Hot damn y'all. Thought some people in here might appreciate this, someone in a glitch art group in facebook posted this today and it is INCREDIBLE. Color Converter/picker/buncha stuff: https://pipeworksinc.io/CC
Aaron Blaise's (Art director and animator on several Disney films like Aladdin, Brother Bear, Lion King, Rescuers Down Under, etc) online animation school continues to have some pretty insane discounts, including offering his Fundamentals of Animation course for free:
Worth checking out, can't beat the price! I really liked his Photoshop tutorial from Youtube (which is a truncated version of the paid course), and I snagged the human anatomy course which is going for a buck. Haven't tried it yet, but I've downloaded for future use.
Windows Ink why are you so trash? I purposefully turned everything Windows Ink related off and changed click settings to avoid common issues people have but of course after an update they were all back and my pen was skipping parts of the line in Krita. It's fixed now that everything is off again.
Windows Ink why are you so trash? I purposefully turned everything Windows Ink related off and changed click settings to avoid common issues people have but of course after an update they were all back and my pen was skipping parts of the line in Krita. It's fixed now that everything is off again.
I'm with you- I wrote this back in June when I had to basically reinstall everything on my computer from scratch, but had forgotten about Windows Ink- and was so angry when I remembered, 'of course that's why Photoshop still seems so messed up.'
For PS/Wacom users, Windows Ink is like the villain in a long-running horror movie series- no matter how terrible and played out it is and cliche it becomes, you know that asshole's coming back for one more scare a few years down the line.
You nailed it! Might make a good comic. In place of a knife there's the windows ink icon.
The skipping was only happening at low pressure. I made the mistake of troubleshooting assuming it was off but wasn't getting anywhere. It was so infuriating to see it there. Lesson learned.
I put a Windows Ink is Evil card in my Anki Tools deck so I never forget.
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gavindelThe reason all your softwareis brokenRegistered Userregular
Oil painting is a messy, finicky beast, ain't it? The canvas, the brushes, the paint brands, the paint quality, even the different physical origins of paint - burnt umber is thick and muddy, cobalt blue just wants to ooze right out of the tube - and each combination mixing differently with interactions of warm and cold and stronger versus weaker pigments - sap green is wimpy and wants to go brown on you while pthtalo blue laughs at the idea of another color disrupting its power - and oh dear I think I've gone cross eyed.
All of that before you get into the difficulty of edge manipulation, layers of paint interacting and pushing, gamsol and chroma...
gavindelThe reason all your softwareis brokenRegistered Userregular
Ah, I really love a good art book. They're decadent, really. A little dangerous - all the enjoyment of the art without having to actually get better yourself.
I'm not playing FFXIV: Shadowbringers, but the art book for it is downright sexy. I could see a totally legitimate life goal for a young artist being "I want to be good enough to work on this".
Ah, I really love a good art book. They're decadent, really. A little dangerous - all the enjoyment of the art without having to actually get better yourself.
I'm not playing FFXIV: Shadowbringers, but the art book for it is downright sexy. I could see a totally legitimate life goal for a young artist being "I want to be good enough to work on this".
Agreed, art books are a real weakness of mine. I always make the mistake of thinking everyone in the world loves art books as much as I do, and give them as gifts. They never go over quite as well as I would hope, the equivalent of a cat bestowing a murdered chipmunk on its favorite human.
Say, y'all ever flip through your older doodles and just... not know what the fuck you were thinking. Sometimes I worry for past Didge
greed, art books are a real weakness of mine. I always make the mistake of thinking everyone in the world loves art books as much as I do, and give them as gifts. They never go over quite as well as I would hope, the equivalent of a cat bestowing a murdered chipmunk on its favorite human.
That's rough. I'd be stoked if someone got me art books. All I get is clothes and socks. Loads of fucking socks. It doesn't matter how many socks you buy me they'll never be paired!!! Just give up already.
Say, y'all ever flip through your older doodles and just... not know what the fuck you were thinking. Sometimes I worry for past Didge
If by older you mean yesterday sure. It gives me the fear. This book I'm reading right now suggested trying turning thoughts like that into silly songs inside your head like putting them to the tune of jingle bells. Apparently it really works after I stop laughing. Brains are weird.
I'm just starting to mess with 3d modelling and I'm having a good time with Blender so far. I tried it ONE time YEARS ago and it is very different now and seems a lot less obtuse.
I'm terrible at it but it's been fun to mess around with. I'm going to try and be consistent to see if I can actually make some progress =p.
My reference board for my current WIP is getting pretty dang weird.
There's a twitter thread I cannot for the life of me find again, but it was full of people posting their weird photos they took for references against the finished works. It was a hoot, I wish I could locate it. One of the best was someone holding a soup ladle at arm's length as reference for a POV piece where the character was holding another person's chin.
I have a little corner that has a couple swords, a staff, some model guns and tubes of varying sizes because I need to have photos of hands holding things or I cannot draw those hands.
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gavindelThe reason all your softwareis brokenRegistered Userregular
Man with gun: "Draw a hand holding a martini from imagination or you're toast!"
Artists: "You know, it was a good run."
Hey dudes. I have a friend asking about kids book illustration prices (yes, I know). I know we have a few people around who have done those projects, obviously I can't give her an overall price ballpark without knowing more about the situation but I'm trying to figure out if this would be more of a per-page situation or a "whole package" contract. Any of your experiences would be valuable.
sup everyone I'm doing my regular four year check in lol--
Yall can see what I've been making on my website clarkspaintings.com (I sell prints now :P), I have a show opening in NYC at a gallery called Kings Leap in November of all new stuff.
I'm also really proud of a TV show I produced that premieres oct 23 on HBO, it's called How To With John Wilson. Glad to see some familiar faces still posting work!
Apropos of nothing, just pointing this out because it's saved me a ton of time, and I don't know how many people out there know about this (As someone who has been using Wacom stuff for like 20 years, it was news to me when I found out this year, so I hope I'm not the only one who didn't already know this).
