Art Improvement Tactics?

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bluescreening
True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
Joined
Apr 3, 2021
I’m a fairly amateur artist. It doesn’t cause me acute pain to look at, but it is not particularly pleasing to the eye.

I’m not exactly sure how to go about improving my art other than the dreaded “just practice” which I consider to be a pretty useless piece of advice. There are several areas I know I can improve in but I just can’t figure out what specific ways to approach these areas - mostly perspective, detailed anatomy, and shading beyond basic cel. (I am not sharing examples of my art so I don’t get artstyle doxxed lmao.)

Do any artistically-inclined Kiwis have any specific tips on how to improve the technical skill of your art?
 
posting on behalf of my girlfriend who does art.

"I've seen a large jump of quality in my art by focusing on the fundamentals again.
In general, be serious about it, take notes from online demos, lectures and classes.
I've focused recently on perspective and values. And just by that I can tell it has lifted me a fair amount in a short time.
There's videos on Youtube that I followed and took notes (assuming you do digital art), but there's information here that will be useful regardless"
Take your time with studies, don't rush it, make sure you're getting out of it what you want. Follow along videos and books, but always have a 'fluff piece' (something you can go to at any time which is fun and not too difficult) so you don't get burned out.
Treat it as something more academic than something you just 'do', -Sam's girlfriend.

and here's the videos she linked me.
 
Grind more Loomis.

/ic/ jokes aside: I've found that what works for me personally is just experimenting. Deliberately seeking out things I've never done before and just doing them. I tend to avoid videos that teach you how to do art because in today's day and age a lot of "teachers" just give warm, fuzzy saccharine statements to make the viewer feel they're better at art than they actually are. But the videos I would recommend are ones of people just drawing. No commentary, no actual lesson per se, they're just creating art and filming it because they can. You can learn an awful lot just by looking at the way an artist constructs a drawing.
 
Without seeing your work, it's hard to comment anything directly constructive and useful.

When you say that your work isn't pleasing to the eye, then what do you think is pleasing to the eye? Are you trying to reach the skill-level of a particular artist? Are you trying to force yourself into working within a specific style? Without power-levelling too much, when I was studying I would often find myself just trying to emulate the work that I responded to the most. I had to shake myself out of that mindset and instead learn how to respond to certain elements within other's work, learn about them and the context in which they're used, and then translate them into my own.

I'm going to hazard a guess that you are working digitally and are interested in 2D illustration, but in order to be proficient at that, you have to understand the core basics of drawing by hand - observation, space, perspective, light and shadow, etc. If you don't become familiar with those basics, then you will never develop the entry-level skillset required for you to develop and improve your work further.

As others have mentioned here, there's plenty of videos online which can assist you with various drawing processes, but I would actually suggest forgoing those and instead just buy a small sketchbook, a few pencils, and in your down-time do some quick, informal observational drawings of your surroundings.
 
other than what's already been posted here, one thing I'd recommend is observing other art; do they draw eyes in a certain way you like, do they have a specific way of shading that works well, is there some detail in the way they construct faces that stands out to you, do you like how they draw limbs.
not only is it a possibility for you to try and adapt these little intricacies into your own style, but it might make you look at your own art with a more critical eye; what is lacking in my own style that I see others being able to do?

also, even though it has been said before, I'll also say it because it is probably the most important thing: try observational drawing. It really helps.
 
I’m not exactly sure how to go about improving my art other than the dreaded “just practice” which I consider to be a pretty useless piece of advice.
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Would have agree with you but as I learned through time, with both ups and downs in my art quality it's safe to say that practice does have a meaning. It's just, you don't need to focus on one particular aspect and just ignore others, no, during practice you should combine, experiment, after all the results you'll receive in the end would be an actual proof that you've improved your skills at some things.

Just be serious about your art passion and new er stop creating stuff.
 
Draw every day, draw to be creative, learn through osmosis. Even just following somebody's steps, coming to understand why they do what they do will help you formulate your own style. I've followed along with a Bob Ross video to try and understand how he makes clouds or trees. After following along I have a better understanding of how to create clouds, and it builds from there.
sunset.jpg
 
Draw reguarly, seek out critiques, know where your flaws are and work on overcoming them, try to improve each drawing from your last even if it's just in a small way. Seek out art by artists whose works you enjoy and try to see what they do that appeals to you. Study the fundamentals.

