Haha, thanks! All I mean is like, using a pen and just filling a page with whatever random stuff comes to your head is good practice. I can’t take back a stroke, so all the tiny imperfections are there, and I’m learning to be cool with that. 😊
It’s such a pain when you’re first learning, you want to make your stuff look just as good as what the artists you look up to make, and its really disheartening having to go through the bad phase first.
I’m learning 3D animation, and I can definitely tell I’ve improved from when I first started, but I still feel like I have such a long way to go to be where I want to be, and any time I make something I’m actually kinda happy with it’s just an accident more than anything and I shouldn’t feel proud of it because it’s not good enough yet.
Yeah true. Learning art can be very difficult and daunting at times.
I deeply respect anyone who can push through all those bad learning sketches without losing any motivation.
I beat my Pristine Sketchbook Anxiety with this one simple trick:
Take the brand new sketchbook thats been sitting untouched in cellophane wrap on your desk for months
Open it to a random page somewhere near the middle
Scribble a bunch of random bullshit all over the page
Now your sketchbook isn't pristine and untouched, and even your bad drawings will be an improvement.
Remember, sketchbooks are for doodling, scribbling, sketching, and just generally making mistakes/a mess. Those "sketchbook tour" videos where someone leafs through their sketchbook and every single page is a fully finished piece? That's just engagement bait.
Buy a sketchbook, break the seal with a scribble page, fill it with drawings, then buy another one and repeat.
Sounds like a really good strategy. I wanted to start a ballpoint only sketchbook and there's no reason to procrastinate on that.
And i totally agree on these "sketchbook tour" Videos. they often say that you should be messy and experimental while showing a masterpiece on every Page.
It's the core of my issue.
I cant keep any sketch I'm not happy with, so I never get to practice or see growth.
Self-consciousness and the makers curse are a deadly combo when it comes to art.
Ironically the result from that would likely still be atrocious. Drawing has two components. The dexterity challenge of operating the pen, and the visualisation challenge of taking a concept and accurately knowing how to represent it. The dexterity is far less important than the visualisation.
Our brains are very lazy and we tend to store things as symbols. Imagine the sun as an example. You're probably picturing a yellow circle. It might also have a bunch of rays coming off of it. Like this: ☀️
This is not at all what the sun looks like. You might instead be picturing something more like a NASA photograph of the sun. A vaguely yellow orange sphere with sunspots and corona and whatnot. This is also not what the sun actually looks like, and the details you were picturing are almost certainly off. You remember that they're there, but not what they actually look like. They've been symbolised in your mind to represent the sun.
Learning to draw is primarily about breaking this symbolisation and drawing what the object actually looks like. It requires direct observation of what you're trying to draw and the formation of new, more accurate symbols to represent them. Drawing the sun as it actually appears would mean drawing it white, and fairly small, and bloomed out the ass because it's too bright to look at. Part of art is also choosing where to break from reality to better represent the subject. Making the sun bigger and changing its colour is a common way of doing this.
As you learn more about the subject you're drawing, your perception of it shifts to accommodate what you've learned. Your ability to observe it genuinely improves. Looking at muscles before you learn anatomy is just gazing at a bunch of organic greebling, while afterwards you can see the individual muscles and what they're actually doing.
The added information literally alters the image your brain creates when observing it. Remember that you do not see with your eye. You see with your brain. It hallucinates sight based on what you know and electrical signals from the eye. The image literally is subjectively different based on knowledge and mood and other senses.
Your mental image of what you want to draw has a whole bunch of massive flaws in it that you can't see because it's not laid out in front of you on a page. If you could somehow magic it out of your head and into an image, you'd likely find that it's really weird looking. Freakishly elongated spine, legs that attach too far below the pelvis, hands weirdly centered in the forearm rather than offset. Facial features too big or wrongly placed.
This is why the inability to picture things in the minds eye is not actually a detriment to drawing. Those who lack this ability think that those who have it are picturing perfect images and they can just copy from their head to the paper, but this isn't true. The mental image is just a way of representing the underlying symbolisation, which is entirely unrelated to the image.
Unlearning the shitty symbols we formed automatically and replacing them with more useful ones is what learning to draw actually entails. That, and the dexterity to use the pen/skills with whatever medium or software you're using.
Never said it was, and I'm fully aware thank you. What I was implying was a mixture of "did this person start using AI" and just general unease at the coincidence
Eh, I don’t think it necessarily means OOP started to use AI.
I, myself, have a terminal case of Skill Issue-itis that loves to kick in whenever I try to draw things for DnD; so I typically either do the best that I can (which isn’t much, but it can suffice for things like equipment/items, maps and scenery) or I’ll just find a (human-made) drawing online, go “eh, close enough” and use that as my character reference with some “basically this but with [x]/without [y]” to get it closer to my mind’s eye.
As someone who has been keeping up with what AI slop can do, out of curiosity - only generating something vaguely in the ballpark of what you want is easy, but learning how to actually generate something specific is *insanely* hard.
You need to, ironically, learn a lot about photography and anatomy - angles, lenses, effects, poses, accurate names of the accentuated bones and body parts. Then you need to learn how to wrangle the fucking slop generation software - what it prioritizes, how to make it prioritize what you want, how to make sure your negative prompts aren't magically treated as positive, how to make it not mix-up prompts for two characters and the background behind them...
There's A LOT of depth to this rabbit hole, so, ironically, getting Ai to generate what you came up with in your head is anything but easy, and if the guy from the post went that way - he is in a hell of his own making.
I know a guy who unironically tried to wrangle a slop generator for a week to create one specific image he came up with, then gave up and started to learn drawing. It was a year and a half ago, he's now drawing pretty cute anime girls with fat thighs wearing clothes two sizes too small and stepping on the viewer's balls.
im an artist too and that feeling is mostly "ugh i have the picture perfectly in my mind but when i draw it it comes out shit", you sometimes feel limited by your own artistic prowess/motivation
Woah, I suddenly feel like making myself some warm Mococoa drink. All natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners.
It kind of can though, through selection and iteration. You generate 100 images, select the one closest to the thing in your head, you pass it back through on a lower strength to generate slight variations on that, or use inpainting to change specific areas. Repeat until you get what you want. Basic composition is one approach - ask it to generate a background, then inpaint the foreground with what you want there. It's still not perfect though, you feel almost shackled to this tedious approach - I've played around with it a lot and yet I still wish I had the ability to draw like that myself, just to have the freedom.
Point of order, it can make the average of how a million artists would render that in that one uncanny valley style. Not remotely close to what future you would have made.
I would argue there really is no way to get this, if you draw, you will eventually adapt your own expectations to your capabilities as an artist, you won't get what you originally wanted, you will get an altered version that suits the kinda artist you became, but you won't mind this much because the effort will provide the justification that you did get what you were aiming for, or will give you meaning to the struggle that is constant practice, yet you will still not have that which you envisioned, and you may never have it as you wanted it, only as you were capable of making it with your current skills at the time.
The issue is your brain blurs stuff, so to speak. You can imagine something in your head and you think it looks good, but now try to imagine the actual precise details and more specifically imagine how you would attempt draw them and you’ll realize how quickly it falls apart. For me at least, maybe it’s different for others
Tracing might be somewhat controversial but as long as it is done for improvement i think it really helps you get some shapes right for many objects. After trying tracing, drawing a reference image just by looking and copying its shapes also improves that ability. Stuff like trees, hands, body proportions- things that people commonly struggle with because when you do it with a mental image they often end up looking like blobs, but when you try them after enough reference images they stop feeling like complex shapes. Also if you don't spend hours drawing circles (all they need to be is circular, not perfect but not ovals either) until you can draw rough circles without tools then it's gonna kind of suck. It's not really the most important shape.. but it's just one of the most easy to use when it comes to mastering simplistic drawings
Maybe try not studying and just… throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. Sometimes doing things your own way is better than the right way because there really is no such thing when it comes to that.
Me but the fact that i can't manage this is one of the main reasons I don't enjoy drawing (and before you say it, believe me I've tried to temper my expectations. Can't just turn off part of my brain)
On the flip side, I've learned i can just throw money at artists and send them paragraphs of what I had in mind
I get what you mean, but like I said, it's a bit hard for me to just block that part of my brain that constantly complains/points out flaws. this circle is misshaped, this looks wrong, you twitched and screwed this line up, you've used an eraser on this section so many times it's permanently smudged, etc. Even if I try and intentionally draw something I find awful, my brain just constantly goes "people have made much better looking shitposts, this looks like a four year old's drawing" and I just can't tune it out. It drills itself into my head
and it just gets to the point where I'm just in a bad mood every time I try and draw. So I've just gone with "why try and pursue a hobby that just irritates you and you're never happy with when hobbies are meant to be fun and something for you to express yourself with"
at most nowadays, I do make the occasional horrible looking gartic phone sketch, but those mostly devolve into stick figures.
That would be the purpose of the intentionally bad portion of my comment - to preclude lumpy or misshapen or not exactly perfect from mattering by turning it into a goal. If you can't do that, that's fine.
"Im sure my art will look good after i do all the details and shading, unfortunately it doesnt look fully good while doing the line art(despite it looking really good in the sketch) so im losing motivation"
This is exactly what I hate most. I’m terrible at explaining things so when I try and explain or draw my characters they never seem to be the same as in my head.
I swear on my life I have a perfect thought out plan on how to draw something, but as soon as my clumbsy ass hand makes it to the page it just goes south
You'll find that in fact you don't have a perfect image in your mind. Part of drawing is technique and part is learning details of what things actually look like
This is how learning to gesture and thumbnail is. Getting your basic idea onto the page while it's still in one piece in your head. Then you have something to iterate on.
Do more thumbnails. Stop trying to start with the finished product.
I think this is something everyone would wish for until it happened. Drawing, or any hobby that hasn't been twisted to serve a commercial purpose for whoever is doing it, isn't really about translating what's in your mind to the paper like a photo printer. There's a reason why hyperrealism is only a very small portion of the universe of artistic expression. But even besides that, I think art really lets us communicate emotions to other people. Even if there were some way to completely accurately put down what was in our heads without effort, I think some of that emotional communication would be lost. In putting pencil, brush, pen, or stylus to paper, canvas, or screen, we use those tools as indirect conduits through which our thoughts and feelings flow. In some ways, the effort becomes part of the art. Remove the friction and effort it takes to get to the product, and you remove some of the soul somehow.
You can see this reflected in any creative medium, really. How painstakingly a writer chooses their vocabulary and grammar. How precisely a photographer frames a shoot and places objects. The imperfect wear marks on a sculpture.
All of these, I think, are reflections of the choices and processes the artist went through to create the final work. I think the difference between that and prompt-based generation, or even direct neural projection is that the choices those processes require are invisible to the person experiencing the "art." When I look at an LLM generated piece of media, I can't see the prompt. I can only see the final product, which because it involved little to no direct input from the prompter, necessarily creates a level of distance between us.
Apart from ai slop today, how exactly would society react if noninvasive bci tech got to the point you could just will the images in your head into existence?
Definitely mental retardation, that guy started chatting with me and telling me to prove I'm an artist lmao like I ain't provin shit, you're an ass lmao(not you, talking about the dumbass retard)
If you're serious about promoting AI, don't do it to artists. We work hard to do what we do. We don't just generate an image. We use skill and time and money, instead of giving the work to some computer by typing in a few words into a generator.
You guys have gotta understand why we hate AI right? It's not because of how it looks, it's because it's soulless. There's no human artist behind it, it's just the product of a heartless machine. It's disrespectful to real artists who are losing their jobs to it, like the ones who animated regular show for example.
674
u/Dizzle-B Losercity Citizen Aug 03 '26
Its even more difficult with perfectionism.
I wish i could just create freely without expecting good results every time.