If you use a Wacom tablet on Windows, if you often have your tablet stop responding after waking up from sleep or w/e (like I do), you can make a .bat file in Notepad with the following settings and then make a shortcut to it that runs as admin, and running that shortcut will bring the tablet back to life in a few seconds.
You may have to restart Photoshop afterwards to get it to recognize pen pressure again, but this is a lot faster than rebooting the computer or digging through the Windows Services' list of a trillion things to do the same thing.
@Angel_of_Bacon this is actually super relevant to me, I just switched back to wacom, traded my yiynova for a 22hd, and as soon as the drivers dropped on my first day of painting I was like "oh, right, this."
Haven't been on the wacom side for like 8 years and this is still a problem, damn.
@Angel_of_Bacon this is actually super relevant to me, I just switched back to wacom, traded my yiynova for a 22hd, and as soon as the drivers dropped on my first day of painting I was like "oh, right, this."
Haven't been on the wacom side for like 8 years and this is still a problem, damn.
Yeah it's kinda incredible they haven't solved the issue in all this time. I'm surprised the Yiynova didn't have similar issues- I've always been wary of the non-Wacom tablets because I heard vague reports of 'driver issues'...and if the gold standard of driver support is Wacom- which has traditionally been pretty bad- I thought, 'just how bad must the other stuff be?'
Anyway it's still a pain in the ass, but the shortcut (combined with quick launching with Launchy, though I guess now the Windows key will do the same thing) has reduced my reaction to, "goddammit", from, "godDAMMIT!!!!". Hopefully it helps with the ol' blood pressure a little.
Apparently this has been floating around for a while, but I recently came across a 'self-taught' curriculum for drawing, meant to take someone from 'complete beginner' to 'decent':
Seems like a good collection of resources, for sure. He has it set as taking a bit over 2 years. This is interesting, since I've never really seen anyone put a hard number on how long it takes to become somewhat proficient, especially a timeline that openly acknowledges it will be a multi-year endeavor just to get comfortable with fundamentals. Most stuff aimed at true beginners seems to dance around timelines, and with a lot of them I got the impression that I should be catching on a lot more quickly than I actually have been.
On the other hand, and to immediately contradict myself, it seems like an awfully ambitious timeline! They put Lessons 1-3 plus the 250 box challenge at around 1 month of study, which is nuts. Maybe he's thinking of it more like a full-time study curriculum? For me, if I end up trying to do all or most of the lessons included here, I'd probably be looking at 3 to 4 years.
I'll probably keep this around and use it to help me choose new resources as I muddle along. I'd really like to get more into human figure drawing after I finish DAB.
Edit: Attempt to copy the whole dang thing because imgur is being a jerk. It's a tall boy,
get ready to scroll:
I'm just getting a spinning blue loading circle from that link.
Just judging based on what you're saying though, I would say that yeah- getting good can take a really long time, even if you are doing full-time art school for several years.
I think this is something that tutorials and resources struggle to get across in a meaningful way- most artists will say something to that effect, but a lesson or video tutorial is always going to show you a pro doing what they can do now after doing years of work, excising the thousands of hours of practices and tens of thousands of mistakes made along the way to acquire that skill, by necessity.
I think an underrated benefit of taking in person, high-quality classes is being able to get a feel for what a good rate of improvement actually looks like and feels like, by watching the progress of other students in real time- and realizing that while progress always comes slower than you'd like, you're probably within the average rate of improving in reality, even if it doesn't feel like it.
Even having worked professionally for years and years, I still pick up art books and marvel at how easy and quick the artists at Pixar/Dreamworks/Disney make things look, even though I know in my logic brain that I might only being seeing a heavily edited, 1/100th portion of the work produced over a 4 year project involving hundreds of people. Art can really mess with your sense of time in ways that aren't always great.
I'm a dummy, I think I copied the link from my personal saved copy, not the original one. Shooooouuuuuld be fixed? In case I messed it up again, it's 'Radiorunner's Curriculum for the Solo Artist.'
Nothing loads for me either, but I agree with bacon.
An analogy is, I got myself a piano recently. There are a million videos, iPad apps, and things to help me learn piano "in 30 days" but nothing is happening in that short of a time frame cause I got other shit going on. Its fun for me and I look at it as a hobby, I hope to improve and I have songs I dream to play one day, but I am not absolutely crushing music theory every day. One day maybe I will have more time to do such a thing, but I know that without that immersion the timeline is extended. That's totally ok. I dont need this out of piano, I just want to like it and enjoy it.
I dont think I would have this patience with piano if I started in highschool, but I've already spent the time, and continue to spend the time, packing practicing drawing/thoughts about drawing/ into every waking moment that I can outside of my day job. I know I'd improve faster if I got teachers, watched more videos, practiced more, dedicated more time, stressed, set goals, pushed hard... but to what end, as a 30 year old with a job and another hobby that I monetize on and off, do I want to turn piano into that? I dont! The only difference in piano and drawing on a personal level is I'm not putting the pressure of success on it, so it taking 40 years to learn jingle bells would be a problem for absolutely no one.
I think its good and healthy to manage your time and figure out where art and drawing sits in your life, dedicate your time accordingly, and follow timelines on a purely speculative basis. Give yourself a challenge but dont endlessly stress because of other peoples expectations of your improvement.
Looking at the image now, it looks like the approach here was 'take full-time art college curriculum, delete non-art classes, find and replace classes with best available online equivalents'. So this would probably be a pretty solid undertaking, if one that would probably a bit much for anyone with a lot of outside obligations. Also the lack of critique/interaction with a lot of these will also make these lessons a bit less effective than you might receive in an actual class. So I think in actual practice, it'd probably take longer than what's suggested here to take in all this material effectively. Also it seems pretty geared toward the realistic concept/digital painting side of the spectrum, so if you wanted to do something else (animation, for example), you might be able to make a better curriculum by looking up the course guide of a top-tier college program in that area, and finding equivalent online classes that fit the bill yourself.
