#redrawing a thing but failed

[scapegods]

guard dog

[flowerbloom-arts]

Giggling and kicking my feet. Multishipping is so fun.

[certainlyathrill]

look at these losers they look like they stink

[arolesbianism]

Despite how much I suffered making my last isat au Aris sprite redraw, I decided to do it again and once again went through hell doing it. There’s like a billion mistakes in this (such as her having the wrong arm rip) but at the end of the day I’m still happy with how it turned out :]

[ctiren]

Omg do Karin 💕🤩

i tried!

i'd like to do her more justice so i'm gonna take another try at it at some point 🤸‍♂️

send me an ask and i'll draw you a guy

[mel-loly]

-Creator!🌟

[loverium]

AH HELP i looked at ur to do list and seeing the sheer excitement over the robinhill layouts is so funny to me … ROBINHILL 🔛🔝 FR — @dovehil

I’m a big fan of it! All of my headmates hate it for some reason, i love barbenheimer dynamics… 💔

[karimelthefloof]

We had a power outage due to somebody cutting the powerline with a chainsaw (Fun!) BUUTT it allowed me to practice inking and coloring instead of scrolling through tumblr and youtube-

Although i did spend the whole outage drawing this one art and listening to spooky stories on youtube cause i had anough phone battery to last me a day >->

[vetyr]

hi, i ireally love your work and i don't know if you've answered this before but, what kinds of studies do you do or how did you learn color theory? i wanna get better at rendering and anatomy but im having trouble TT TT

Hi! Long answer alert. Once a chatterbox, always a chatterbox.

When I started actively learning how to draw about 10 1/2 years ago, I exclusively did graphite studies in sketchbooks. Here's a few examples—I mostly stuck to doing line drawings to drill basic shapes/contours and proportions into my brain. The more rendered sketches helped me practice edge control & basic values, and they were REALLY good for learning the actual 3D structure behind what I was drawing.

I'd use reference images that I grabbed from fitness forums, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, and some NSFW places, but you could find adequate ref material from figure drawing sites like Line of Action. LoA has refs for people (you can filter by clothed/unclothed, age, & gender), animals, expressions, hands/feet, and a few other useful things as well. Love them.

Learning how to render digitally was a similar story; it helped a lot that I had a pretty strong foundation for value/anatomy going in. I basically didn't touch color at all for ~2 years (except for a few attempts at bad digital or acrylic paint studies), which may not have been the best idea. I learned color from a lot of trial and error, honestly, and I'm pretty sure this process involved a lot of imitation—there were a number of digital/traditional painters whose styles I really wanted to emulate (notably their edge control, color choices, value distributions, and shape design), so I kiiind of did a mixture of that + my own experimentation.

For example, I really found Benjamin Björklund's style appealing, especially his softened/lost edges & vibrant pops of saturated color, so here's a study I did from some photograph that I'm *pretty* sure was painted with him in mind.

Learning how to detail was definitely a slow process, and like all the aforementioned things (anatomy/color/edge control/values/etc.) I'm still figuring it out. Focusing on edge control first (that is, deciding on where to place hard/soft edges for emphasizing/de-emphasizing certain areas of the image) is super useful, because you can honestly fool a viewer into thinking there's more detail in a piece than there actually is if you're very economical about where you place your hard edges.

The most important part, to me, is probably just doing this stuff over and over again. You're likely not going to see improvement in a few weeks or even a few months, so don't fret about not getting the exact results you want and just keep studying + making art. I like to think about learning art as a process where you *need* to fail and make crappy art/studies—there's literally no way around it—so you might as well fail right now. See, by making bad art you're actually moving forward—isn't that a fun prospect!!

It's useful to have a folder with art you admire, especially if you can dissect the pieces and understand why you like them so much. You can study those aspects (like, you can redraw or repaint that person's work) and break down whether this is art that you just like to look at, or if it's the kind of art that you want to *make.* There's a LOT of art out there that I love looking at, probably tens of thousands of styles/mediums, but there's a very narrow range that I want to make myself.

I've mentioned it in some ask reply in the past, but I really do think looking at other artist's work is such a cheat code for improving your own skills—the other artist does the work to filter reality/ideas for you, and this sort of allows you to contact the subject matter more directly. I can think of so many examples where an artist I admired exaggerated, like, the way sunlight rested on a face and created that orange fringe around its edge, or the greys/dull blues in a wheat field, or the bright indigo in a cast shadow, or the red along the outside of a person's eye, and it just clicked for me that this was a very available & observable aspect of reality, which had up until that point gone completely unnoticed! If you're really perceptive about the art you look at, it's shocking how much it can teach you about how to see the world (in this particular case I mean this literally, in that the art I looked at fully changed the way I visually processed the world, but of course it has had a strong effect on my worldviews/relationships/beliefs).

