#everytime someone asks me for drawing advice i just shut down *static noises*

[sunbloomdew]

do you have any tips how to doodle? i want to have some drawings around my writing but i have a hard time making it look effortless. love your art btw!

thank you for the compliment anon! as flattered as i am to be asked for drawing advice, i absolutely don't feel i have enough knowledge or skill to give it. still, since you asked i'll do my best to give you an answer! ( ◡̀_◡́)ᕤ

just to be clear, i am a self-taught hobbyist ⁽ᶠᵒʳ ⁿᵒʷ⁾. this isn't going to be a definitive 'how to draw' post! do not take this advice at face value if you are trying to learn how to draw professionally, because well, that wasn't the question and that's not what this post is about. it's just your rando tumblr artist giving silly advice on how to draw silly doodles :3

so here are my tips and tricks on how to doodle:

1. firstly? relax. you're doodling for fun and for yourself! it doesn't have to be perfect (as cliché as this sounds). your works are important because you created them.

i find that a lot of the time i don't even start drawing because i don't think i can pull it off the way i imagined in my head. don't fall for this, it's your inner goblins trying to deceive you. you will never get to a point where it looks like you want it to if you don't try at all!

draw even if you think it looks like shit. don't be overly critical of yourself but also don't give up. it's okay to change something if you feel it looks weird or just cause. but also step away from a drawing from time to time, so you can see it with a clear mind - maybe you will catch some mistakes or maybe you'll realize that it looks better than you thought it did!

2. doodle all. the. time.

the more you do it the more natural it will feel. silly expressions, random objects, your ocs, anything.

you said you want to have drawings to go with your writing, so i suggest trying to draw whatever moment you wrote! i'm gonna use our life as an example, since that's the fandom i draw for at the moment. when i play the game and i like a line or a certain moment i quickly draw it on a sticky note. even if the doodles look bad i still feel good looking at them, because i drew a moment i enjoyed and i managed to show the emotions i wanted in the doodle.

3. use references. like a lot of them.

from my experience, i usually have an idea on what i want to draw - what pose or expression i have in mind. first i sketch it out on my own and then i look up references. sometimes for an entire doodle and sometimes for a specific part, like an arm placement.

if you don't have a clear idea of what you want to doodle, but you know the moment in your writing you want to draw, let's say two characters dancing, look up photos of people dancing and look at art that other people drew to seek inspiration.

references are really helpful but they can also feel constraining, as if they are limiting what you can draw. to that i say if don't use only one reference! the pose can come from one picture, an expression from another, body type a different one and so on. personally i have an entire board on pinterest dedicated to photos and drawing advice i find useful. when i can't find a specific thing i usually take pictures of myself and use that.

this is a really nice deviantart post about using references! you can also find it here on pinterest, where i found it.

4. simplify your refs!

when you have a reference it still may be hard to draw with it. i used to do the thing where you start drawing with a ref by focusing on one part and drawing it in an extremely detailed way and then moving on to another. needless to say it did not look good at all - the proportions were off and it looked stiff and unnatural.

what helps a lot is simplifying your references and your drawings in general. here's what i mean by that:

imagine references not as a whole but as a bunch of shapes. you can draw over the reference directly to get a better feeling of what shapes make sense.

5. what i learned from my book about drawing is that your hand movements shouldn't come from the wrist, but rather from the arm. most of the time using only wrists is good for details. it may feel a bit awkward and clunky to implement the entire arm into drawing at first, but it helps a lot with how your lines look!

6. and last but not least, we are talking about doodles! not detailed, complicated art pieces.

it's okay if they are messy or imperfect in any way.

so tldr; doodle because you like to, draw a lot and everything, use references and simplify them, use the entire arm while drawing, and don't worry about them not looking like a museum art piece!

i think in the end what is most important is that you draw because you like to. progress will come with time.

sooo there you have it! i took some time with replying to this ask because i wanted the advice to be good,, i hope it helped you in some way anon! ৻( •̀ ᗜ •́ ৻)