Still a solid idea for structure for those who need it, but as Iruka's getting at I wouldn't stress if you need to modify it/your expectations to suit your own goals/life circumstances and take things at your own pace.
Thank you both, I really appreciate it! As dumb as it sounds, it's taken me quite a while to internalize how to approach the 'learning' part of learning to draw, and to understand how many mistakes I need to make, and how long the process will actually take. @Iruka , your point about learning Jingle Bells for 40 years really helps, honestly.
I've got a full time job and other obligations, drawing's more of a hobby. If it takes me a decade to make an animation I really like, no harm no foul as long as I'm making progress. The dream is to get good enough to do commissions once I retire [you know, if that's possible, lol], which is like 30 years from now. So I have some time (also early 30s).
@Angel_of_Bacon your insight as an industry professional is really helpful! Especially the observation on the focus of that curriculum. I am in fact more interested in animation/ cartoons than photorealism, so I may look into swapping a few parts of that outline.
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gavindelThe reason all your softwareis brokenRegistered Userregular
edited November 2020
I'm always dubious of these guides. I don't think they come from a bad place, but they offer a highly compressed timeline. I always find myself completely lost in the day to day. For example, the very first step says:
"Do the gesture challenge concurrently with the Figure Drawing course. In the early stages, learning the flow of gesture is the most important thing - it prevents stiffness in your drawings."
To me that is profoundly unhelpful. What does gesture mean? How do I decide which pieces to include? How do I map from top to bottom of the figure? I produced literally of hundreds of pages of squiggly gesture drawings inspired by Vilppu and Loomis to zero practical effect because I couldn't connect the squiggles to a meaningful understanding of their purpose.
I don't know how other artists solve that dilemma. It seems like a lot of folks who follow this sort of approach learned to draw organically as they grew up, and the same lackadaisy approach does not have equal results as an adult with a full time job.
Stealth edit: the number one barometer for whether to follow an artist is the answer to the question, "Would I want to draw like this person?" If their work does not impress you, then do you really want to ingest their approach?
Also, as a person who went to an art school that alot of modern day digital artists would call a waste of money (and even I would say was too expensive), theres alot lacking in that curriculum in terms of "playing with child like wonder".
That is a really strong list of technical resources, but bacon is right that it is super biased to concept and other digital, industry oriented artists. It's an important thing to keep in mind when looking at art advice online. Even this community, when you look at most of the history of this forum, the intense focus on "getting better" was fueled by a desire to enter the industry. The disdain for non representational, naive, or even too-anime, or too anthro art was fueld by our perceptions of having what it takes to get into that industry. And a ton of people who were engaged in that here moved to work in that industry. But that's not the whole of making art.
As I got older, further away from school, and further away from working in entertainment and profitablity being the primary goals of art making, I was way less hard on myself for appreciating the woo-woo, emotional, touchy feely, playful and weird sides to art.
Are there any women on that list at all, without including that proko and CGMA are general providers who might have a woman or two pop up here and there? When do you spend time getting inspiration?
What if, in retirement, you want to apply your art to making decorative tables and screen prints, is that not valid?
I played a ton in school, mostly under women teachers in the illustration department, and looking back it was very important for my health and creativity, even if at the time I was desperate to spend learning anatomy and win the art race to get the art job.
It was took a long time to unlearn the impatience for me, but the great irony is that its a lot easier for me to make my studies fun once I let some of the art job baggage go. Letting go of the job baggage is 100% where my current work came from and I learn so much about what I like to paint through my dags, drunk brush ink sketches. Being able to do that work and get it out, I'm starting to look back on my idea of a portfolio and think of ways it can be more fun and interesting for me, and not work I'm forcing myself to do.
If your a hobbyist, embrace it. Include things that are fun and feel like playing and someone might judge as a waste of time. Look away from purely white male ideals of learning, theres a ton of art gatekeepers when you focus on the industry.
Learn anatomy and portrait drawing because that's the sort of art you want to make. Prioritize the fundamentals that will make you happy to create work with those skills.
To Gavindel's point about it being difficult to just list off a bunch of lessons and actually make sure you're getting what's intended out of it, that brings up another good point about not getting tunnel-vision pursuing only one recommended path.
A lot of the artists I know (myself included) have big ol' bookshelves full of books that at first glance, and even on closer examination, might seem incredibly redundant. A quick glance over my shoulder and I can count up like...16? books on figure drawing/anatomy, and maybe half a dozen about perspective. And even though a lot of these books are going to cover the same things by and large, I don't think of these as a waste of money- because the differing approaches, differing language, etc. may mean a single sentence of insight that I didn't get from one of those other books may be the thing that makes a principle 'click' for me in a way the others didn't. I'm sure if I started sifting through the landfill of my brain I could probably come up with examples of me spending $35 on a book by a respected master, but getting more useable insight on a subject from some random tutorial .jpg made by some nobody I came across on Twitter.
It took me years and years of reading some older, very well regarded books to realize: wait, this book and its lessons are being written as a response to what the standards the author was taught back in the 1910's or whatever, and doesn't go over all the stuff that it assumes you would already know, assuming you'd already have the experience they'd experienced- and therefore the book is way less useful without that grounding. It took a lot of time to realize that I was missing a lot of pieces, much less figuring out how to fill those pieces in. Even from the well-regarded, nobody's gonna have all the answers you need in one convenient spot.
It's kinda like writing a research paper in school- there's a reason the teacher is going to make sure you've got more than one citation in your bibliography, so you're getting multiple perspectives, learning to discern facts from opinions, and not taking any one source as unimpeachable gospel.
