#i'm mainly worried that like. my art tips make me sound more skilled than my art actually is

[ssalballoon]

i wanna get better at art but dont know how to start ^^' whats a good way to get into studying anatomy and improving as an artist? tysm 💗 love your art soso much

more art converts 😼 yay!!

i think these asks were sent by different people but they're pretty related + a lot of my advice is the same! so i'll answer these together under the cut (it's so long oh gosh)

ok first of all i'm very flattered that people are asking me for art advice but i'm really not the most equipped person to ask TTOTT I've never been deliberately studious with my art so I feel bad offering advice when I've mostly gotten by with just drawing fanart and ocs a lot... my rate of improvement has therefore been slow, but I've still had an enjoyable learning experience so perhaps from that angle my input may help! i'll mainly refer you to external resources that have helped me

For anatomy + drawing humans:

1) I know I'm not diligent enough to sit down and study muscles, so instead I make it more enjoyable by drawing my favorite characters in a pose that targets the muscles I want to practice! (i default to drawing ppl naked because of this lol) This isn't the most efficient, but it serves as good motivation to get practice in. (honestly a lot of my general art advice has the undercurrent of becoming so obsessed with characters to drive your motivation to draw even when artblocked/ struggling with doubts!)

2) I want to refer you to Sinix's Anatomy playlist! Although Sinix focuses more on digital painting, he gives simplified anatomy breakdowns that include how muscles change shape under different movements/poses, which is crucial for natural human posing. the static anatomy diagrams from Google don't really help for that

3) What's just as important as anatomy is gestures! (especially important if you're used to drawing non-human objects I think!) Making figures look like they have flow to them will sell the "naturalness"(?) to your anatomy. If you have in person life drawing sessions accessible near you I'd recommend trying those out, or if you prefer trying it digitally there's this website!

This helps you not only get a sense of human proportions, but also natural posing! I'd limit the time taken to draw the poses from like 10 seconds to 1 minute(?) for quick gestures, and maybe 1 minute to 5mins(for now!! typically they go much longer) to study human proportions. I'd say don't spend a lot of time on them, repetition is more important!

4) I've also picked up on useful anatomy tidbits from artists online! Looking at how practiced/ professional artists stylize a body helps me focus on what the essential details are to convey a particular form (looking up "human muscles" and being hit with anatomy diagrams full of all the smallest details can be overwhelming! what do you even focus on?! so these educated simplifications really help me) Like Emilio Dekure's work! Look how simplified these figures are, and yet contain all the essential information to convey the sense of accurate form (even though it's highly exaggerated!)

(shamefully admits I've never studied from actual anatomy books so I can't recommend anything in that sense TTOTT)

For general improvement:

1) I highly recommend Sinix's Design Theory playlist and Paintover Pals! (+ his channel in general) You don't have to put them immediately into practice, but I think these are good fundamental lessons to just listen to and have them in the back of your mind to revisit another day. Plus these videos are just fun and very approachable! Design theory fundamentals are essential to creating appeal and directing a viewer's attention, and critiquing others' work/ seeing his suggestions are a good way to practice noticing areas of improvement+ solutions yourself!

2) If you prefer a more formal teaching resource, the Drawabox YouTube course covers all the basic fundamentals of drawing in short lessons. But honestly if I were starting out, this would be a little intimidating for me (and even now it still is! I haven't done all of them) But even if you don't watch them, the titles should give you an idea of the basic concepts that are valuable to pick up. I think it would be nice to keep in mind and revisit once in a while as you learn!

(One lesson I do encourage you to watch is the line control one! A confident continuous line conveys motion and flow much better compared to discontinuous frayed lines which I think is good to practice early by drawing from the wrist and shoulder)

3) As a universal piece of advice: Please please please use references! Use a reference for literally everything, observing is how we learn! You'll find that a lot of things you thought you knew what they looked like are inaccurate by memory alone. Also, trace! This is solely for your practice, tracing then freehanding has helped me grasp proportions when I was struggling! (of course don't post these online if you traced from art)

I've found that being able to compile references into easy to access boards has been very helpful in encouraging me to use references more. For PC, I think they use PureRef (free/pay what you want), and for iPad I use VizRef. VizRef is a one time purchase (which was definitely worth the $3.99 USD price imo)

