Everything I draw ends up wearing a bow-tie

TL:DR - why I will never regret drawing/having drawn so much crappy fanart.

When I was in the last years of university I was having a huge amount of trouble. I had no faith in myself. I was given conflicting advice about my work. I tried to please everyone. I tried not to let my family know how much I was struggling. I didn’t know what my style was or if I should even have one. I was depressed, but I didn’t know that I was; I just thought I was being stupid and overly emotional, so I berated myself for it.

At the time, I didn’t realize it, but the main outlet that I was using to escape the stress was drawing fanart. It was a shelter; a place that I could be creative and contribute without having someone jump down my throat about it. While my work at university floundered and fluctuated, my fanart became more experimental and true to my feelings, as I continued to be inspired and encouraged by people in the community. If I hadn’t had that outlet I don’t know what would have happened. I came close to giving up at school, but I never did when it came to making people smile online.

I came to learn essential lessons about character design and story that I was never taught in school; that good characters always have flaws. That you if you can tell who you’re looking at just by their silhouette, or their hands, or their shoes, that is a brilliant design. That it’s good to have colour associations and motifs, that pushing an expression or pose makes it better, and that with-holding information is more dramatic than drowning people with it. I also came to realize that copying the original style could be informative, but it was only when I was brave enough to go outside the boundaries of what was already there that I produced work that I liked. The more experimental I became, the better the outcome was, and the more I learned. Perhaps I felt more free to do this because I wasn’t being judged for it, perhaps it was because I could relate to the characters better than my own under the circumstances, I don’t know.

What I do know is that I owe One Piece more than I can adequately express, and anything that improves a person’s life, as profitless and self indulgent as it can seem to some people, is never something to be ashamed of. I’m not saying that drawing fanart is better than creating original work, very far from it; what I mean is that it’s not a bad thing, and you should never let anybody tell you that it is. The greatest artists in the world have learned by mimicking those artists that came before them. We don’t use the term fanart to describe what they were doing, but is it so very different?

capriciouscrow:

modmad:

Things I did not mean to do today;

• This.

Now see….Look at how cool this looks. How cartoony it is, obviously it isn’t realism but…i just. I’m so jelous that people can draw these sort of things…

I HAVE to draw somewhat realistically. I know i’m far from being a great artist who can render a scene like a photo but i am even farther from being able to do this…I can NOT draw something so cartoony like this because it bothers me…

And on some level it’s cuz i don’t wanna hear a critique that says “Well that’s not anatomically correct” … Anyway i really love this drawing and the band is pretty cool too u-u

Not very often I reblog my own stuff, but I got curious at seeing someone state ‘obviously it isn’t realism’ and clicked the link to read this through.

First of all, thank you! It’s wonderful that you like my work so much! Very very flattered, kisses, high-fives and hugs, and damned straight the band is pretty cool too.

The real reason I’m dropping this back on my blog though, is that the only reason I can draw like this is because I have learned how to draw realistically. If I didn’t know how to draw an anatomically correct human, I wouldn’t be able to exaggerate and caricature it like this. People seem to mistake stylistic design, especially cartoon design, as a way of drawing without applying realism. It’s completely the opposite. If you want to draw like this, it is imperative that you know what you are pulling apart and stretching and squashing and generally turning on its head.

You hear the phrase 'you have to learn the rules to break them’, all the time, but it isn’t explained very often. What it means it that you have to know what the rule you are breaking is, and you have to have a reason for breaking it. In a cartoon it happens all the time: a person walks off a cliff and doesn’t fall until he notices; rule broken- gravity, reason- comedy. A smear frame will have the character drawn with ten hands and three eyes; rule broken- realism/on model design, reason- fluidity. With this style I seem to bend the legs and have that jutting out part just below the knee on the lower leg- this is actually just an exaggeration of the calf muscle, and when you look at a real human leg, the two parts do not line up exactly and are, in fact, curved. The bones are bent in order to absorb the shock of walking, have a look at some skeletons, you’ll see. I didn’t add anything or change anything, just pushed what was there already. Certainly, I did it so far that it looks absurd, but it is grounded in truth; rule broken- anatomy, reason- silhouette.

Basically what I’m saying is that when artists can draw like this 99% of the time it’s because they’ve spent long and arduous hours learning how to draw realistically. If you’re still having trouble believing me have a look at some of my earlier drawings of the robots, they aren’t at all cartoony. I’m not saying that I’m a master at drawing humans, I wish I was, but I don’t want to encourage the idea that I or any other cartoonist would reject a solid grounding in anatomy.

(via capriciouscrow-blog)

(via kawaiiyomo-blog)