Drawing Technique Issues

Drawing is difficult.

It's too easy to make mistakes and not notice them.

In the course of trying to re-learn how to draw, I've learned some interesting things. The biggest lesson learned in the process was that the geometry and overall composition of a drawing can easily become skewed if you don't constantly check for it in the process. A good way to do this is, if drawing on paper, to hold the drawing up to a bright lamp or daylight and look through the paper. If the drawing looks weird in some way or seems lop-sided, there's a good chance your artwork has fallen victim to skewing.

On a computer, flipping the drawing is usually as easy as "flip horizontal" in your graphics editor of choice.

Take my advice: when drawing, you want to correct any proportions or skewing issues BEFORE you start inking or coloring. Otherwise, if you want to correct your artwork, you'll have to do much more work all over again. I've run into this situation more times than I care to remember.

It's even worse if you never catch these mistakes and have to wait until you post it online and everyone else notices it for you. That is frustrating.

Furthermore, if you express frustration with your artwork's flaws, people who offer helpful critiques will often take it personally and think you're attacking them. People will be led to believe that you cannot accept criticism because you show frustration with yourself. This can compound problems in your development as an artist. Again, this is from some rather harsh personal experiences.

Something else I've noticed: A Wacom tablet, even if you do your sketches on paper, will help immensely. No scanned, inked, linework will ever have the fine resolution of something "inked" on the computer. You will most certainly acheive cleaner line work if you scan your sketches into the computer and ink them digitally. This technique is certainly not for purists; it has served me well, however.

A lot of this stuff is personal preference and observation. Your mileage may vary.

This is some pretty neat stuff, actually. And part of why I tend to toss a lot of progress sketches at my friends is actually to see if they can catch any glaring errors I've managed to miss.

On skewing, I think part of that is from drawing on a completely flat surface. Proper drawing desks are tilted for a reason, and it's to help prevent that sort of thing. I forget the details on why that is, but it is a thing.

I probably need to do a lot more checks for proportions and so-on than I do, myself, speaking of that sort of thing. I also need to work on more dynamic poses and proper composition. There's a lot of s*** one tends to be really bad at when one has pretty much no proper training as an artist. "I'm doing it for fun," may not be an excuse for such things, but it's not like I'll ever hold a candle to my brother when it comes to these things. ...sort of like I wouldn't expect him to just do science super well, either.

My biggest weaknesses right now are probably that I just need to draw MORE things, more often, and faster. Yeah, there is the whole "you're practicing things wrong, now you have to relearn it all from the beginning," problem, but...doing more stuff, even if I think it's crappy stuff, is good. Doing stuff that's pushing my boundaries even if it turns out not as good is...probably good, and so-on. Can't learn anything without doing it in some way.

Practice makes perfect, as they say.

Neither one of you are terrible. Not the best out there, but better than a lot of people on DA.

I agree with Vega that criticism doesn't always have to be "constructive" to be useful. Being made aware that something doesn't look quite right can be enough to get the artist to take a closer look and examine the flaws in their own work where they otherwise wouldn't think to do so.

As with music, you don't have to be a musician to know what music you like. You don't have to be an artist to know what art you like or if it looks right. It does take an artist, though, usually, to provide detailed critiques.

It's all useful if you accept it as honest.

edit: I realized that Vega didn't make that point in this topic but I saw it in another topic recently. Miroku tries to find it.