Hi, hello, good morning, good afternoon or good night peeps! I have a burning question for all of you artists out there! I am not actually a visual artist so I would like to know how to *improve!* (pretend the text is fancy and bouncing around)

I know the best way to improve is time and practice and boring stuff blah blah blah, but I wanna know EVERYTHING ELSE!! >:)

How do you all draw? What are the secret tips and tricks? How are you all so good at drawing? Please! I need answers!!! My art is weak right now and I want to improve!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yours truly - John "The Hartmann" Favourite

My humble contribution to this hard question:
- Think about what you are doing before you even start. Have a goal, focus on an idea, a style... Skill isn't all, you can fail battles or do boring stuff even if your pixel dithering is great. Subject and composition matters a lot
- Have a good setup, to be more efficient, so you can focus on drawing. Knowing your tool is also important, I own Aseprite which it great but I still use Gimp most of the time for this reason...
- Get ambitious and fail. Failure is part of evolving, and doing what you already know will not help your progress a lot
- When you start doing big pixels or other visuals, it sometime looks ugly, empty, boring... Don't give up and continue, you don't create something cool, you improve it until it becomes cool! I was thinking about quitting on half of the entries I ended up winning, especially intimidating 4HB
- Look what others do and don't hesitate to ask questions

Good luck on your journey!

The things I do for art are very much a "me thing", but it helped me improve so here goes

I like to learn about the field of study or its history (if possible) for something new i wanna draw, it helps visualize the concepts behind the object

Also listening to fitting music genres for what I'm drawing, that tends to help me

And I use tons of designated references, they are very cool and useful and there for you to learn

That's about it

I'm not as much a pixelist as I am a visual artist, I have an ongoing webcomic with well over 300 fully colored illustrations and animations, and I've finished hundreds of commissions outside of that.

How I improve is really down to constantly trying to do things I don't know how to do. If you get really good at drawing the same thing and suddenly you try to draw something different, it will be frustrating. This is why it's important to try new things constantly.

In my case, I used to be kind of scared of drawing backgrounds, but I wanted my characters to have a world to exist in and interact with, so I forced myself to learn by doing it anyway. Badly at first but over time, through constantly pushing against the limits of what I currently knew, I was able to gain some real competence in backgrounds.

Muscle memory and fine motor control are critical to drawing quickly, so it's a good idea to practice with a pen and paper. You can always fine tune everything later, but being able to draw with broader strokes and get yourself 80% of the way there rapidly will give you much more time for finishing, dithering, and finalizing the shapes. When you're doing an ohb, being able to rapidly go from idea to prototype art is critical.

Now the caveat here is that the vast majority of my improvement happened between 2021 and today, so I don't really have the record on this site to justify how I'm talking about it, but trust me, I have spent thousands of hours with a pen in my hand, and it really does boil down to finding your limits and then pushing against them until you're beyond them.

Use references! Copy things from real life until you know how to draw them without looking.

you guys draw???

actually, sorry if i derail the thread at all, but i’d be interested in hearing what programs people use to create their art. i draw alright on paper but i’ve never been able to get in the groove of drawing using a computer

here's a book rec
https://archive.org/details/andrew-loomis-fun-with-a-pencil

P.S. drawing on a computer is wack, come at me >:)

All these tips are good, but there's one thing that helps that a lot of people take for granted:

Find something you like and obsess over, and draw it constantly.

Practice really is the best way to improve, so if you find something you really really love drawing, you'll be practicing really frequently without it being a chore.
90% of my skill in drawing characters is from drawing my fursona on a near-weekly basis for a decade.

try copying drawings from Peter Paul Rubens, Charles Le Brun, Albrecht Durer, Egon Schiele, Leonardo da Vinci, etc. - you can learn a lot from them just like they were your teachers - and also important, learn how to sharp a pencil with a knife (as importantas learning how to wash your paintbrushes if you're a painter) - and visual culture (arts in general, graphic design, whatever) is important as well, not only as reference, as for eventually trying to avoid the same mistakes

and 2 quotes from drawing teachers i had:
- "Get into the habit of drawing every day, whether the drawings are done in a notebook, on napkins, etc. - the important thing is to draw every day, and the evolution ends up appearing"
- "When you are drawing, imagine that you are carving a sheet of paper with the tip of a pencil."