Do gesture drawing if you want to get better at poses (quickposes.com is great for this), render in black and white if you want to brush up on your values. There's plenty of books out there that can help you improve. How to Draw and How to Render by Scott Robertson, Color & Light by James Gurney and George Bridgman for anatomy.

That said, as has been stated by others, take your studies seriously. If you're following a tutorial on drawing something, try to understand why it's done a certain way. Good luck.
 
Post in the art thread and ask for crits. No, seriously, the community we have here is actually really nice and shockingly un-judgmental for the fucking Kiwi Farms, and because it’s relatively small you’ll actually get eyes on your work. If you haven’t taken an art class since high school you probably straight up DON’T know what you’re doing wrong, and what helped me improve the most was have other people here tell me what I was doing wrong and where I could improve, because sometimes when we judge our own work we know it looks “off” but we don’t know WHY. Sometimes you really just need a more experienced eye to pick out mistakes and give pointers on how to fix them.

Really, the first step to improvement is just mindfulness and awareness. You can’t get better unless you can identify what’s “wrong” in the first place, and that’s sometimes the hardest part.
 
First tip; don't knock people when they say practice.

Like learning to dance it's all about muscle memory. Draw a circle once it's gonna look shit, however if you draw a circle 600, 700, 9000 fucking times, however long it takes your brain to pick up and you can do that shit perfectly every single time without thinking about.

Art is almost entirely about training the muscle memory in your hand. Once you can draw basic construction shapes and understand lighting you can follow any and every tutorial and pull it off with relative ease. Start with drawing and shading shapes, the rest follows.

As for particular details: I'll need to know what you're trying to draw, what kind of style and size etc, it's too big a field of study for anyone to give you solid generalised advice outside of practice. It also depends how seriously you wanna take it and what field of art you want to specialise in as lessons and focuses for each will be drastically different.

Eg, I do tattoos, in my field you'll get chewed out if you can't perform precise and crisp final designs, meanwhile in illustration a certain amount of wildness and experimentation can be appreciated.

You might as well ask for how do I mechanic? First thing anyone competent will ask you is, 'well, what is it you're trying to do?'

So, I ask you, what is it you're trying to draw?
 
One step art improvement lecture:

Don't be a Dobson.
It's that simple.

Don't grow complacent, be realistic and objective about your art, take criticism both good and bad. When you have trouble drawing something, check out guides how to do it and train to do that regularly.
 
Your perception and hand skills - is the only factors to define quality of your art. And they are neural network driven (i.e. brain). So primary and only true and honest solution for improvement is just practice. Doodle like no tomorrow, sketching like hell, and nothing else matter. Rinse and repeat. Like they do to train neural networks.
 
Outside of training your body and mind one thing I tell people is to respect the craft.

People often get attached to these ideas and see other artist's completed pieces rather than the the process itself and get lost trying to imitate something they don't fully understand. It leads to people making art but not improving fundamentally once you break it down.

Much like everyone else said in this thread, you have to practice with a purpose and not aimlessly throw lines on a paper. How you learn depends on you as well. Perhaps you learn from experimenting on the paper with multiple things you learned recently or you focus on some of your weaker areas and approve on that. We all differ in that regard.

Overall since this is question is more vague atm main thing that can be recommended is looking at your line work. Even in other fields like architecture linework will tell you more about yourself than you realize. You can look at any of the greats and it will all come down to confident linework. It tells a lot about the artist at hand.
 
Lone MacReady said:
Draw every day, draw to be creative, learn through osmosis. Even just following somebody's steps, coming to understand why they do what they do will help you formulate your own style. I've followed along with a Bob Ross video to try and understand how he makes clouds or trees. After following along I have a better understanding of how to create clouds, and it builds from there.
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Bob Ross videos are fun to watch and I enjoy listening to them while I work, but he painted in oil and used a very specific technique that doesn't really translate to other media. You would be better off going outside and doing some studies of the actual clouds you see in the sky.
 