Again, this is also a good reason why in person teaching (presuming the teacher is qualified, which many are not) can be a lot more effective than a one-way resource like books or video tutorials: you can tell a teacher, "I don't get what you meant by this", or a teacher can observe that you're not picking up what they're throwing down, and can then adapt what they're saying to make sure they're getting their point across to you. When relying on non-interactive resources, you tend to just have to go find another resource to try to puzzle it out.
That said, casting a wide net for information can lead to another issue, where you're inundated with so much information with so many differing approaches and recommendations and exercises that you're left bouncing back and forth between them all, not making progress in any particular direction. There was a pretty good post about this up at Muddy Colors recently ( https://www.muddycolors.com/2020/10/gnats-vs-chimps-a-guide-to-community-part-1/ ), where they recommend choosing a limited number of primary resources/teachers to follow seriously- the ones whose work and approach jive the most with your intentions- while giving the rest only glancing attention when helpful to do so. Spackle to fill the gaps, so to speak. Just because someone is a "better artist" than you doesn't mean everything they say is going to be the most useful thing for you at this time at your present level of development, or even that what they have to say will ever be relevant to you personally, so don't worry about being discriminating.
Also I agree with Iruka, in that you shouldn't stress too much about "OMG HOW DO I DO THIS RIGHT HOW DO I MAXIMIZE EFFICIENCY OMG", especially when you're coming at it as a hobby.
Frankly even as a pro I need to take a step back a lot from that way of thinking, because I know it tends to be more destructive than productive.
There's a concept in Zen called "Beginner's Mind" that I think is useful here- even if you're an 'expert', if you can approach the page with the same sort of eagerness/curiosity/playfulness/lack of expectations as someone who has never drawn seriously before, you're almost certainly going to be more creative, learn more, and produce better work than someone ripping their hair out, screaming, "THIS SUCKS SO BAD WHY AREN'T I BETTER YET?!??!" The former will remain focused on the work, where your mind needs to be to produce good work- the latter will be focused on matters of the ego, and without their head in the game they're doomed to frustration and slow progress. This doesn't mean eschewing education or hard work, just that in the moment you are actually drawing "wouldn't it be neat if I tried X, how might I go about doing Y?" works a lot better than "FUCK I gotta get through these 500 head drawings and they ALL have to be PERFECT or else I am a FAILURE". To watch some people draw you'd think they believed art directors hire based on how impressive of a frown they can maintain.
So you know, keep it chill if you can. Life's too short to force yourself to hate the things that are supposed to make you happy.
gavindelThe reason all your softwareis brokenRegistered Userregular
Don't listen to Iruka. Art is no place for emotions!
Jokes aside, the process of learning art is really mysterious. I've never seen a learning process as heterogenous and varied as art instruction. I'm willing to bet if you put everyone in this forum in a room for instruction, you'd be lucky to connect to a fifth of the group at a time. Advanced students need help on rhythms and flow; intermediate students need encouragement on the road; beginner students are like "Would you shut the everliving hell up about forms this pencil is trying to murder me!" How students actually cross the gap between each of those steps seems to rely heavily on internal changes to perceptions and understanding that do not communicate well.
There's an element of time. The neurological process of learning art seems to take years. Its one part motor skills, one part study and retention, one part some kind of weird unholy alchemy of visual perception and mental modeling, and none of these grow particularly fast.
I mean, I'm reviewing Figure 1 basics from Watts over Thanksgiving, and there are things I see clear as day which I was completely oblivious to in 2015. Could I go back and articulate them to past Gavindel? Sure, I guess, but he wouldn't have been able to parse them. He was too overwhelmed trying to get marks on the page to worry about the fact he was drawing every model thicc. Current Gavindel is like "Maybe we should try to fix these proportional issues", but he can't see the subtle plane shifts the Watts instructors point out so casually. In another year, maybe those will be obvious too.
I wish we had some serious longitudinal studies on art education over a 20 year period. Its my strong suspicion that there is one hell of a rewiring in there.
Are there any women on that list at all, without including that proko and CGMA are general providers who might have a woman or two pop up here and there? When do you spend time getting inspiration?
This really gets at a point I've been frustrated with as I've been searching for courses and tutorials! Almost every source I've found is dudes, and most seem to be coming at it from a very similar angle. Do you have any suggestions for resources from women?
On the inspiration side I follow a bunch of fantastic artists on Tumblr, and watch art streams on Twitch to see their process, but they are working so far above my skill range that it's more entertaining than instructive right now.
Bacon, I really do want to attend an in-person class but that's not in the cards right now. COVID's spiking very badly where I am, and most in-person instruction has been completely shut down (which, to be clear, is the right call). I was actually scheduled for a life drawing class to start riiiiiight as the pandemic started and everything was cancelled. Cost a pretty penny too, and I doubt I'll be getting that money back since the art center is having rough times right now.
Facebook keeps serving me with ads for https://www.21-draw.com/ , which has about half and half male/female instructors. That said, I haven’t taken any of the courses or know anyone who has, so I can’t vouch for how good the classes are one way or another.
And certainly under the circumstances I wouldn’t go for an in-person class either, and many in-person classes aren’t worth the money even without a pandemic. My intention was less to get you to sign up for something this instant, and more just to make you aware of what elements you might be missing from an online-only instruction, so you can make moves to compensate for it, or at least not beat yourself up if things seem to be going slower than you’d like. Ex: I’m a little asocial to a fault so I’ve never done this, but I’ve heard some people forming/joining informal critique groups over Discord/Zoom or whatever can be helpful to compensate (howwww you do that I dunno! I just saw someone mention it and said to myself, ‘that sounds like a great idea!’ and then never did anything further about it. )
Sorry to hear you’re getting stiffed on the life drawing class, that sucks!
I'm subscribed to Stephen Bauman's patreon his wife Cornelia Hernes also has one, hers appears to be more painting orientated though (and Stephens a bit more drawing).
