Ponythread Learns to Draw! Together!

[Thanqol]

Thanqol learns to draw in a nutshell! This is fabulous advice.

One thing I'm beginning to notice though is that you are doused too much on tryi new things. Sometimes it's nice to just refine what you has. Develop the depth that spending all your time on breadth makes you lose.

Remember, practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes rote. Perfect practice makes perfect, and you don't get that if you bounce around too much.

But cautioning that maybe your path isn't the best is what I do, so take it rhetorically. It is to provoke thought more than anything.

I actually disagree with this. Every time I experiment, even if it's a godawful failure, I've learned a lot of actual, usable things. And then, months later when I'm rummaging in my bag of tricks for a specific effect, I'll have a bunch of things to call on and an informed choice as to what works best. I did a whole bunch of experimentations with fire effects a while back, found one I liked, and I can just come back to it whenever I need to. It's a permanent upgrade to my visual arsenal.

And it's not like experimentation takes up my entire draw practise time. I typically do an entire picture 'standard' except for a few colouring and shading techniques that I take huge gambles on, even if it risks ruining the entire picture. I learned from Day 254, for instance, a lot about the limits and variance of the bristle brush, and I learned a three-point shading technique that I absolutely adore. In subsequent pictures I'll practise those lessons while experimenting with other things. In the same picture, I used lessons on solid black+transparency slider from previous experiments to get the shadow right. It all adds up, and flows together. Everything has use, like a big pile of Lego blocks.

Yes, attempting rote-drawing of standard humaniform heads until I can do it reflexively is an enormously appealing concept which often features prominently on my to-do list. But I don't have enough Lego to start building and refining the style I want yet. I don't have a good way to do hair. I haven't practised enough with skin tones. I can't draw figures in physical contact right. I want to experiment with these things until I've got understanding of each conceptual element, until my Lego box is full of pieces, before I work on refining a style.

I'm getting closer, but I'm also getting better at seeing which areas I'm completely clueless on.

Aaaaand the best thing I've coloured in ages, yet I managed to only save it as a .png and not a sai file so I can't ever finish it, which really, really annoys me. And it also made me stop doing art for around two weeks...

Ouch, sucks mate.