Maybe this goes without saying, but it's important to remember that rendering and composition are separate, equally important aspects of a complete visual work— meaning the pieces (+ the contents those pieces) and then how they come together / are presented relative both to each other and to the bounds of the space that they occupy.

It's a good practice to look at unoccupied / negative space as a distinct object, and to ensure that this object has an equally pleasing form to the elements within it.

as someone with many characters n sonas, i assure u that the moxiecat obsession method works. like i have a decent handle at shapes due to drawing arresterdramon over and over from different viewpoints

what i love doing is holding certain poses with mine own body before drawing them. makes me pay attention to like, wheres my centre of balance? how heavy are my limbs in this pose? where does my shirt do that crinkle? where do my shoulders lie in relation to my hips in relation to etc etc? plus when you do it in front of a mirror u have this sort of reference burned into ur brain so u can sketch it out quicker, AND it doesnt feel like cheating lollll

for backgrounds i just focus on filling in the colours and shapes instead of doing meticulous lineart. i had to grow out of that "lineart everywhere" phrase n i admit it took me a long time. liek remember its a fucking background, it shouldnt demand attention

4 retrokid: i use ibispaint on my lovely little phone which has a stylus. the app supports S-pen and it feels great to use, much better than drawing with pen n tablet on the computer. also less strain on my wrist when drawin for a long time

as someone who almost exclusively does visual art here on botb I think I can give my two scents on this. the things that helped me the most other than just drawing all the time were research and criticism.

look up as many tutorials as you can (alphonso dunn is a channel i HIGHLY reccomened), see how other artists draw what you want to draw, learn their process and see what works. use refrences and study too, get one of those like little art refrence figures (NOT THE STIFF ASS WOODEN ONES THOSE SUCK) and do some pose studies. look up stuff on pintrest too, lots of good refrence images on that site for reals. also look at books written by actual artists like Andrew Loomis or Burne Hogarth and see what they do to make their art good. this is all for building that "visual library" in your head so when you do go to draw something out of your head, you aren't just going in blind.

you also need the input of others to get better. Botb is already good for this but I'd also recommend seeking the critique of other people too. ask them what's good and what's bad about whatever you've made, then take what they say and use their advice in the next piece. In my AP art class in high-school we had class critiques throughout every step of the process, from the ideas, thumbnail sketches, midway through the piece, and the final product. that constant back and forth was one of the things that helped my skill skyrocket in high-school.

my last piece of advice is to doodle a lot, have drawings that u just like do for fun and no other reason. like have a place where you can just fuck around and not give a shit about what goes on the paper cuz nobody is gonna see it. I doodled a fuck ton on school worksheets for like years, I bet if I hadn't id wouldn't even be half the artist I am now. have fun with it and shit. also make a shit load of ocs that helps too.

I wish u well on ur art journey :]

I have been a vector artist since 2020, especially as a vector tracer.
And here's my fun advice:

Start something simple.
You obviously cannot do something that is complicated, especially on your first try. Everything takes baby steps. Try to make something minimal and simple.

Don't rush
Not many followers are waiting for your art to be uploaded. And artworks take time and effort. So don't hestitiate while making your artwork.

Make your style at home
It's all about having fun while doing it.

i think above all, being comfortable in how much you do is paramount as you ultimately don't want to burn yourself out. find a subject you're interested in and right amount of time to practice and go from there and you should see yourself naturally get better. it also really helps to

• study other people's art in the subject you're interested in
• use references in case you need a guide to help you draw
• use tutorials and guides in case you want to have a straightforward learning experience for artistic elements
• seek out critique from your colleagues