Are there any women on that list at all, without including that proko and CGMA are general providers who might have a woman or two pop up here and there? When do you spend time getting inspiration?
This really gets at a point I've been frustrated with as I've been searching for courses and tutorials! Almost every source I've found is dudes, and most seem to be coming at it from a very similar angle. Do you have any suggestions for resources from women?
CGMA and Schoolism both have woman instructors interwoven in there. I have found some success by just actively seeking out and following artists that give me more perspective. I haven't been in the taking classes game for a while, so I haven't been on the look out for teachers in particular. the last class I took was trying out screen printing (which happened to be a cool woman here in Austin teaching). I was hoping to take some wood working classes before all hell broke loose.
And dont get me wrong, the fundamentals are important and having some frame work a self taught artist is a great idea to keep you moving forward. Unless you're particularly masochistic though, there's no reason to positively beat your head into the wall over it. We haven't done a resolutions thread in ages, but I still think its important to look at your progress and think about what you want in the short term and the long term: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/186005/enrichment-set-your-resolution#latest
When I feel stuck, I still go back to this prompt. I try and pick something technical to focus on, but also try and think of something I consider fun and not working to a long term goal. I decided all my faces looked the same, so I took a portrait class, but that same year, I bought small sketchbooks that I exclusively drew in when I was out drinking with friends. I'm trying to work through a book project, but I also took a screen printing class so I could play with some big machine-things and put skulls on shit! I'm not going home for Christmas this year, so I spent a night cutting snow flakes out of paper like I was 6 again to hang in the apartment, not like special arty ones, but normal ass printer paper ones.
This framework is the best for me. When I feel more ready to learn I lean into the technical and work out my frustration like a puzzle. When I dont have the energy I lean into doing whatever the fuck. Letting go of the baggage around it means the pendulum swing isn't as extreme and I can learn at my own pace while doing things I enjoy nearly in sync.
Looks like the 16" cintiq is only $650 on the ole Amazon which I feel is cheaper than its historically been? The jump up to a medium is still absurdly expensive for not that much more real estate, though.
I have an old, large intuos 4 and the screen size looks similar so I might keep that on my radar. I don't really work digitally enough to justify it but a lot of that is because I just don't like the disconnect of looking at a screen and not my tablet. A cintiq could be a little more ergonomic, maybe?
Looks like the 16" cintiq is only $650 on the ole Amazon which I feel is cheaper than its historically been? The jump up to a medium is still absurdly expensive for not that much more real estate, though.
I have an old, large intuos 4 and the screen size looks similar so I might keep that on my radar. I don't really work digitally enough to justify it but a lot of that is because I just don't like the disconnect of looking at a screen and not my tablet. A cintiq could be a little more ergonomic, maybe?
I think it's been that price for awhile, it's just confusing because for awhile there was also a more expensive 16" Pro version with a higher res display (and other things probably? I dunno).
Looks like they discontinued the pricier one, probably because it was confusing to people.
And having worked on big Cintiqs (22") at work and my small Cintiq (12") at home for years, I definitely would find it hard to go back to a non-display tablet at this point- but I've worked with people professionally that absolutely refused to work with Cintiqs even when given to them for free, and adamantly stuck with their Intuouses (this seems crazy to me), so I dunno.
It's one of those things like a VR headset- it's really hard to tell if it's gonna be worth the money for you until you've actually experienced it, but it's hard to experience it until you've actually spent the money on it.
Well, I guess the question is, do you want to spend $650 on those dreams and ideas?
I always feel like an ass giving advice involving suggesting anybody spend any money on anything, because I know not everyone has a bunch of cash to throw around. But if you've got the money, I'm sure it's probably a nice thing to have. You might use it more than you think! Or maybe you'll let it collect dust in a corner somewhere!
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Worth checking out, can't beat the price! I really liked his Photoshop tutorial from Youtube (which is a truncated version of the paid course), and I snagged the human anatomy course which is going for a buck. Haven't tried it yet, but I've downloaded for future use.
I'm with you- I wrote this back in June when I had to basically reinstall everything on my computer from scratch, but had forgotten about Windows Ink- and was so angry when I remembered, 'of course that's why Photoshop still seems so messed up.'
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The skipping was only happening at low pressure. I made the mistake of troubleshooting assuming it was off but wasn't getting anywhere. It was so infuriating to see it there. Lesson learned.
I put a Windows Ink is Evil card in my Anki Tools deck so I never forget.
All of that before you get into the difficulty of edge manipulation, layers of paint interacting and pushing, gamsol and chroma...
I'm not playing FFXIV: Shadowbringers, but the art book for it is downright sexy. I could see a totally legitimate life goal for a young artist being "I want to be good enough to work on this".
Agreed, art books are a real weakness of mine. I always make the mistake of thinking everyone in the world loves art books as much as I do, and give them as gifts. They never go over quite as well as I would hope, the equivalent of a cat bestowing a murdered chipmunk on its favorite human.
Say, y'all ever flip through your older doodles and just... not know what the fuck you were thinking. Sometimes I worry for past Didge
That's rough. I'd be stoked if someone got me art books. All I get is clothes and socks. Loads of fucking socks. It doesn't matter how many socks you buy me they'll never be paired!!! Just give up already.
If by older you mean yesterday sure. It gives me the fear. This book I'm reading right now suggested trying turning thoughts like that into silly songs inside your head like putting them to the tune of jingle bells. Apparently it really works after I stop laughing. Brains are weird.
Clip studio paint is doing the 50% discount promo again if anyone is interested
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully
I'm terrible at it but it's been fun to mess around with. I'm going to try and be consistent to see if I can actually make some progress =p.
There's a twitter thread I cannot for the life of me find again, but it was full of people posting their weird photos they took for references against the finished works. It was a hoot, I wish I could locate it. One of the best was someone holding a soup ladle at arm's length as reference for a POV piece where the character was holding another person's chin.
Artists: "You know, it was a good run."
Yall can see what I've been making on my website clarkspaintings.com (I sell prints now :P), I have a show opening in NYC at a gallery called Kings Leap in November of all new stuff.
I'm also really proud of a TV show I produced that premieres oct 23 on HBO, it's called How To With John Wilson. Glad to see some familiar faces still posting work!
If you use a Wacom tablet on Windows, if you often have your tablet stop responding after waking up from sleep or w/e (like I do), you can make a .bat file in Notepad with the following settings and then make a shortcut to it that runs as admin, and running that shortcut will bring the tablet back to life in a few seconds.
You may have to restart Photoshop afterwards to get it to recognize pen pressure again, but this is a lot faster than rebooting the computer or digging through the Windows Services' list of a trillion things to do the same thing.
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Haven't been on the wacom side for like 8 years and this is still a problem, damn.
Yeah it's kinda incredible they haven't solved the issue in all this time. I'm surprised the Yiynova didn't have similar issues- I've always been wary of the non-Wacom tablets because I heard vague reports of 'driver issues'...and if the gold standard of driver support is Wacom- which has traditionally been pretty bad- I thought, 'just how bad must the other stuff be?'
Anyway it's still a pain in the ass, but the shortcut (combined with quick launching with Launchy, though I guess now the Windows key will do the same thing) has reduced my reaction to, "goddammit", from, "godDAMMIT!!!!". Hopefully it helps with the ol' blood pressure a little.
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Focusing for three hours for Watts assignment: *long farting noise*
Every freaking time!
https://imgur.com/gallery/RXJ2nmH
What do y'all make of it?
Seems like a good collection of resources, for sure. He has it set as taking a bit over 2 years. This is interesting, since I've never really seen anyone put a hard number on how long it takes to become somewhat proficient, especially a timeline that openly acknowledges it will be a multi-year endeavor just to get comfortable with fundamentals. Most stuff aimed at true beginners seems to dance around timelines, and with a lot of them I got the impression that I should be catching on a lot more quickly than I actually have been.
On the other hand, and to immediately contradict myself, it seems like an awfully ambitious timeline! They put Lessons 1-3 plus the 250 box challenge at around 1 month of study, which is nuts. Maybe he's thinking of it more like a full-time study curriculum? For me, if I end up trying to do all or most of the lessons included here, I'd probably be looking at 3 to 4 years.
I'll probably keep this around and use it to help me choose new resources as I muddle along. I'd really like to get more into human figure drawing after I finish DAB.
Edit: Attempt to copy the whole dang thing because imgur is being a jerk. It's a tall boy,
get ready to scroll:
Just judging based on what you're saying though, I would say that yeah- getting good can take a really long time, even if you are doing full-time art school for several years.
I think this is something that tutorials and resources struggle to get across in a meaningful way- most artists will say something to that effect, but a lesson or video tutorial is always going to show you a pro doing what they can do now after doing years of work, excising the thousands of hours of practices and tens of thousands of mistakes made along the way to acquire that skill, by necessity.
I think an underrated benefit of taking in person, high-quality classes is being able to get a feel for what a good rate of improvement actually looks like and feels like, by watching the progress of other students in real time- and realizing that while progress always comes slower than you'd like, you're probably within the average rate of improving in reality, even if it doesn't feel like it.
Even having worked professionally for years and years, I still pick up art books and marvel at how easy and quick the artists at Pixar/Dreamworks/Disney make things look, even though I know in my logic brain that I might only being seeing a heavily edited, 1/100th portion of the work produced over a 4 year project involving hundreds of people. Art can really mess with your sense of time in ways that aren't always great.
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An analogy is, I got myself a piano recently. There are a million videos, iPad apps, and things to help me learn piano "in 30 days" but nothing is happening in that short of a time frame cause I got other shit going on. Its fun for me and I look at it as a hobby, I hope to improve and I have songs I dream to play one day, but I am not absolutely crushing music theory every day. One day maybe I will have more time to do such a thing, but I know that without that immersion the timeline is extended. That's totally ok. I dont need this out of piano, I just want to like it and enjoy it.
I dont think I would have this patience with piano if I started in highschool, but I've already spent the time, and continue to spend the time, packing practicing drawing/thoughts about drawing/ into every waking moment that I can outside of my day job. I know I'd improve faster if I got teachers, watched more videos, practiced more, dedicated more time, stressed, set goals, pushed hard... but to what end, as a 30 year old with a job and another hobby that I monetize on and off, do I want to turn piano into that? I dont! The only difference in piano and drawing on a personal level is I'm not putting the pressure of success on it, so it taking 40 years to learn jingle bells would be a problem for absolutely no one.
I think its good and healthy to manage your time and figure out where art and drawing sits in your life, dedicate your time accordingly, and follow timelines on a purely speculative basis. Give yourself a challenge but dont endlessly stress because of other peoples expectations of your improvement.
Still a solid idea for structure for those who need it, but as Iruka's getting at I wouldn't stress if you need to modify it/your expectations to suit your own goals/life circumstances and take things at your own pace.
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I've got a full time job and other obligations, drawing's more of a hobby. If it takes me a decade to make an animation I really like, no harm no foul as long as I'm making progress. The dream is to get good enough to do commissions once I retire [you know, if that's possible, lol], which is like 30 years from now. So I have some time (also early 30s).
@Angel_of_Bacon your insight as an industry professional is really helpful! Especially the observation on the focus of that curriculum. I am in fact more interested in animation/ cartoons than photorealism, so I may look into swapping a few parts of that outline.
"Do the gesture challenge concurrently with the Figure Drawing course. In the early stages, learning the flow of gesture is the most important thing - it prevents stiffness in your drawings."
To me that is profoundly unhelpful. What does gesture mean? How do I decide which pieces to include? How do I map from top to bottom of the figure? I produced literally of hundreds of pages of squiggly gesture drawings inspired by Vilppu and Loomis to zero practical effect because I couldn't connect the squiggles to a meaningful understanding of their purpose.
