Help needed on improving

[dannycruz]

honestly, i'd suggest putting the comics and anime away for a bit and just from draw real life...wether it be from pics or objects physically in front of you. also pick up a good anatomy book to help you make sense on what you're seeing.
i've given that bit of advice before and it usually turns people off...either its too much hard work involved or its too easy to fall back on old habits but, whatever, people tend to want instant gratification anyway.

[Inkthinker]

Well, and as I said, a lot of time people don't understand the value of the advice. Their train of thought is, "I don't want to draw 'real-life', so how is burning time drawing that going to help me draw what I DO want to draw?"

Especially for hobbyists and newborn amateurs, who aren't in it for the money and don't care about drawing any other way than the ways that make them happy.

And that's fine, it's good even, to have a goal in terms of what you want to do. The trick is understanding that if you can master the difficult stuff you don't want to do, everything else snaps into place SO MUCH MORE EASILY. As I said, these aren't lessons in "how to draw", they're lessons in "how to solve drawing problems".

So for instance, if you have a mastery of basic composition and anatomy, you find it easier to break down things into simply shapes which you can easily draw in perspective. This provides a structural basis for the more polished drawing which you can then lay over the top with the framework in place to create a strong basis for the work. It doesn't matter if that polished result looks like Jim Lee or Joe Mad or Satoshi Yamamoto (Pokemon artist) or Leonardo (the painter, not the turtle)... though they may all have widely different structural frameworks to their drawings, they all have something under their work.

And that, more than anything, is what I suspect is lacking here. Drawing from life will help with that. So will buckling down and learning some of those "fundamentals of drawing" (and that means actually practicing them, not just reading about them in a book or being told about them in a video or classroom).

[Senji]

Inkthinker nailed it right on the smacker, I can't stress this enough myself: Studying from life really depends on your perspective to life drawings. It is so easy to fall in a trap of just drawing from life, copying what you see and not learning anything. Coming home all chuffed that you churned out a realistic portrayal of life but at the end of the day, can you apply what you drew with your own drawings with a new set of angle and poses?

As Inkthinker puts it, you should really focus on understanding the subject itself, try to absorb the way something looks, the way it contracts, extrudes, fold in a particular way (muscle/facial features/movement) and from multiple perspective - and then try to apply your knowledge to "solving drawing problems." This is a really good way to teach your perception or your eyes to perceive what makes fundamental sense and how to solve something that's not.

Yes, it's not completely necessary to learn every ins and outs of the human body and no, you can't really get anywhere without stepping outside of your comfort zone or in other words, learning from life/reference!

[ssss6eight1]

Draw daily. Practice makes perfect. All the other shit will come later.

[Walril]

For what it's worth. I don't care how many times I lose because there are lessons learned. I can't count on my knowing I can win. I need to express that with carbon on paper.