005 size) so that she could just load her artwork with details and such. And it looked great! So for the longest time I ordered a bunch of those and rarely used my thicker liners trying to emulate her artwork.

The problem is... I have a less detailed style that vastly prefers thicker, more expressive line work. So my inking just looked janky and off for like 10 years before finally a non-artist friend made an offhand comment "hey, have you ever considered using thicker lines?" Being the big dum dum that I am, no- I had not ever considered this. And thus like 22 or 23 year old Rhonder FINALLY started experimenting with line weights and voila, my line quality feels much much much better than it ever did from middle school-college.

Best:

When approaching your first comic project(s), consider starting with something small and easy to complete.

I had always been enamored with writing and making a huge long-running series that resembled the stories that most inspired me to start making comics in the first place. But after years of starting these big projects only to get a few pages in and drop them I realized, at least to start, that wasn't a sustainable path for me to take. It was only after hearing and deciding to try this advice that I was finally able to start my comic journey "for real". Now that I have a few finished projects under my belt I've been working my way slowly up to longer projects, but I don't know if I would have made it this far if I tried to keep just brute forcing my way into a long story I wasn't ready to tackle. Even now a few years in I don't feel comfortable starting something that would take more than 1-2 years to complete. but I'm trying to train my speed so that I can tackle bigger projects and have them take less time

I think the thing about advice is really that it doesn't work for everyone. You'll see a lot of conflicting opinions.

Because...
"Start with a small project first" is the worst advice I've heard in my opinion. What if there's only one story I want to tell? And what if it's big? Then what? I'd rather spend over 12 years failing and having false starts, because now I'm where I want to be.

For good advice?
"Draw everyday/do something creative everyday" is the best advice, for me. I've been doing just that for basically my entire adult life. I maybe take one day off a week to recharge. But other than that, if I'm not drawing, I'm not getting better and gaining ground as an artist.

But. Advice. Like art, is subjective, and that's okay. Not all advice has to work for you. Find what works and throw all the rest away.

That is so true. Some people do something and it is a break out success like when recently an author gave away 7 of their 8 books for free, for the launch of their 8th books launch. Make SOO much money, but doesn't work for most.

Also who ever told you that bad advice is a jerk. Digital takes just as much skill to create a beautiful piece. Is it a different set of tools? yes! Do you have to know what your doing? Yes! But if your skilled and can create, that is all that matters.

You do you!!!

Worst Advice: If you don't make it in 2 years change your username, your email, your everything so no one knows you failed when you start again.

(like wtf? No one even gives a damn what you did 2 years ago, you're fine.)

Best Advice: No one cares that much about hearing about your project that doesn't exist, they want to see your project.

(AKA, get that idea on paper and just make the thing.)

Worst advice: Had a teacher look at my animation after I did sound editing, didn't really critique the audio but said my film would be much better if the characters grunted like banjo and kazooie characters every 5 seconds.

Best Advice: Learning to balance things out in comics such as less text makes it easier to read and that an establishing shot helps readers figure out where a character is in the page.

The worst advice I ever got was that art was a waste of time and that I could never do anything worthwhile with it. I heard this from so many people for years and years. The worst part was that I believed it and internalized that idea while I pursued things I hated just to feel like a "real adult". It took me years to decide to embrace what I really wanted to do all along and I'm never looking back.

The best advice I've gotten is that art is representational. As long as you're not working in a hyperrealism style you can bend the rules, be weird and experiment. As long as something looks identifiable as what you're trying to represent you can make stuff toony and super expressive.

For me the joy behind art is self expression. Ignoring that bad piece of advice and jumping whole heartedly into the message behind the good one has helped me immensely.

If someone says digital art is not art or not to use reference then this is not advice then
you are talking to a toxic person and you should just run away and talk to someone else.
This is my advice to everyone.

I received a lot of superb advice in my life. I try to soak it all in. There are many advices,
I think it´s clever to listen to them all, try them and see what works for you as an individual person

Definitely the worst advice I've been given was advice relating to how I depict gender. In my early online work, my female characters were frequently mistaken for male, because in the late 90s and early 00s, bishounen characters and ecchi were all the rage and barely anyone, even in LGBTQ+ circles was familiar with terms like "nonbinary", so I got told over and over and over "your girls look like boys!", "you need to make your girls more feminine!" "They need more prominent boobs and eyelashes". People were VERY concerned about this, as though a girl not being very very obviously a girl with exaggerated feminine characteristics was a horrible thing that needed resolving, even in a story where the character's sex or gender were completely irrelevant. My work from the mid 00s looks really awkward because of this attempt to make characters more superficially feminine, and I feel like it held back my anatomical drawing because in reality, male and female bodies and faces actually aren't all that different, and treating them like it's two totally different approaches to drawing anatomy is silly. It's much better to learn general anatomy more like it's a sliding scale like "okay, people with a more female pelvis it tends cause trousers to crease like this... Broader shoulders work like this... More muscle tone in this area will look like this..." etc.
In other words, learn what physical characteristics will make a character appear more masculine, and what will make them look more feminine and to have the freedom to mix and match and play around and to not have to worry about people getting on your case because they're angry about not being able to neatly assign gender to characters (and they're scared that maybe they're a bit bi, I dunno? ).

Best Advice: "Do what works for you." Basically, early on with manga stuff especially, there was this common idea that to draw "proper manga" you had to use a dip pen and a pot of ink on a piece of bristol board on a drawing board, real screentones, draw right to left and draw in a style that was as indistinguishable from Japanese creators as possible. But some of the more experienced artists on the UK scene advised a more pragmatic approach. They'd give advice like "no, draw your comic left to right if you're making it in English; it'll read better", "Use the pens that you can afford and have space for and give you the best result", "Of course you can mix manga influences with other comics influences!", "Yes, digital tones are fine, just make sure you're working with the right DPI for your print size!"
In the end, it's all about what gives you the best pipeline for keeping making pages that look decent, are easy to read and express the feeling or action you want to express, and if your way of doing that is a bit different, that's okay!

Worst Advice: Focusing on muscle when drawing anatomy. This is how most drawing anatomy classes teach it, that you start with the skeleton, then add the muscles on top to build up the form. And while I think muscle groups are useful to know, it can lead to all your people looking like body builders. You can't even see muscle on most people who aren't actively flexing. I found a tutorial one day on building up bodies by focusing on fat distribution instead of muscle, and it's helped me so much.

Best Advice: If you're making comics, cheat as much as possible. Pretty much all of my background are traced. Don't steal other artist's work, but take your own photos or use 3d models. Looks twice as good in half the time. And there's still a lot of skill in setting up the background, most of my exterior shots are like four different photos I've taken stitched together in photoshop, and then I drawn details and textures over it.