4) On that note, try building up the habit to observe from media + real life and make purposeful comments about what you see! Like hey, when I bend my knee, the muscles/fat in my thighs and calves bulge outwards, I should draw that next time. Purposeful observation carries over to your overall visual library, and it's a little thing that adds up over time

5) For motivation, get into media you really enjoy, or make your own characters! The way I started art more seriously was by drawing fanart + OCs from anime that I liked ^^ For OCs it really encourages you to draw more because you're the primary creator of their art! Also you gotta see a lot of good art to make good art! Watching visually appealing media (like animation with appealing stylization/simplification) can passively help you learn just by observation.

ok wow I could go on but this is already a lot of information TTOTT my main aim for this reply is basically: don't let anything discourage you from learning to draw!! drawing is so fun and brings me a lot of joy ^^ practicing often will of course help you improve, and the way to incentivize that is by having fun with it! i hope this could help!💞

[diviinedogs]

❣️hoi, what was art school like? I'm planning to go myself (and my family is pretty passively aggressively turning me down), but I just want to know what skills do you learn? What is the experience? Thank u for your time! Ur blog and art are amazing btw

hI I think it really depends on the school but I can give like the idea of two of them since I went to another school for precollege to see if it was something I’d be interested in majoring in! C./C/A and I went to Ri/.ngli./.ng and my parents are actually letting me go back to school now so hopefully I’ll be back there in Fall c’: also thank you for liking my stuff!

this ask is gonna long because I know I’m gonna ramble so I’m gonna call the schools C and R so I don’t have to do the slashes all the time! C’s experience was a specific  1-2 month course so it’s nothing like actual college at R so feel free to skip down to it, I just thought it was important to add since it was my first experience at an art school

and after I talk about the schools I’ll say what stuff’s good to include in your portfolio, of course this is based on my experience but for the most part it helps in what you should try strengthening 

I did animation at C, which was 2D in the morning and 3D in the afternoon. I did precollege the summer before my senior year cuz it’s like the college experience before college so you do get the feel of how it is being on your own, and I wanted to see if I was good enough to pursue something art related. At this point, my parents were on the fence about the idea, so it would help them too. And C’s in California, so I had a bunch of relatives who could show me around and who I could stay with during the weekends

experience wise, the teachers and TAs I had were really nice, so in 2D it was stuff like learning Principles of Animation and the first thing we did was a flipbook animation I think? and then it went to looking at scenes from movies for inbetweens and character sheets and we all worked together reanimating a quick scene from a movie. In the end, we all chose a really short scene from an animated movie to study and reanimate for our final

while in 3D, it was just learning around Maya and doing animation exercises each day with it, eventually working your way up to a mini film (nothing’s completely rendered though! just models), other than that it was pretty much the same as 2D

so basically, I learned the basics and they were really helpful, but to be honest I felt a bit lost with how free it was, you basically had to learn everything on your own with the teachers just checking your work. I was really good at 3D but it... wasn’t fun for me lol so I decided that after this I’d want to stay in the 2D realm of things

now for R! My parents were worried about the starving artist myth and all that, so they would absolutely not let me do Illustration even though that’s what I really wanted, so I chose Game Design and I was like hey I’ll deal with it or like maybe I’ll like it. If not, I could always try convincing my parents to let me switch my major. 

the way things work at R is that all the majors are put into categories, so Computer Animation, Game Art, and Illustration are all the Media Arts majors. All Freshman take basically the same type of classes and things start breaking off around the second semester of freshman year. Eventually you like see no one outside your major lol

and lET ME TELL YOU........ R HAS A VERY HEAVY WORK LOAD, so you gotta be prepared for that. I think just about all art schools are like this, but R’s very strict on it.  Manage your time wisely, there’s a lot of times I’ve seen people pull all nighters just to finish all their assignments. I was really bad at managing my time too, so when I go back I need to be more strict on myself. It’s better to do things early and relax than relax until last minute and have anxiety hell. Not many of the teachers are about how much homework you have in other classes. Also, it’s good to not do things last minute because then you can relax earlier and scanners and place you go to take photos aren’t crowded.

and trust me, your teachers will know if you did something last minute, and they can tell whether effort was put into something or not. 

