I didn’t draw the gozu. plans came up today - helped a friend in priming and painting his new house, and now my arms are spectacular pastas! Like, the really overcooked sort. Blahhhhh!
Dang art’s gonna happen sooner or later, I gotta… Idk I don’t have a sustainable art groove to get back into, but I gotta do this. Gozu are cool. This is my post to not let myself forget.
This is also my post to welcome Liamix to the forums! Oh man. You are early in the art world, but that means I get to watch your skills improve like crazy AND THAT IS MY FAVOURITE THING TO SEE.
My advice: Don’t worry about having to draw with traditional media, you want to start with those anyway. Learning to draw with digital tools first means mistakes don’t have as much impact, and you have access to layers immediately. If you can hit ctrl-z infinite times and re-draw a line until it happens to look right, is that practice, or just relying on chance? If you can rely on layers to do the organizing for you, do you still learn how to do a rough layout/‘under-sketch’ before moving on to actual details? I argue not.
My advice is DO STUDYS. Find a pic you like, or want to learn from and make a copy of it. Obviously don’t pass that off as your own idea, but doing a study from someone else’s photos or art is a great way to get a feel for EVERYTHING. Linework, style, proportions, depth, scene composition/balance, colour use, texture. Do like apprentices did back in the Renaissance, learn from masters. You’ll see your own style grow from where you make changes from the original, or in how you simplify photo-real things.
I would suggest doing studies from a variety of sources though, not just one style. Lotta kids in highschool I knew back in 2001-2006 had the dreaded anime phase. Anime already simplifies a lot of anatomy down to a specific style, so learning to draw anime means learning to simplify your art in the same way. If your own style begins to emerge and you simplify or change traits, you are doing so from a source that already does this. Learning proper anatomy from solely anime or other highly-stylized cartoons is like expecting a photocopy of a photocopy to look like the original.
