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?
My least favorite part of drawing is when you do line art, but it doesn't turn out as good as you want it to be 
It's crazy how clearly we can see something in our mind, or have a really strong concept, but it doesn't always translate perfectly onto the page.
On the flip-side, I remember teaching a class of young kids on how to draw an apple, and one kid had a brutal perfectionist streak. I learned that the kids who were able to enjoy their work and weren't so critical of themselves were just as capable, it's just that the perfectionist kid was so hard on himself that he wasn't able to recognize that what he had made was really good!
Gotta have that balance of being kind to ourselves in our journey of learning, eh?
For me it's just the more technical stuff. Backgrounds, objects, anything mechanical, or more angular. I draw very sketchy and fluid and a lot of round and organic shapes.
I try to do my best and use whatever tools and tips and tricks I can find, but I just don't enjoy drawing objects and buildings and mech as much as I do figures, faces, hair, clothing, and organic things.
Oh.. I also don't like to draw feet xD
I don't want to just avoid the things I don't like to draw, because, well for one, I usually need to draw them for the context of the image, but also because I don't want to cheat myself out of improving. Just because it's hard doesn't mean it's impossible.
Yep, backgrounds can be definitely tedious, but super important, which makes things worse. I've heard it's best to treat it as an extension of the theme or emotions, ie: changing the perspective to give a sense of freedom or fear, changing the shapes of objects to come off more threatening or restful, etc...
Still, it always seems like people who draw mechs versus those who draw people sometimes stay on their sides forever. It's tricky, but worth it.
Yes to the feet, definitely the bane of my existence currently.
Good on you for having that attitude, I'm certain you'll go far if you stick to it!
For sure! And it's especially great when you factor in color theory and using the color of the sky and atmosphere to set the mood and reinforce the emotions of characters. It's a necessary evil xD
It does seem that way... It's might be the same reason why math people enjoy math more than art and vice versa. One is more technical, absolute, while the other is more fluid and organic and subject to change... but both can be tedious and often overlap. It's definitely worth having both skills in the long run.
Feet are just.. euuughhghgh. i try never to cut them off or hide them because, like I said I don't want to give myself excuses to not improve, but GAH they are a female dog to draw. Especially bare feet... so many toesies 
And thanks. I used to not, when I was younger, but I realized the more I forced myself to draw things I hated or drew badly, the easier it got to draw them. I still suck at backgrounds, but I'm a heck of a lot better at them now than I was 5 years ago.
ACCURATE 100%. I recently flip some out to check if the eyes aren't sliding off or if the other side of the face is neither too thin, disformed, or condensed. Its like Russian Roulette with the results haha.
Working with a reference side by side for faces in my semirealism style seems to have helped but translating it to a more simplified style proved just as difficult for me since I have a habit of merging layers when I have tons of it in my sidebar oml.
Ehhh the whole inking phase is always kind of a downer for me. For my comic, at least, I do my inking in traditional mediums with dip pens and brush pens, so there's always a lot of pressure to do it right the first time and not mess up... and then end up messing up anyways. Granted I do a fair amount of touch up in photoshop before I color so it's never a huge deal but still. I'm also not a fan of how long that phase usually takes (me, anyways). Like, the final result is always nice to look at but it always feels like it's tedious and takes forever.
I've grown more accustomed to digital inking over the last year or so though, working on other sideprojects, so I've decided that after my current comic comes to a close (in 2 pages) I'll be swapping over to digital inking for the next one~
I agreee with @DokiDokiTsuna wholeheartedly, groups are going to be the end of me x'D doing a comic you can't run away from them tho, so I'm getting better at them (hopefully lmao).
The whole inferior half of the human body is hard for me as well to get right (I always draw legs too... Wide? (Dunno what's the correct word for this in English).
Also, placing the feet in the right way with the floor always gives me it's fair share of trouble (feet in general do).
This is all due to my lack of anatomy studies and for drawing mostly busts/mid bodys for most of my life x'D I'm in the process of fixing that.
Coloring huge spaces like road, building outside or wall of the room inside is for sure my least favorite. I never like how it's looking.
Oh right... I forgot I dislike doing background. Especially if it's involve perspective. For some reason my sense of perspective is pretty off (few me at Least...). Maybe because I need to get used to draw on my phone for a few years.
I need to learn how to let go. I sometimes get stuck drawing a certain character pose/facial expression/ whatever and just can't make it look good. I'll draw and re-draw the same thing again and again and again. And it still doesn't work and it's been 2 hours since I started. Failures like these sometimes get to me; I should be able to draw anything I want! So why can't I do this? I feel pressure and it in return makes drawing the thing even harder. It also stops my work flow and eats all the enjoyment I get out of drawing.
I hate it when this happens, especially if its for a client and there's an upcoming deadline and you start to feel rushed but you just can't figure it out and now you can't stop worrying but you need to focus but you can't and now you're super frustrated too and then OOF.
I can draw great feet from memory, but when it comes to hands, I always have to check which side the thumb goes.
My least favorite part is the layout. I prefer not to think and just draw intuitively. But that doesn't work for something that requires a storyboard.
What tabs did for browsers is what folders did for digital art programs. Now I've got a bajillion folders in folders with layers masked ontop of them. Different kind of mess, haha.
Wow, mad props for the traditional inking. I have a friend who's still doing that, and I wonder what wizardry he does to make it all work. I think if you're in the camp of traditional inking, it's best to have someone else do the colouring because it's all hella time consuming (but worth it).
Congrats on the comic projects, I can't say I've ever finished one off myself, haha. I hope you can celebrate that a little before you move on to the next.
Drawing hands and metal things always sucked for me. I am not really a fan of inorganic shapes that require precision and straight lines and hands...well hand are essentially one part of the human body but have the complexity of the ENTIRE human body (with fingers being different limbs and such).
However, that's not really my least favorite part.
My least favorite part is flats. I just...it's soooooooo boring. Inking can be tedious but at least I can experiment line thin and thick lines, adding crosshatching, etc. Flats is just really dull to me. Kinda like waiting at the airport for a flight. You're just there. Stuck. Waiting for the flight so you can actually FEEL like you're gonna get to your destination. I hate the flat process.
I once went to a seminar that talked about the differences between a child and a savant like Kurt Cobain. The point was that there's a place we need find as creatives where we enjoy honing our craft like established artists do, but hold onto the joy we had as children where creating was a form of playing.
I wish I had taken notes, because it was excellent.