It depends on your current level, can you post some examples of your work? I definitely suggest working on form and perspective and draftsmanship to start if you're just starting. I can provide some resources and exercises if you need. I'd definitely like to see what you currently have though,
 
Studies. They're a pain in the ass, but you can make them more fun by thinking of them as groundwork for what you actually want to do.

Anatomy: do gesture drawings using sites like lineofaction, focus on the quicker ones. Longer ones are helpful when you know more but since beginner artists are slower, it's too easy to get bogged down in minutiae unless you learn that if you only have 60 seconds it matters less about whether you have a detailed ear versus getting the whole thing down. I'd say do 5min or less.
Gesture drawings are fun because you can then take those poses and learn to draw clothes on them, turn them into an actual scene, draw them as your characters, etc.

Perspective: draw still life of objects, draw cityscapes and architecture from photos. If you have a story with characters that you want to draw someday, maybe find photos of similar settings to learn to draw. If your reason for drawing is to draw your high fantasy D&D characters, studies will be more fun when you're practicing perspective by drawing little old medieval village pictures, etc.
Perspective sucks, nobody likes it, it'll always have you squinting at your paper going 'wait, did I do that right'. Dometimes even if you DO do it right it'll look off. It's all about lots of practice to learn to sort of fudge it convincingly.

Shading: do studies of things that interest you, set up in dramatic, strong light-and-shadow lighting. Non-cel shading is all about learning how light interacts with different surfaces and materials, where it's a hard line between light and shadow and where it's a soft gradation. There's some pointers that can help (shadows on a curved surface are general softedged, cast shadows are hardedged, cast shadows go from hardedged to more diffuse and soft the further away they are from the object casting them) but it's all about learning the volume of the objects you're looking at and how to apply a good understanding of how shadows behave to those objects.
I always found that I had more patience for studies when they were of something 'cool' to me. There's a lot to be learned from Ye Olde Ball Study, but I had a lot more willingness to do it when doing a study of a knife or a cow skull or a flower. Your life will be easier if you pick something that's mostly one color though.

At the end of the day you have to make learning fun for yourself, because drawing is the thing that's gonna make you better at drawing. Draw what's fun. Find ways to integrate study into that. Surround yourself with art you like by people whose work you admire, use it to get pumped to draw, learn from seeing how people do things and figuring out if that's something that can work with your own drawing.
The best thing you can do for yourself is just DRAW.
 
Find some speedpainting videos with artwork that you admire. There are tons of them. Look past the spectacle and pay attention to their process. You'll find that most artists have a flow that can make light and shadow almost take care of itself, such as rough sketch>detailed sketch>midtones>shadows>highlights>details.

Perspective is complicated but not difficult if you really take the time to learn the basics of concepts like vanishing points and ratios.
 
I’m not exactly sure how to go about improving my art other than the dreaded “just practice” which I consider to be a pretty useless piece of advice. There are several areas I know I can improve in but I just can’t figure out what specific ways to approach these areas - mostly perspective, detailed anatomy, and shading beyond basic cel.
Click to expand...

I saw the title of this topic and, half-jokingly, thought 'stop copying manga and learn how to draw'. After reading this quoted section, I realise part of my initial reaction wasn't too far off the mark.

I agree with @Scolopendra Dramatica - I would be a little more sympathetic of your dismissal of 'just practise' if it sounded like you'd put in the practise in the first place. But I also agree with the old saying, work smarter, not harder. +1 to those here who tell you to draw from life, study the art and styles you like, learn the fundamentals. The fundamentals like the ones you say you have trouble with.
I don't know how long you've been working at this, but you do sound like a newbie who heard about the kind of work you need to put into learning to draw shit like that 10,000 hour rule, I expect thought 'fuck that' and came here looking for quick fixes.
I understand if it's not quite like that, I understand the need to find somewhere and someone to jaw about niche interests, but: anatomy. Perspective. Shading. These are bare bones basic concepts and topics in art instruction. It also might be different if you were a complete noob, but you know your problems and the beginning steps you need to work on. Do you honestly need a throwaway kiwi farms thread to unlock these secrets? There are fucktons of books on the matters. There are fucktons of online resources. Some of them are even free and good, like Prokos youtube channel, linked above, or James Gurneys blog, or Andrew Loomis books.

Go and watch them, and read them, and practise.
 
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