What do you wish you could get better at drawing? Do you avoid drawing anything because it's too difficult?
Thanks to everyone who replies, this is part discussion and part me doing research for topics on art to cover in my comic.
Dec '19
Dec '19
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There are 71 replies with an estimated read time of 9 minutes.
Yeah, But I mean, Picking out the colors so they don't clash with the foreground or some other reasons. Like, Is this building red? How red is it? will it look good against this green building? Maybe add a bit of grey? Yknow.
I just have trouble with it sometimes lol
Those evil, articulating, cylinders. How dare they exist to torment everyone with their complexities!
Agreed, I always avoided hands when I was younger, or drew the old' flat paddle hand and called it good.
Definitely. Colouring isn't as easy as picking a colour from the default swatch collection and calling it good. There's tone, hue, contrast, and colour schemes (triad, monochrome, compound, and complimentary). Then we have to fight against all the simplistic stuff we were taught in elementary school about the sky being blue, trees being green, etc...
There's too much to unpack here, but there are solutions. I'm definitely planning on explaining colouring in my comic for this exact reason, but someone requested I talk about perspective first, which is just as complex. 
In short, art is weird, and we have to teach ourselves to see things as they are, not what they seem to be.
I'm very fine with sketching and linearting. The one I don't want to do is always coloring. 
Flat is still fine, but them the soft shading took me too long, so I've been looking for new way of coloring that is quite fast and not ugly looking.
Group pictures. Seriously, whenever I have to draw 2 or more people in the same scene, by the time I finish Person #1 and start on Person #2 I'm already ready to quit. I fatigue very easily...
Besides, having to worry about keeping all the heights and body parts in proportion drives me crazy with anxiety. At least with one person, you know everything will more or less look correct, even if you make a few mistakes. But once you start introducing more characters into the same space, all of a sudden there's someone to compare with. Everything you do inconsistently, from anatomy to perspective, starts to stand out more and more.
It's too much...unfortunately, it's unavoidable. >_<
What I wish I could draw better is to draw faster than I currently am.
Not that it is difficult, it is time consuming.
Least favorite part of my art process is flipping it sometimes to see if its okay or weird in a mirrored view. I dont bother to fix much it because detailing enough takes a lot of time o<-<
Lighting is hard in the face and I want to work better with it tbh. I want to make big backgrounds- like detailed architecture and stuff but perspective scares me big time when there's a character in focus involved. I want to work better on adding different colors. I avoid drawing animals for most of my stories for some reason. I dont really enjoy enjoy them unless its a photorealistic study and it has to be the subject matter.
I've coloured comics for people on and off, and sometimes I do wonder if there really is a fast way to colour. Flat shading is fine so long as either what you're drawing isn't complex or you have a strong grasp of form... but then using a more smudgey soft brush on a locked transparency layer seems less finicky.
Pinky promise if I figure it out I'll pass it on, haha.
I watched a video that was quite helpful, will link it if I remember it. Essentially he said there's more efficient ways to practice than simply drawing over and over. It was a three step process:
It's kind of like the memorization process of learning a language, it apparently helps your brain hold on to what you've learned more. Then the more you know the less time it takes drawing and redrawing stuff.
Does that make sense?
You mean.... this3?
Yes, yes, definitely. These are all difficult things without an insta-fix. I'm just addressing the basics of how to draw in perspective in my comic now, and boy howdy, there's so much to talk about, I don't know if I'll ever come to the end of how to's on it.
Thanks for pointing these out, they're good reminders to me on topics I should cover!
YES. I just did a series on skeletal anatomy on my comic and in the process ended up learning stuff myself (and some reminders. Getting to know how the skeleton articulates and how things are connected really removes some of the mystery there... I gotta practice more.
First it was elbows, but once I got the relative hang of those, I found myself asking "what the heck are shoulders and feet anyway?!"
One day I'll understand them more.
Yeah I have mad respect for the people who drew those gigantic crowd scenes like in the "Where's Waldo?" books, lots of comics and manga as well.
Perhaps a less overwhelming approach would be to start with the poses as stick men and have the general ratio of size, then move onto sketching each character and buffing out there anatomy?