I don't know how other artists solve that dilemma. It seems like a lot of folks who follow this sort of approach learned to draw organically as they grew up, and the same lackadaisy approach does not have equal results as an adult with a full time job.
Stealth edit: the number one barometer for whether to follow an artist is the answer to the question, "Would I want to draw like this person?" If their work does not impress you, then do you really want to ingest their approach?
That is a really strong list of technical resources, but bacon is right that it is super biased to concept and other digital, industry oriented artists. It's an important thing to keep in mind when looking at art advice online. Even this community, when you look at most of the history of this forum, the intense focus on "getting better" was fueled by a desire to enter the industry. The disdain for non representational, naive, or even too-anime, or too anthro art was fueld by our perceptions of having what it takes to get into that industry. And a ton of people who were engaged in that here moved to work in that industry. But that's not the whole of making art.
As I got older, further away from school, and further away from working in entertainment and profitablity being the primary goals of art making, I was way less hard on myself for appreciating the woo-woo, emotional, touchy feely, playful and weird sides to art.
Are there any women on that list at all, without including that proko and CGMA are general providers who might have a woman or two pop up here and there? When do you spend time getting inspiration?
What if, in retirement, you want to apply your art to making decorative tables and screen prints, is that not valid?
I played a ton in school, mostly under women teachers in the illustration department, and looking back it was very important for my health and creativity, even if at the time I was desperate to spend learning anatomy and win the art race to get the art job.
It was took a long time to unlearn the impatience for me, but the great irony is that its a lot easier for me to make my studies fun once I let some of the art job baggage go. Letting go of the job baggage is 100% where my current work came from and I learn so much about what I like to paint through my dags, drunk brush ink sketches. Being able to do that work and get it out, I'm starting to look back on my idea of a portfolio and think of ways it can be more fun and interesting for me, and not work I'm forcing myself to do.
If your a hobbyist, embrace it. Include things that are fun and feel like playing and someone might judge as a waste of time. Look away from purely white male ideals of learning, theres a ton of art gatekeepers when you focus on the industry.
Learn anatomy and portrait drawing because that's the sort of art you want to make. Prioritize the fundamentals that will make you happy to create work with those skills.
A lot of the artists I know (myself included) have big ol' bookshelves full of books that at first glance, and even on closer examination, might seem incredibly redundant. A quick glance over my shoulder and I can count up like...16? books on figure drawing/anatomy, and maybe half a dozen about perspective. And even though a lot of these books are going to cover the same things by and large, I don't think of these as a waste of money- because the differing approaches, differing language, etc. may mean a single sentence of insight that I didn't get from one of those other books may be the thing that makes a principle 'click' for me in a way the others didn't. I'm sure if I started sifting through the landfill of my brain I could probably come up with examples of me spending $35 on a book by a respected master, but getting more useable insight on a subject from some random tutorial .jpg made by some nobody I came across on Twitter.
It took me years and years of reading some older, very well regarded books to realize: wait, this book and its lessons are being written as a response to what the standards the author was taught back in the 1910's or whatever, and doesn't go over all the stuff that it assumes you would already know, assuming you'd already have the experience they'd experienced- and therefore the book is way less useful without that grounding. It took a lot of time to realize that I was missing a lot of pieces, much less figuring out how to fill those pieces in. Even from the well-regarded, nobody's gonna have all the answers you need in one convenient spot.
It's kinda like writing a research paper in school- there's a reason the teacher is going to make sure you've got more than one citation in your bibliography, so you're getting multiple perspectives, learning to discern facts from opinions, and not taking any one source as unimpeachable gospel.
Again, this is also a good reason why in person teaching (presuming the teacher is qualified, which many are not) can be a lot more effective than a one-way resource like books or video tutorials: you can tell a teacher, "I don't get what you meant by this", or a teacher can observe that you're not picking up what they're throwing down, and can then adapt what they're saying to make sure they're getting their point across to you. When relying on non-interactive resources, you tend to just have to go find another resource to try to puzzle it out.
That said, casting a wide net for information can lead to another issue, where you're inundated with so much information with so many differing approaches and recommendations and exercises that you're left bouncing back and forth between them all, not making progress in any particular direction. There was a pretty good post about this up at Muddy Colors recently ( https://www.muddycolors.com/2020/10/gnats-vs-chimps-a-guide-to-community-part-1/ ), where they recommend choosing a limited number of primary resources/teachers to follow seriously- the ones whose work and approach jive the most with your intentions- while giving the rest only glancing attention when helpful to do so. Spackle to fill the gaps, so to speak. Just because someone is a "better artist" than you doesn't mean everything they say is going to be the most useful thing for you at this time at your present level of development, or even that what they have to say will ever be relevant to you personally, so don't worry about being discriminating.
Also I agree with Iruka, in that you shouldn't stress too much about "OMG HOW DO I DO THIS RIGHT HOW DO I MAXIMIZE EFFICIENCY OMG", especially when you're coming at it as a hobby.
Frankly even as a pro I need to take a step back a lot from that way of thinking, because I know it tends to be more destructive than productive.
There's a concept in Zen called "Beginner's Mind" that I think is useful here- even if you're an 'expert', if you can approach the page with the same sort of eagerness/curiosity/playfulness/lack of expectations as someone who has never drawn seriously before, you're almost certainly going to be more creative, learn more, and produce better work than someone ripping their hair out, screaming, "THIS SUCKS SO BAD WHY AREN'T I BETTER YET?!??!" The former will remain focused on the work, where your mind needs to be to produce good work- the latter will be focused on matters of the ego, and without their head in the game they're doomed to frustration and slow progress. This doesn't mean eschewing education or hard work, just that in the moment you are actually drawing "wouldn't it be neat if I tried X, how might I go about doing Y?" works a lot better than "FUCK I gotta get through these 500 head drawings and they ALL have to be PERFECT or else I am a FAILURE". To watch some people draw you'd think they believed art directors hire based on how impressive of a frown they can maintain.
So you know, keep it chill if you can. Life's too short to force yourself to hate the things that are supposed to make you happy.
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Jokes aside, the process of learning art is really mysterious. I've never seen a learning process as heterogenous and varied as art instruction. I'm willing to bet if you put everyone in this forum in a room for instruction, you'd be lucky to connect to a fifth of the group at a time. Advanced students need help on rhythms and flow; intermediate students need encouragement on the road; beginner students are like "Would you shut the everliving hell up about forms this pencil is trying to murder me!" How students actually cross the gap between each of those steps seems to rely heavily on internal changes to perceptions and understanding that do not communicate well.
There's an element of time. The neurological process of learning art seems to take years. Its one part motor skills, one part study and retention, one part some kind of weird unholy alchemy of visual perception and mental modeling, and none of these grow particularly fast.
I mean, I'm reviewing Figure 1 basics from Watts over Thanksgiving, and there are things I see clear as day which I was completely oblivious to in 2015. Could I go back and articulate them to past Gavindel? Sure, I guess, but he wouldn't have been able to parse them. He was too overwhelmed trying to get marks on the page to worry about the fact he was drawing every model thicc. Current Gavindel is like "Maybe we should try to fix these proportional issues", but he can't see the subtle plane shifts the Watts instructors point out so casually. In another year, maybe those will be obvious too.
I wish we had some serious longitudinal studies on art education over a 20 year period. Its my strong suspicion that there is one hell of a rewiring in there.
This really gets at a point I've been frustrated with as I've been searching for courses and tutorials! Almost every source I've found is dudes, and most seem to be coming at it from a very similar angle. Do you have any suggestions for resources from women?
On the inspiration side I follow a bunch of fantastic artists on Tumblr, and watch art streams on Twitch to see their process, but they are working so far above my skill range that it's more entertaining than instructive right now.
Bacon, I really do want to attend an in-person class but that's not in the cards right now. COVID's spiking very badly where I am, and most in-person instruction has been completely shut down (which, to be clear, is the right call). I was actually scheduled for a life drawing class to start riiiiiight as the pandemic started and everything was cancelled. Cost a pretty penny too, and I doubt I'll be getting that money back since the art center is having rough times right now.
Someday, though!
And certainly under the circumstances I wouldn’t go for an in-person class either, and many in-person classes aren’t worth the money even without a pandemic. My intention was less to get you to sign up for something this instant, and more just to make you aware of what elements you might be missing from an online-only instruction, so you can make moves to compensate for it, or at least not beat yourself up if things seem to be going slower than you’d like. Ex: I’m a little asocial to a fault so I’ve never done this, but I’ve heard some people forming/joining informal critique groups over Discord/Zoom or whatever can be helpful to compensate (howwww you do that I dunno! I just saw someone mention it and said to myself, ‘that sounds like a great idea!’ and then never did anything further about it.
Sorry to hear you’re getting stiffed on the life drawing class, that sucks!
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CGMA and Schoolism both have woman instructors interwoven in there. I have found some success by just actively seeking out and following artists that give me more perspective. I haven't been in the taking classes game for a while, so I haven't been on the look out for teachers in particular. the last class I took was trying out screen printing (which happened to be a cool woman here in Austin teaching). I was hoping to take some wood working classes before all hell broke loose.
And dont get me wrong, the fundamentals are important and having some frame work a self taught artist is a great idea to keep you moving forward. Unless you're particularly masochistic though, there's no reason to positively beat your head into the wall over it. We haven't done a resolutions thread in ages, but I still think its important to look at your progress and think about what you want in the short term and the long term: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/186005/enrichment-set-your-resolution#latest
When I feel stuck, I still go back to this prompt. I try and pick something technical to focus on, but also try and think of something I consider fun and not working to a long term goal. I decided all my faces looked the same, so I took a portrait class, but that same year, I bought small sketchbooks that I exclusively drew in when I was out drinking with friends. I'm trying to work through a book project, but I also took a screen printing class so I could play with some big machine-things and put skulls on shit! I'm not going home for Christmas this year, so I spent a night cutting snow flakes out of paper like I was 6 again to hang in the apartment, not like special arty ones, but normal ass printer paper ones.
This framework is the best for me. When I feel more ready to learn I lean into the technical and work out my frustration like a puzzle. When I dont have the energy I lean into doing whatever the fuck. Letting go of the baggage around it means the pendulum swing isn't as extreme and I can learn at my own pace while doing things I enjoy nearly in sync.
I have an old, large intuos 4 and the screen size looks similar so I might keep that on my radar. I don't really work digitally enough to justify it but a lot of that is because I just don't like the disconnect of looking at a screen and not my tablet. A cintiq could be a little more ergonomic, maybe?
I think it's been that price for awhile, it's just confusing because for awhile there was also a more expensive 16" Pro version with a higher res display (and other things probably? I dunno).
Looks like they discontinued the pricier one, probably because it was confusing to people.
And having worked on big Cintiqs (22") at work and my small Cintiq (12") at home for years, I definitely would find it hard to go back to a non-display tablet at this point- but I've worked with people professionally that absolutely refused to work with Cintiqs even when given to them for free, and adamantly stuck with their Intuouses (this seems crazy to me), so I dunno.
It's one of those things like a VR headset- it's really hard to tell if it's gonna be worth the money for you until you've actually experienced it, but it's hard to experience it until you've actually spent the money on it.
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But I got dreams and ideas
I always feel like an ass giving advice involving suggesting anybody spend any money on anything, because I know not everyone has a bunch of cash to throw around. But if you've got the money, I'm sure it's probably a nice thing to have. You might use it more than you think! Or maybe you'll let it collect dust in a corner somewhere!
I am not being helpful right now!
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