bad art advice

  • ⚙️ Performance issue identified and being addressed.
  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
"Do the art style like this!"
The art style being the generic SU one with the stubby proportions and basic shapes. Including the basic shading that's just a darker colour of the base colour.
 
The one that makes me cringe is that pretty much any trade-established technique that's made to save time without compromising style or your budget is "cheating." But I mostly blame ignorance towards the nature commercial vs. the idea of "real art means lots of pointless steps" on that.

In Western art, there's a tendency to study how the Old Masters worked without studying how their studios worked with assistants, apprentices, engineering techniques, etc. and forgetting a lot of them did this to put food on the table. Not that they didn't enjoy it, but "starving artist" is a romantic idea for trust fund babies.
 
It's a great place to find artbooks and resources, but if you've ever been on /ic/ there's good chances you've heard terrible advices.
>just trace/there's nothing wrong with tracing/you'll learn fast if you trace/pros do it all the time lmao just photobash/etc
>fundies aren't important lol
>using reference is cheating
>anything wrong with your drawing? LOOMIS
>the fastest way to get good is to soullessly churn out study upon study for years until you reach critical mass and morph into an art god
Click to expand...

I originally went there because I had no clue how to progress, and quickly realized I really had to figure out what was good advice and what wasn't. It seems that people there are stuck with the mindset that progressing in art is a slow, boring slog of a grind requiring you to sell your soul to Vilppu to stack gains. "Just draw" has become kind of a meme there, to give you an idea.
The /ic/ experience ended up being good for me though, with a bit of trial and error I learned that the best way to improve, for me at least, is to do the exact opposite of what /ic/ does: through projects - comic, series of illustrations, whatever you're into. Just start something you'd like to create from beginning to end. That gives a purpose to studies, Loomis and whatnot and you'll get a lot of mileage out of it if you give it your all and try to make it as good as possible. Just draw, put effort into it and have fun, look up artbook of references when you need to, and you'll have improved before you know it.
 
Having the "right tools" makes your art look more professional, apparently according to one of those cringy "how to draw manga" guides that I had during middle school.
 
On that note, I thought one had to have professional tools like Photoshop to be a real artist.

Turns out that is not necessarily true these days, it's how you use your existing skill. Learning to adapt makes one less Dobsonian.
 
I have plenty to talk about! I've heard terrible advice from everyone. Not just friends or online, but family members as well.

"You'll never get any money. Go get a real job."- everyone's who's told me this usually comes from a decent place. The "starving artist" thing just seems to be their first impression for artists. I can understand that the art world can be harsh, but that's like any other risky commission-type of job. There's no guarantee of success. That's why people usually say this. They really only mean well.

However, I've seen this used waayyy too much to kill younger people's creativity. Little kids being told this because they want to be creative does not help them in long run. All this does is show you're an unsupportive jackass and for the most part it crushes their spirits. I get wanting your kid to do well, but sometimes you got to get to point to realize they'll make decisions that you don't like, just as everyone else does.

One of the artubers I follow stated something really dumb, "you don't need to know anatomy to stylize something. Infact, I'd say stylization is a different skill entirely." - Anatomy is so damn important. If you want to draw something like anime you should know how that shit works. How can you stylize an arm when you don't know what it looks like? How can draw the muscles of a leg when you have no idea how it works? It's dumb to think you can skip any step just because you have some level of skill.

People say to price yourself accordingly and I was told to do the same, but more often than not they do it completely wrong. Art is not a minimum wage job. It is a commission job. You don't charge $30 an hour for a sketch. That makes you look shady. I see so many people treat it like it is one and it's the worst advice I've seen. Compare prices to others in the art community and see what is fair. A sketch can be from $5-10 depending on the skill and effort put into it, but don't charge a fee per hour unless it's livestream thing.

Lastly (for today), digital art and physical art (realistic art is a different medium so I'll just make it clear here) are two completely different things that take time to master. I've been told a tablet would make my work better. I've been told my work looks better digitally.

So many of my amateur art friends used to praise my tablet skills (that I learned over the past 5 years) and when they finally got a tablet, the complained about not being able to do anything well on it and that their art looked more or less the same. Of course it does! You didn't learn anything! I don't understand why people think that either medium will suddenly make their art better? That's not how it works.
 
"You don't need to know how to draw in order to be an animator!" I mean yeah, if you're content with just being some rando internet animator rather than being someone a studio can actually rely on for multiple art skills.
 
TowinKarz said:
"It's not a flaw, it's a style"

A style isn't the same as consistently making the same mistakes.
Click to expand...

I hate this excuse so much it's not even funny. I see so many terrible artist justify their shitty work by saying "it's not a flaw and it's a style". It's another way of just them trying not to own up to any mistakes. I'm not going to act like I don't have things I hate to draw, but you should always strive to do better.

Whenever I see a younger artist use this justification, I'm not mad, just disappointed. It just shows to me that you've already given up so early and that you don't want to try anymore so you can just hide behind a flimsy excuse. When you're young, I know it's demoralizing to try and draw something you like, only to fail over and over, but that doesn't mean you stop trying. Like every other decent artist, you keep at it and you improve overtime.

When it comes to professionals, it's even worse. A little mistake or weird drawing perspective is normal, but outright wrong proportions are not. There is a clear difference between trying to create a type of unique style and then just completely forgoing any technical skill because you're afraid of it.

Then again, I see this excuse is especially prevalent among the anime community. Why is that?
 
If we're counting bad anatomy advice....almost the entirety of How to Draw Manga Couples-- which you can see online here.
(I'm ashamed to say I bought this as a kid based on the cover and guest artists)

Also back in ye olde days of deviantArt I was advised to not give catgirls "butthole tails" and to instead....essentially sprout the tail from the mid-back? and they tried to justify this with some spinal drawing they totally pulled out of their ass which left the poor catgirls paralyzed from the pelvis down.
 
