Advice for a struggling artist? Lately I have been dying to get into drawing. I've taken a few art classes through my high school career and yet I can't remember shit of anything I learned.
Anyway I have been dabbling a bit and made a few sketches, I feel like I'm getting it but there are some basics I don't really get.
So my question is what should I be doing? I know I'm not gonna be able to draw furry art right off the bat, so I'm just wondering what kind of subject material or maybe even daily exercises I should be doing?
Anything helps, just kind of looking for a starting point if anything.

Every artist you speak to will have a different answer to this question.

First of all, I think you have the right attitude. I've been drawing for 20 years and I'm regularly and utterly humbled by the quality of artistry that this community produces.

In terms of advice, let's see...

1) Start simple! - If you're starting out, draw real-world objects. Begin with relatively simple things like cups, books, fruit, etc. Move on to more complex objects like buildings, trees, and motor vehicles.

2) Use references! - When you've built up some confidence you can take a crack at figure-drawing. Having someone pose for you is *extremely* useful, but not always practical. Luckily, you have access to the largest collection of images ever assembled by humanity. Learning the basics of human anatomy is a good step to take, even if your eventual goal is to draw more "toony" characters. (Pst, using porn as a reference is totally fine, and actually a great excuse for having a huge collection of smut on you hard-drive, "it's just for reference, I swear!")

3) Don't sweat the details! - Get messy with your sketches. If you're using pencil and paper, use a well-sharpened soft grade pencil like HB or B (using softer grades is fine, but you can end up with a lot of smudges). If you're drawing digitally, you can make a sketch on one layer as messy as you like. Then, when you start to get a sense of where the picture is going, you can refine that sketch on a new layer. I put all of the major stages to a recent picture I did side-by-side here as an example: Link Start messy, then refine.

4) Copy what you love, practise what you hate! - Learn from other artist's work, copy the elements of their work that look good to you. Steal those good ideas and make something new with them. Hell, trace if you really want to; just DON'T try and pass that off as you own work, that's a bad path to go down. Conversely, if there's something you utterly despise drawing because it's so frustrating (hands, feet, and faces are common examples), spend a whole day just drawing nothing but that thing. You may have to grit your teeth and power through it, but by the end of it drawing that terrible thing won't seem so daunting.

Whew.... I was only gonna write, like, three sentences here. I guess I got carried away. Hope some of this helps, man. Best of luck!

I agree with pretty much all that theunderdog said. I really don't disagree with anything, and would have said pretty much the same thing :P However, I can add a couple little things

I'm going to assume you want to draw characters. If so, anatomy is one of the most important things to get right! Figure drawing is where its at. There are multiple sites you can use to help yourself practice! The one I use most often seems to be down at the moment, but here are a few
http://artists.pixelovely.com/practice-tools/figure-drawing/ (down as of this posting)
http://reference.sketchdaily.net/en/
http://www.quickposes.com/gestures/timed
http://www.wysp.ws/practice/

If you really want to get serious about drawing, look into a local Junior College if you have one and see if they offer figure drawing classes. There's nothing more motivating than paying for someone to grade you on your ability to learn, and in my experiences the classes are fun!

@Tokaido: Those timed poses websites look very useful, thanks for the links!

theunderdog said:
@Tokaido: Those timed poses websites look very useful, thanks for the links!

Hehe, you're welcome! I try and get at least one practice session on one of those sites done every day.... but it's been a week since I did one last XD

Don't forget to practice drawing shapes, especially squares and circles.

INSPIRATION!

I'm on your boat right now, but I can't exactly say that I'm struggling.

I'm merely practicing drawing inanimate objects on a practice sketchbook. And when I've filled it all out, I'll "promote" myself by getting a drawing tablet.

Advice? Practice and motivation.

Some points to offer as well as reiterate from previous responses:

Draw from life. It does not matter what the object is, simply focus on the shapes and form. This is generally better than references given how depth perception works. You may also alter the lighting as you need.

Start simple-- spheres, cubes, and so on. You will learn that many things can be simplified into basic shapes; it is then only a matter of arrangement of those shapes.

Do not get hasty about getting a tablet. Tablets are quite expensive. A cheap 5-subject notebook for $3 and a pack of mechanical pencils can get you quite far as is.

Practice often. Draw daily if you can, multiple times if possible. Much of art is muscle memory as well as hand-eye coordination. Practicing even the movement is helpful.

Don't concern yourself with color yet. Focus on value first. This is a typical approach by low-level art classes at college level.

When drawing from life, draw what you see, not what you think you see. This is more difficult than it sounds. Try to "shut your brain off" as it may tell you that what you see does not make sense as it is and will impede your progress. This will get easier with time and practice. Nothing in life is ideal, so trying to, say, draw a portrait of someone you know based solely on the idealized and generalized "how to draw the human face" exercise will often look quite strange.

Do not avoid things you think you cannot draw-- many people will hide hands or feet in their works instead of practice them. You don't have to like it, but you will never improve if you avoid drawing them. They will get easier with practice.

Finally, don't worry about not being "good" right away. Art takes many years of mistakes and practice to hone just like anything else. Do not be so quick to simply move on from it. Patience is a virtue.

Zmutt said:
just kind of looking for a starting point if anything.

There is literally only one rule you need to remember to actually get good at art/drawing/media over the course of a couple months to a year.

NEVER

EVER

EVER

EVER

Trace something, don't tell yourself it's practice, because it's not. It's making you worse, way worse. If you can't think up your own shapes, your future drawings will fall apart.

That's all I can say x.x cause I'm shit.

Cynosure said:
There is literally only one rule you need to remember to actually get good at art/drawing/media over the course of a couple months to a year.

NEVER

EVER

EVER

EVER

Trace something, don't tell yourself it's practice, because it's not. It's making you worse, way worse. If you can't think up your own shapes, your future drawings will fall apart.

That's all I can say x.x cause I'm shit.

Completely wrong.

Tracing is very acceptable as a learning process. In fact straight up copying people's art is part of higher art studies, because forcing yourself to replicate what a master did forces you learn HOW THEY DID IT so you can do it again somewhere else.

As the famous quote goes: "Good artists imitate, great artists steal."

Ozelot said:
Completely wrong.

Tracing is very acceptable as a learning process. In fact straight up copying people's art is part of higher art studies, because forcing yourself to replicate what a master did forces you learn HOW THEY DID IT so you can do it again somewhere else.

As the famous quote goes: "Good artists imitate, great artists steal."

True.

As humans, we're better off referring to what we see rather than what we know.

Cynosure said:
There is literally only one rule you need to remember to actually get good at art/drawing/media over the course of a couple months to a year.

NEVER

EVER

EVER

EVER

Trace something, don't tell yourself it's practice, because it's not. It's making you worse, way worse. If you can't think up your own shapes, your future drawings will fall apart.

That's all I can say x.x cause I'm shit.

Nope. Tracing is a viable way to learn how to draw, especially with human anatomy. It's when you trace, and then try to make money off of that where it becomes shitty.

TheHuskyK9 said:
Don't forget to practice drawing shapes, especially squares and circles.

This (but not just squares and circles, 3d volumes like cubes (especially! This is how you locate everything properly in space!), spheres, cylinders, and cones, too).
Draftsmanship is really important. le-mec on tumblr has some nice draftsmanship drills , and he also covers this aspect heavily in his youtube tutorial channel 'moatddtutorials'.

I have found drawing 3d text whenever I need to label something is a fun way to practice draftsmanship and volumes. I usually use cube volumes for the ends and connect them with cylindric-ish volumes (overall effect is like a shaped chunk of toffee). This is the basis of classic cartoon 'bubbly' text, but of course you can render any style of text like this. Finding a thing like this that is simple, fun for you, but educational and scalable to any level of sophistication you like, is a good way to help make drawing a habit.

Other draftsmanship stuff:

• Draw using your arm. Seriously. Don't use your wrist for actually drawing (only measurement). It is so much more accurate and endurant, once trained.
• Try different grips. Standard writing grip is known as a 'precision grip' and is not good for drawing larger strokes. You can do a number of different types of grips in overhand or backhand(back of your hand faces the paper) variants, there is a good video about grips in the moatddtutorials channel I mentioned above. Gripping as lightly as possible is ideal IME (both in terms of line quality and of fatigue)

The above two are important from a health perspective, so definitely get them handled. I used to get major strain in my drawing hand and couldn't use it for days; changing grip and drawing with my arm totally banished that

• Try different drawing tools. Each has a different feel and application. Using tools that are too precise or not precise enough for what you are drawing can be an unnecessary strain.
• Being able to accurately draw both very small (1mm on the paper) and very large (1ft on the paper) is important. If you don't, it can be hard to make the scale of things feel right, even if you get their relative size correct (not sure what to say here, it's about like .. coarseness. If you have a small detail that is rendered coarsely, it just looks coarse; if you render it finely, it looks small. If you render a large detail finely, it looks fussy, if you render it coarsely, it looks large.)

Re: Tracing:
IMO it's a matter of what is happening mentally : Like Vilppu says 'we don't copy the model, we analyze it'. If you're just connecting lines with no higher level understanding of the structure of a pic, that doesn't help. If you're actually breaking down stuff and try stuff like drawing different views on the picture, making front/side/plan views of the objects you are trying to copy, that's more useful -- you are gaining in judgement, at minimum.

So basically, the problem occurs when you don't have the knowledge of principles that you can use to break stuff down.

That said I tend to avoid direct traces, I try to eyeball everything to keep my ability to measure by eye accurate.

Ratte said:
Practice often. Draw daily if you can, multiple times if possible. Much of art is muscle memory as well as hand-eye coordination. Practicing even the movement is helpful.

This is extremely key. I used to 'get artists block'. Now I don't. Habituation (and the willingness to make that initial push past 'don't wanna start') is why, AFAICS. You just kick the excuses aside and draw -- even if its bad, a bad drawing is still much better than no drawing.

Being comfortable with other people getting offended also helps (this occasionally happens if you're drawing them or someone they know. Sometimes it happens even though you're not but they think that you are.)

Finally, don't worry about not being "good" right away

I'd go further than this: Don't even try to be 'good' right away -- instead, try to understand and carry out the fundamentals of art correctly. Like, a lot of artists, myself included, do this thing where they try to render something in a sophisticated way (instead of deconstructing what they are seeing fully and gradually building up levels of detail over a simple but sound foundation.). The result tends to look incongruous, inconsistent, incomplete or hollow.

I don't feel I put that well. It's like.. your favorite artist. If you want to draw like them, it would actually be dumb to try to learn their exact line styles. Breaking down the broad structures they use, in terms of relationships between polygons and primitive volumes, is it. Basically, style doesn't count that much.. If you like their style, don't try to copy that, try to copy their -understanding-.

In terms of an overall curricula, I'd suggest Vilppu's Drawing Manual. It's well structured with a logical progression, and can be constructively revisited whenever you feel the need. It contributed a lot to my ability to make solid, convincing forms, and saved me from the chaos of just 'drawing things' (which is a habit you should cultivate, but you also need to deliberately study specific subjects in order to effectively nail down your understanding into something reproducible.)