Everything I draw ends up wearing a bow-tie

Well, I’ll actually go at this one backwards- because trying to increase your skill level is much harder than being inspired… but of course, being inspired makes it much easier to increase your skill level, so… I’ll shut up and just answer the questions.

Looking at things and drawing them is one of the best ways to get better- but looking at something and figuring out how it works is a much better way to get better. When you know why something looks the way it does; when you really know how something works, not just looks, but works, you’ll be able to draw it from the inside out. That makes an enormous difference, and then afterwards, when you imagine it, and when you imagine new, crazy, impossible things, you can take those things you know about real things and make your impossible things much more real.

Draw the things that you find hard to draw- I used to find drawing hands and feet really annoying, because I wanted to draw them well, but I couldn’t. I can’t say that I draw them well now, but I enjoy drawing them because I understand them- I basically spent a solid two weeks of summer just drawing hands and feet, from the inside out, bones and muscles and gloves and socks and shoes, and eventually I’ve got to the stage where I can do it and enjoy it. I’m not great at it yet, maybe not even good- but that’s the fun thing about learning, you never stop, and you can always improve. Some people seem to find that discouraging but I find that terribly exciting :D

As for what inspired my style, I still don’t know that I have one, and if I do I have a few different styles, but some of my biggest artistic influences are Hergé, Eiichiro Oda, Dali, Hogarth, Steve Bell, Robert Valley, Albert Uderzo, David Sutherland, Brad Bird, Tove Jansson, Spike Milligan, Milt Kahl, Dave McKean, Al Hirschfeld, Carl Barks and about a million more who I will kick myself for not being able to think of immediately later.

Basically the best advice I can give you is to keep trying, keep learning, and keep asking questions. Never think that you know something; that’s a very dangerous trap to fall into because then you’ll stop trying to learn, and that’s just about the worst thing you can do to yourself, as an artist and as a human being.

I would say I still pretty much suck at anatomy, but initially I learned by a) looking at other humans beings (generally advisable) and b) the medical journals in my house. My parents are doctors so I learned to draw hands and feet by looking at the bones. Once you know how something looks on the inside it’s infinitely easier to understand why it looks the way it does on the outside.

Of course, later on I took figure drawing classes and started to really look at how the proportions and muscles work. Figure drawing with a good, patient teacher is the absolute best way to learn how to draw humans.

I made a stream about other generalized anatomy tips over here but again, I am not an expert by any stretch. Best way to get a hang of it is practice practice practice. Not what you want to hear I’m sure, but it’s all you’ll ever hear when you ask, so better to put the hours in practicing than asking.

scribbleaddict replied to your post: Minor spoiler I guess

Hey, just wondering…would you be up for giving me some tips on cleaning up and doing your line art, before the coloring process? I’m in the process of learning this whole digital art thing, heh. Thanks if you have time to answer! :D

Had a few people ask similar questions, and really I never know what to say because I just… clean the drawing! I’ll give you my process but I’m not sure how much it will help.

I clean up in Photoshop CS5.1 and I almost always start with a pencil drawing that I’ve scanned in (I’m pretty bad at sketching things digitally), and adjust the values with levels so I can see clearly enough. I make a new layer, have my brush tool set to size 5, full opacity, full flow, no spacing, and off I go!

A general clean up tip that I learned in school was that your hand has a natural ability to draw arcs from the wrist, so if you’re having trouble with a curve, rotate the canvas to your advantage- just like you would spin a piece of paper to get a better angle on it. Really it’s best if you draw from the shoulder, but for clean up I find things are a little different and you require more control.

Other advice would be to try to give foreground objects and characters a thicker line (this helps to add depth to the lineart and thus the picture), and try to feel where the weight of the line should be. This is hard to describe, and can really only be found with practice, but say I was drawing a pudgy rabbit; I would put the weight in the belly of the line, right underneath the rabbit. Some people like to give the very outer-most lines more thickness to really emphasize the silhouette- this gives a chunky, graphic feel to the picture, so experiment and see if you like it.

The best and most boring advice is to practice. There’s something called the ten-thousand hour rule that gets mentioned a lot in animation and illustration; basically there’s a theory that in order to be good at something, you have to spend 10000 hours doing it. Another way I’ve had it put is that you have 10000 bad drawings in you; the sooner you get them out, the sooner you’ll get to the good stuff.

I’m still working on it…

Yeah, I really am sorry about that, but as for losing inspiration, there’s really no way of knowing how or when it will happen. I can’t make any promises with TPoH, but I have a good feeling about it, so let’s hope that I can keep chugging on with it.

HAHAHAHAHAHA

I do not think I am a great artist. I struggle to think of my as an artist most days; but I’ll tell you what everyone else has told me, and what I’ve eventually started to realize for myself.

Everyone can draw, but there are different levels of ability. No matter what level you are at, there is always someone better than you, always someone worse than you, and you can always, always learn. If you love it, do it, get better. Make mistakes, make horrible mistakes; mistakes that you will treasure and cry over and keep close to your heart so that you never ever make them again. Don’t ignore people who say that your work looks bad because you did something wrong- ask them what is was and how to do it right next time. Do ignore people who just say that your work looks bad because they don’t like it- art is opinion.

You can’t please everyone.

Listen to your instincts- if you think a picture isn’t going as planned; stop, do something else, come back to it later, come back to it a year later if you have to, but don’t give up. Don’t think that you shouldn’t try. Don’t think that, because you aren’t good enough, you aren’t allowed to do something (unless it’s brain surgery). You still don’t think you’re good enough? Of course you aren’t good enough; you’ll never be good enough for you. Your brain is always five years ahead of your hands. Your own expectations of yourself are higher than anybody else’s. If you think that you’re the best at what you’re doing, that’s probably proof that you’re missing something, but that doesn’t mean you should constantly think you’re the worst. If you can’t believe in yourself, find someone who does. There will always be someone who does. Sometimes it’s a whole bunch of someones, and some day, maybe, that’ll mean that you can believe in you as well.

And then maybe you’ll start drawing a webcomic.