Now for classes, I’ll talk about just freshman year since that’s probably what’s most helpful to you right now and since I was made to drop out by my parents I’ll probably be repeating like the second semester of that rip.... anywAY

so, R starts you with foundation, so figures classes, 2D design, drawing (this one’s perspective! so important but rip everyone forgets everything after that semester so I should probably start studying perspective again)

the figure classes at R are sO GOOD............ you improve a lot with those, a few weeks into it I was thinking about the figures I had in my portfolio and was just like...... fuck these are so shitty how the hell did the school accept me.... of course the experience depends on the teacher, but I loved my figure drawing teacher he was really cool and good. He did demos at some point every class to where we would all just hover over his shoulder and watch him draw while he explained what he was doing. You i

2D design I hated because like...... abstract... it’s supposed to help you work with compositions and such but I really don’t understand abstract and execute it properly so that was a really difficult class for me 

drawing class is just doing still life and perspective exercises, you don’t really get to the fun part till second semester, I forget the other exercises but I remember that towards the end there was one where you designed a car (like a fun spin on it like.... I think mine was a firefly styled car? yeAH)

other classes were Film & Narrative (so studying films, it was cool) and Writing Studio, which is just like a writing class, they don’t really apply to skills/experience in art so I’ll skip over those

second semester, you still have Figure Drawing, but there’s more of a focus on stuff and you get to draw animals too (sadly no, no real animals come into the classroom. You work off of projections and then there’s a field trip to a big cat sanctuary)

drawing II gets fun because you finally get to use photoshop for your still life and assignments, the assignments get more fun like the Tro/./.ja./n Ho//rs/e assignment. Like you could either do the actual one or draw a similar scenario, I’m totally blanking out on what I did but one of the examples was like a giant wooden mouse with cheese and in the back were cats watching the actual mice. Anyway, it had even more of a focus on compositions and colors. 

Another assignment was designing a character’s room. It could be any character, but you couldn’t have anything that gave away their name. People had to be able to guess who the room belonged to just by looking at it. Sounds hard, but fun. If the character you chose had like a specific style from the concept art of where they’re from you’re free to use that too! I did Kida from Atlantis and one of my friends did Greg Universe’s room, so she got to imitate SU’s background style which was cool to see!

3/D desi/gn was............. super difficult to me, I almost failed that class >w>;;;; because it was woodshop type stuff and polymer clay depending on what you wanted. However, every assignment you did would lead up to the grunt assignment, which was like, you had three designs of things that would be possible grunt level monsters, and you essentially pitch a game idea to the class and they pick the best. SO again, modeling especially with actual clay is hard for me but it was a great experience when it came to designing and stuff. There’s more but I don’t want to get into all the assignments

3/.D design differs based on what major you’re in, and you only get it if you’re doing one of the Media Arts majors, but I’m pretty sure for the most part they’re the same?

if you major in Game Art or Animation, then you also take traditional animation, which was really fun but tbh...... I only knew how to do animation because of me being at precollege at C and then like learning stuff on my own, you were really left alone a lot, which is the same for some of the other classes. They’ll help you if you ask, but if you don’t then you can’t really get helpful feedback. Again, it depends on the teacher. The one I had was really nice and I frequently went to her for help.

so despite how some assignments/classes were hard for me, I really loved R and I’m excited at my parents giving me the option to go back, I just need to do a portfolio again >w>;;;; R’s a really good school with a lot of great resources. All of my issues came from problems with people (not teachers just other students) there and I’m not gonna get into those cuz personal lol

OKAY SO for portfolio tips

still life

figURES

ANIMALS, it makes you have a better understanding of anatomy and stuff

try to have a mix of media in there, like I mainly do digital but still have some traditional stuff to show that you know how to use those

I would keep figures realistic and not stylized so they can see that you have an understanding of them

depends on the school I think, but R strictly says in their guidelines to not do fantasy stuff like unicorns and dragons

NO FAN ART.......  you can have it but you need to be really, really vague? if that makes sense, like people shouldn’t be able to tell it’s fan art

have what you’re applying for in your portfolio, so like depending on what you want I’d add concept art stylized stuff or character designs 

you gotta have your best work in there, like some people like having okay/bad work to show how much they improved but that’s a bad idea, if you don’t think something’s good don’t put it in for colleges to see