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The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

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Oh hey, your art owns majorly, and I covet your skills muchly. I wanted to ask, how do you go about drawing portraits from imagination? Do you have any tips or resources you could recommend? Regardless if you respond or not, hope you keep drawing forever.

Thanks so much!

I guess I approach drawing people roughly the same way that I draw anything else: Absorb as much knowledge as possible, by whatever means possible, and experiment a lot.

I don't have any specific resources to recommend, but there are lots of good ones out there and they're all good for different things. "Anatomy for artists" resources are a great reference for the general forms, medical resources can explain the fine details, and studying other artists that you like can teach you a lot about interpretation and stylization (although be wary of learning detailed anatomy based on other artwork because nobody is perfect and you may not even be able to easily tell what they might have exaggerated on purpose). Even if you have a simplified style where you don't usually draw the subtle little details, any insight is valuable. The more anatomy you know, the more options you have to work with.

That said, nothing beats studying from life. And while you absolutely should draw live subjects when possible, it's good to remember that you don't need to be holding a pencil to absorb information. I think I just pay more attention to other people's faces than the average person whenever I'm looking at or talking to someone. Try to figure out what makes someone look distinctive, or attractive, or intimidating. How accurately do you think you can guess their age, or heritage? Based on which features? Is there any feature they possess that's different from anything you've drawn before?

Whenever you think you've learned something new, experiment with that knowledge! To me it feels like a waste of time to draw the same picture twice, so I'm constantly trying to come up with combinations of features, angles, styles, shapes and colours that I haven't used before. I think that artists who are less confident at drawing people tend more toward stereotypes (giving a 'manly' character all of the 'manliest' features, for example) and that can sort of work for some cartoonier styles, but I prefer a more realistic messiness. Real people don't fit into neat boxes and have all kinds of fun combinations of features. Sometimes I'll just start sketching a face without a plan in mind and won't really be able to tell the character's gender or race until I'm almost done. Other times I'll foresee it going in one direction and try to turn it around before the end.

If you always try to do something different then I think you eventually run out of boring choices and become forced to make more interesting ones, or at least choices which are new to you, which can in turn help you to develop new ways of thinking about a subject. And I do a lot of sketches, so I burn through a lot of ideas. Plenty of them are pretty mediocre and that's okay. 'Bad' art is just a byproduct of making 'good' art. If a picture turns out poorly then I just try to figure out what went wrong, save it anyway, file it away where nobody else will ever see it, and start a new one. The hundreds of drawings that I've uploaded to the internet are nothing compared to the mountain of stuff that I don't bother sharing.

Hopefully that helps a little bit!

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Self-Portrait Day 2024

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