Thanks so much for sending in a question (& for reading, if you got this far)! I read every single ask I receive, including the kind words & compliments, which I genuinely always appreciate. Best of luck with learning, my friend :)

[lackadaisycats]

How do you draw so well on paper without getting frustrated with your own art? Bless me with a tip pls

I often draw very messily on paper. I just clean it up afterwards, either by erasing stray marks and guidelines and relining the drawing, or by scanning and doing digital touchups. Or I just leave some of the messiness there because sometimes that has more personality and charm than a pristine, polished drawing does. I am also in a near perpetual state of frustration with my art. I think that's normal for anyone doing any sort of creative work. Having to erase and redraw something, having to reconfigure your approach after trying and failing the first few times, having to relent and seek out some reference material - it's a confluence of frustration and challenge. As maddening as it can be, it's also part of what keeps things interesting. If it was all completely effortless, what satisfaction would there be in doing it?

I guess if there's a tip in here somewhere, it's to embrace frustration. If you're feeling frustrated, it's a good indication you have a critical eye for your own work and that you're venturing beyond your comfort zones. Both of those things are essential to improving. (That's not to say you should torture yourself. If you're so frustrated that your blood pressure is spiking, well, take a break, cool off, return after a refresh.)

[heck-theo]

TMayNT Day 31: Redraw of day one. (Original prompt was: the turtles in you favourite style.)

Ok there are so many ways my brain is trying to be critical BUT I am proud of myself for finishing one of these challenges, no matter what. I've tried and failed to commit to so many projects.

Just to clarify: my own style is NOT my favourite style. I am far too self critical for that. I just entirely ignored the prompt ^^

vvvv Comparison pic and comments on day 1 v day 31 below. vvvv

So for one thing I did want to de-centre Leo a bit, cause the original day 1 prompt was favourite turtle and I DO love them all, Leo just has a special place to me. I also wanted them to not be floating.

Now I do prefer some parts of the original, mainly the simplicity. I do want to try and aim for a more simplified style in the future (if I can stop defaulting to the style I have atm). I might have gone a little overboard with the lighting on the more recent one. STFU up brain, I did not get worse. But it was fun. I think it's good to explore and practice parts of the art process even if it isn't something you want to stick to. I do think I learnt a lot of stuff and made some improvements over the month.

also bonus cute Raph face that I liked from one of the first attempts but I ended up restarting

[andro-dino]

grgggrrgr wanna post art but have no energy to draw anything rn so WOE ASSORTED DOODLE DUMP FROM THE PAST COUPLE MONTHS BE UPON YE

these root ones are reminding me how much I miss the vagabonds too ourgh,,,,,

hazel’s neck is gonna be killing her when she wakes up in that last one lmao

I need to redraw this with actual refs at some point but I cannawt be the only one who imagined frost eating cupcakes like that one image of jerma eating a burger right

I’ve got an assortment of kremy’s that are entirely unpostable bc they were when I was trying (and failing) to figure out his design (with which I still have not had much success). I know I’ve got some cute ones somewhere but they’re all across random note packets n things I don’t feel like digging for rn

I do have a lot of Gideons tho. can you tell I really like drawing him lmao

[ghostiidasponk]

Tried to redraw azul ob scene in gachiakuta style and failed miserably so have the two out of eight pages I actually finished

I did no doubt learn a lot though LMAO, and I think I got the gist of things I need to improve. It doesn't really look gachiakuta style enough tho I think I just ended up reverting to my actual art style.

Criticism will be appreciated!

[le0sulfurous]

Good day to all the unironic active Captain underpants enjoyers on here (hi to all 7 of you) I realised I hadn’t drawn fanart or a thing in a while and I wanted to redraw some book illustrations that I liked so have these small lil doodles

(original illustrations under the cut)

Also here’s a scratchy doodle that I just drew for fun unrelated to the illustrations, epic heist fail

[charbies]

linktober 31 - HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

I thought for the last day I'd write a little retrospective on what this whole thing was like and what I learned. I'm too tired to draw literally anything else I'm due for a break lol

So this was my second time ever attempting a linktober/october drawing challenge, but my first time managing to complete all the days and prompts. I feel super proud of myself and accomplished for pulling it off.

There were a number of things that were surprising and that were challenging for me that I wasn't expecting this month. If anything, I think this challenge really highlighted my flaws and mental blindspots with how I approach making art.

For one thing, I came away from this not liking everything I made. I think I only like about 9 or 10 of the 30 pieces I put out there. When I don't like my art, I tend to get stuck in this mental stalemate of refusing to finish a piece until I like it, but also refusing to retrace my steps and erase/rework what I have so far for fear of losing progress or not being able to replicate the line/angle/color/etc that I liked.

It was surprisingly hard to accept when I didn't like a piece but had to move on for the sake of time and post it anyway. But once I did it a few times, it got easier. I realized prioritizing my standards over my available energy is not gonna promote progress. If I kept sinking myself into one piece and not moving on until it was optimal, I never would have finished anything-- that was the pitfall that ultimately made me bail out 10 days in last year.

I also realized my sunk cost fallacy/"what if I erase this and can never redraw it good again" stems from some real lack of confidence in my knowledge and techniques with art. I'm self-taught, and I think I tend to believe that everything I make is a dumb happy accident, even though I have mental rules when I draw, use tons of references, and have a process lol. There are a few pieces I started over 2-3 times before I got them right, and that's starting to feel liberating instead of like failing to me now, which I never expected to come out of this experience so that's cool.

Another place I had to learn to let go of control in this was with allowing for style variation. I really wanted each and every piece to be coherent and painterly, like they all came from the same book or something. But then I couldn't decide whether I wanted to do all/no lineart, all/no detailed background, all/no heavy rendering, etc. At the end I settled on just keeping the same canvas dimensions and just prioritizing filling up the space. Glad I ended up doing this, because I really would benefit from continuing to chill out and scale back how much I default to making dramatic, high-render pieces. I gotta break out of my comfort zone and make more sketchy little guys!

Sometimes my attachment to the prompts fluctuated; some prompts I thought I would love and then just wanted to get them over with. Some prompts I thought I would hate and subsequently half-ass, then I ended up redoing them and putting more effort & time into and loved the end result!

It was funny to also see how some pieces that I loved straight up did not get a whole lot of notes or attention. Some pieces I was "meh" about did crazy numbers lol. I'm used to posting maybe 5-6 times a year on here, so I'm usually indifferent to getting notes (by which I mean, I'm super grateful for likes & reblogs and the super sweet & funny messages in y'alls tags, but I'm not butthurt when I don't get notes because whatever happens, happens). Churning out 30 pieces in 30 days made me sometimes get bewildered by what did and didn't get notes, but frankly in the end I think it helps reaffirm that I should continue putting whatever I want out there because it! is! not! graded!!!

So would I do Linktober again? Probably not, sorry! it was a lot of time & effort and took me away from fall festivities more than I would have liked. I kinda only managed to pull this off because I was transitioning between jobs this month and had a week off to just draw. But I also completely see the value in taking on a challenge like this and finishing what I started, I'm super glad I did this, I think my art improved from it. I would definitely do future drawing challenges/prompt things that are quicker or have less prompts!

My advice to prospective future linktoberers: pace yourself and be gentle; this is a great chance to do something exciting and new with your art, but above all it's about you having fun. There are no prizes at the end except for what you've learned and how you feel about it, and that's for the best!!

One thing's for sure, I am zelda'd out lmao so I'll be branching out towards some little projects I have lined up for personal art and other fandoms I'm into right now

So anyway thanks to all of you who read this or who gassed me up this whole month, I appreciate you!!!!!!!! ヾ(＾∇＾)

[puttersmile]

Moonride

I wanted to redraw my oc since we now have an official bat critter. As it seems her arms are her wings instead of arms with wings attached. I wanted to make Cheerigo look more official but eh, I failed. I still want her to have some semblance of anthro hands/fingers but I did change things compared to her first appearance.

I also changed her character description:

Cheerigo never stays in one place for long—there’s always something new to explore, and she’s not about to miss out on an adventure. Quick-wit on wings, turn to her when you're in a jam. Navigating the dark or dodging danger, Cheerigo’s instincts and boundless energy always keep her ahead of the game. When the skies turn dark, she’s the first to take flight, even if she’s not sure where she’s headed. If you’re looking for someone who’ll stick by your side no matter what, Cheerigo’s your critter. Hang on tight and Here we Go!

She is a central part to whatever AU stuff I'm trying to do but I likely won't ever get it off the ground. So to go ahead and spoil a tiny bit, its an Isekai based AU situation.