NoFeline said:
Also back in ye olde days of deviantArt I was advised to not give catgirls "butthole tails" and to instead....essentially sprout the tail from the mid-back? and they tried to justify this with some spinal drawing they totally pulled out of their ass which left the poor catgirls paralyzed from the pelvis down.
Click to expand...
oh you mean like this?
0a23bf3359a205cb82650783bdd7e3ec.jpg
 
They said drawing a turkey without your hand would look bad, I should have listened. I got julay’d by the other kids moms when we presented
 
Discobiscuits said:
The one that makes me cringe is that pretty much any trade-established technique that's made to save time without compromising style or your budget is "cheating." But I mostly blame ignorance towards the nature commercial vs. the idea of "real art means lots of pointless steps" on that.

In Western art, there's a tendency to study how the Old Masters worked without studying how their studios worked with assistants, apprentices, engineering techniques, etc. and forgetting a lot of them did this to put food on the table. Not that they didn't enjoy it, but "starving artist" is a romantic idea for trust fund babies.
Click to expand...

I can’t agree enough on this point. And also, the younger artists think it’s a point of pride to not have to rely upon references. But professionals rely on references and Giant folders of texture samples, lighting samples, fx samples, cityscapes, animals, subway trains ect.

It doesn’t make you a weak artist to use a photograph or anything as long as the picture you end up with is 100% yours at the end of post production.
 
Tanti-Fanti said:
People say to price yourself accordingly and I was told to do the same, but more often than not they do it completely wrong. Art is not a minimum wage job. It is a commission job. You don't charge $30 an hour for a sketch. That makes you look shady. I see so many people treat it like it is one and it's the worst advice I've seen. Compare prices to others in the art community and see what is fair. A sketch can be from $5-10 depending on the skill and effort put into it, but don't charge a fee per hour unless it's livestream thing.
Click to expand...

Pricing is probably one of the trickiest things a freelance artist must do, as it can change a lot from job to job. Not everything is based on commission however. Most of my clients will be charged a flat fee for the piece. Other, larger jobs I've gotten (usually firms/companies/studios, etc) I charge by the hour or by the day, based on agreed upon contracts. Day-rates are high, and it's a very common payment format for entertainment-related freelance/contract work. Charging per hour is also a totally valid way to do it too, but you have to assess if it's worth it to you to do so; I'm very fast, and I'd honestly be losing money if I charged per hour.

I'd say the biggest problem plaguing pricing is that artists almost always charge way too low. Charging 30 bucks a pop for a colored character piece is not going to put a dent in your bills. Going astronomically high is a no-no, because you'll almost always get rejected, but shooting your sights too low is even worse.
 
I think a lot of the people who argue that studying proper anatomy isn't helpful to them haven't pieced together that cartoonists to manga artists alike have most likely studied anatomy and can very likely draw in a naturalistic style. That's how you learn to create a style, by exaggerating the real thing. There's a story about someone who asked Henri Matisse why he always worked with a model if he was just going to deviate from it. His responce was that if he had no model he wouldn't have anything to deviate from.
A few years ago I took a shitty portfolio class with a kid (who was a little :autism:) who at the age of 20-something had that 12 year old "I'm going to be a famous Manga-ka in Japan" mentality. He was just ranting about how terrible our art program was and that he was learning useless things like still life drawing and drawing nude models when clearly the Japanese art school he wanted to go to would be teaching him only manga-related techniques. I didn't have the heart to tell him that based on what I've heard, Japanese art schools would be doing the same thing as ours, but much more brutally. And that he probably wouldn't be allowed to watch Naruto in class, but that's beside the point.

Worst advice I've gotten personally? In that same shitty class my teacher made a comment about how my comics would go a lot faster if I just photocopied a few pages of drawn out panels and used it for all my subsequent pages. Not atrociously bad advice, but I was having a hard time trying to explain to him that you would end up with only three different page layout options and would be designing your scenes based on panel shape, and not vice versa.
He also seemed to suggest to various people in the class that we shouldn't work in different styles and need to stick to just one thing that we were good at. Just about every other art teacher has said that experimentation is important and that it's good to broaden your horizons especially when you're young.


Harzakc said:
Pricing is probably one of the trickiest things a freelance artist must do, as it can change a lot from job to job. Not everything is based on commission however. Most of my clients will be charged a flat fee for the piece. Other, larger jobs I've gotten (usually firms/companies/studios, etc) I charge by the hour or by the day, based on agreed upon contracts. Day-rates are high, and it's a very common payment format for entertainment-related freelance/contract work. Charging per hour is also a totally valid way to do it too, but you have to assess if it's worth it to you to do so; I'm very fast, and I'd honestly be losing money if I charged per hour.

I'd say the biggest problem plaguing pricing is that artists almost always charge way too low. Charging 30 bucks a pop for a colored character piece is not going to put a dent in your bills. Going astronomically high is a no-no, because you'll almost always get rejected, but shooting your sights too low is even worse.
Click to expand...
One of the issues I see in the DeviantArt job forums is that people price so low that it's really difficult to get commission for a decent price without having to offer your services for next to nothing. DeviantArt has their own currency called points, which people use for commissions but so many people don't understand what the value of points actually are. The conversion is about 100 points to a dollar, and I'll see people charging 10 points for art. Granted it's usually rainbow wolves drawn by 12 year olds, but I think their effort is worth at least a LITTLE more than a single gumball.
 
A professor, in my first year of Fine Art at university, back in 1989, told me...

“I have no idea why you are here majoring in Fine Art. You should be airbrushing vans for fans of the Grateful Dead.”

I changed my major the following year.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom