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[flame99]

Hey guys, I've always had an interest in drawing, but I'm not exactly skilled (For example, I once tried to draw an elephant, and several people mistook it as a dog). I'd love to get better, and I've been practicing quite a bit. However, do you have any advice for learning to draw better?

[Sonlirain]

While i'm not really a good artist i'd suggest referencing others a LOT as it helped me get from bottom tier DA cesspool to only DA cesspool levels.
Take a picture you like and try redrawing it as closely as possible but don't just trace it by putting a paper over it and doing a silhuette.
instead just have the original somewhere in sight and try redraw it line by line on an emply sheet.
When you are comfortable drawing that picture try messing around with it so if you for example drew a standing man based of a photo then try drawing the man waving his hand or something.
Over time it should come naturally but i'd suggest having a crapton of reference in the beginning and be patient. I picked up drawing as a new years resolution and i'm still crap (not drawing nearly enough tho) crap at it but i saw some improvement over time this way.

[freeformschooler]

As others will inevitably recommend, Andrew Loomis' fun with a pencil is one of the best books ever made. The point of the book is to advance your understanding of form (as you advance in skill, you slowly learn drawing is a lot like sculpting).

Sonlirain, don't worry: as the saying goes, it takes ten years. DA cesspool is only the beginning.

[flame99]

As others will inevitably recommend, Andrew Loomis' fun with a pencil is one of the best books ever made. The point of the book is to advance your understanding of form (as you advance in skill, you slowly learn drawing is a lot like sculpting).

...
I think I have a new favorite book.  After reading through a few pages of it, I managed to draw something that vaguely resembled what it was supposed to look like that. Thank you so very much for showing it to me!

[Tiruin]

This is a familiar thread...
Oh right, I remember Vector's ol' thread

Hey guys, I've always had an interest in drawing, but I'm not exactly skilled (For example, I once tried to draw an elephant, and several people mistook it as a dog). I'd love to get better, and I've been practicing quite a bit. However, do you have any advice for learning to draw better?

Research what you'd like to draw, perhaps emulate even, and some techniques--study how you do your drawing, as drawing is as much knowing yourself than your work.

Find how best you conceive your art, and if in trouble, find how others present theirs and ask them about it.

Also, FFS said it. I learned drawing by...total nothing other than observation. You can do it, but aid always helps tons.

[mastahcheese]

Posting to get around to reading that link at some point, because my art is teh lames.

[Sappho]

I have to confess that for years I ignored this advice, because it sounded so stupid. I wrote to some of my favorite artists and asked them if they had any advice, and they all said the same thing: PRACTICE. DRAW. DRAW ALL THE TIME.

I took offense to that because it seemed to me that certain people (ie the people who were giving this advice) had obvious natural drawing talent, and no amount of practice on its own was going to overcome my lack of talent. I countered that I've been drawing since I was a kid, and never really got any better.

There is some truth in the fact that some people have more natural talent. But even people with natural talent, it turns out, have usually developed that talent by practicing intensively. And that's the key: not just drawing sometimes and calling it practice, but focusing that practice and making it constructive.

So take the people with the gobs of natural talent, and just ignore them. They don't come into it. And they're a very small percentage of amazing artists. Most of them really have gotten good via practice. Many of them go to art school, but that's really just institutionalized practice. All the practice they're forced to do, that's the real reason people who go to art school end up better at art.

One artist explained to me how he improved. He said he was terrible at drawing faces. No matter how hard he tried, he just couldn't get it right. So he created a practice schedule. Every day, he would draw a face. In the beginning, most of them were awful. But that wasn't the point. It didn't matter that each one wasn't good. Very, very slowly, he started to get better at it. He started to learn from his mistakes. Not even consciously. It wasn't that he'd draw each day then go "aha, I seem to have misplaced this line, so tomorrow my work will be better." Day to day it didn't seem to make much difference. But at the end of a month, he was amazed at the progress he'd made. Like if you measure a little kid's height every day. They grow fast, but you don't notice the difference until the annual height measurement. And then, after he was so sick of drawing faces that he wanted to scream, he picked the next thing he was terrible at drawing, and did that for a month. Now he's a professional artist.

So I started doing this myself, and it has made an incredible difference. Pick the thing you think you're worst at drawing and just draw it every day. Use whatever cheats and tricks you need to. Use a grid. Trace. Copy other artists' drawings. Pick a single photo of a face and copy it every day for a week, then compare all the copies. Try to catch details of people's faces in real life and get them on paper. Fail miserably. Keep doing it anyway. EXPECT that your work will be garbage, and laugh about your worst failures. Seriously. If you expect each piece to be good, you're going to get frustrated. Do your practice not with the goal of creating a work of art, but with the goal of training your stupid, sluggish muscles to obey your will, and your lying eyes to see more clearly. Then one day you'll be doing this and someone will walk by and be like "holy shit you're amazing!" and you'll be like "oh please, this is just garbage," and you will have, at long last, earned yourself a reputation as one of those amazingly talented people who doesn't even appreciate how talented they are.

[Muz]

Yeah, practice a ton. The best writers spend years learning their ABCs and grammar. Best drawers spend years drawing.

I'm untalented with art because I usually think in words, whereas some people think in images or feels. I'm a very technical thinking. But practice makes things good. You might have bad motor skills, but practice a ton and you can still learn to run and play baseball. Fun With A Pencil covers most of the stuff I was going to say about line art. Poses and faces and perspective are damn tough. Work on things one at a time - don't try to draw an epic scene, but keep repeating something until you can do it naturally.

Your next step is learning how colors work. Color theory is a little off IMO, the color wheel is probably not your best focus when learning to do colors.

I learned colors by focusing on grayscale first, and then adding color to it. If it doesn't look good in grayscale, it will certainly not look good when you add some hue to it. No color starts off black or white. A white shirt in a room might be orangey, because of the sunlight at different times of the day. That will be your base hue, your 'white'. Something like a blue shirt might be that orangish-white mixed with the blue you want to portray.

If you're doing computer art, an interesting note is that the darker the color is, the higher the saturation. There's actually 'more' color in darker tones, and the lighter tones approach grayscale. Light shimmering off a red metal thing may still have the same brightness, but it becomes more like white.

Once you're familiar with those techniques, then you can start working with the color wheel. Color wheel still ranks pretty low.. knowing brightness colors makes most of the difference in a lot of art. Most people like me started off thinking that the best colors were different hues of the same brightness.

[Tiruin]

Sappho hit the nail on the head. ._.

Remember this: Anyone who got up there, glorified or not, in the top or not, achieved and made something-practiced their work. Loved their work. Valued what they do.

You can't be good at something if you don't practice it. Also on Muz' part:

I'm untalented with art because I usually think in words, whereas some people think in images or feels. I'm a very technical thinking. But practice makes things good. You might have bad motor skills, but practice a ton and you can still learn to run and play baseball. Fun With A Pencil covers most of the stuff I was going to say about line art. Poses and faces and perspective are damn tough. Work on things one at a time - don't try to draw an epic scene, but keep repeating something until you can do it naturally.

I think with feelings and images, so find it partly complex to translate what I feel-what my imagination or memory sees, into words.
^{It feels so...linear.}
but this is perfect advice.

Do not set your goal so high that you can't achieve it at all. Start one step at a time.
^{The journey of a thousand paintings is one brush stroke at a time~}

[Knick]

Don't be afraid to imitate other people.  I learned to use ink and brush, and how to shade with cross-hatching by imitating a newspaper cartoonist.  Don't be afraid to interpret-drawing a person does not need to be photo-perfect.

Disney cartoonists learn by sketching live animals, how they move etc. 

[Beast Tamer]

Posting to Watch.

[Muz]

So that's what I look like when I'm typing at 3 AM

[ShadowHammer]

I am personally also bad at drawing (my mom recently came up behind me and said, "oh, I see your drawing a... 7 headed duck... cool...". I definitely wasn't drawing a 7 headed duck.), but I can agree, from experience with sports and school, that enough practice can overcome natural talent.

Also, I'm posting to watch and read that fun with pencil book at some point.