Two years ago this month I started drawing art for the very first time. I thought I'd take the opportunity to write about some of my reflections on the process and my progress.
My learning process:
I came at art as someone with absolutely zero artistic ability and absolutely no artistic practice. I mean that sincerely. I'm not someone whom drawing comes naturally to. I never sketched things or scribbled doodles growing. For me, art is a very mechanical and cognitive process.
That said, I'm a practiced learner of things. For all the psychological sequalae getting a PhD gave me, it definitely taught me how to study and learn. So in picking up art, I studied, species by species, body part by body part, muzzle by muzzle, breaking them down into shapes and lines. Every time I would go from utter incompetence at depicting something to being able to draw it at a level that doesn't hurt your eyes.
I think the best way to think about my learning is to picture a bar graph, where each bar represents a specific skill, focus, or component. My growth is about picking out individual slack bars at a time and dragging them upwards towards the mean level.
My progress:
Of course, I am delighted with what I've been able to make. I think some parts of some pics look really nice. Sadly, I don't possess fundamental skills. I can draw something in which 50% is something I'm really happy with (because it was studied) and 50% looks awful (and requires me to either stop and study, or go through a prolonged process of trial and error until it randomly looks right). This can be extremely frustrating. In particular, I really struggle with limbs and shoulders, and consistency in characters between angles and poses.
I appreciate constructive critiques (sadly, I don't think most people know what that actually means). I try to avoid reading comments on other sites like e621 where people can be astonishingly mean about my art (and me as a person), perhaps feeling justified due to the objectionable content I draw, as though depiction is somehow endorsement. I regularly consider just blacklisting myself there, but it brings new people in.
The role of art in my life:
I picked up art because I am a creative person more than anything else, and I was struggling to write fiction anymore. A couple of years ago, the folds in my brain were so shrivelled from writing for work and study that I didn't have it in me to produce anything creative anymore. This made me feel like complete shit. As a random fucking stab at doing something creative that gave me a sense of achievement again I bought a tablet and started drawing landscapes. I liked it a lot and started dabbling in other things. One day I thought it'd be fun to follow a couple of YouTube tutorials drawing furry faces, and it was fun. Then I wondered what it'd be like to draw bodies and dicks, and here we are.
It was only recently that I realised the role that art really serves for me. It's just another form of telling stories. I discovered that I have little interest in drawing things that look good but don't tell some kind of story, even if it's the briefest slice of life. That's why there's dialogue in so many of my pics. I tried to rein it in, but couldn't, and then realised I didn't want to. It's also why the Ben/Andy/Owen pics get so much attention. I get to tell a story about complicated freaks with art in that way, and that's the most rewarding thing.
What about writing? (Wait, you're a writer?)
The last story I finished coincided with me picking up art. Over two years ago. Art fills a certain gap in my life, but... I have a sense of mastery over writing that I don't think I'll ever have with art. The problem I have is that it's not simply a different skillset to art -- they require different fucking life skills, and (at least for me) different levels of mental health. I can chip away at art for a few minutes here and there, but writing is a whole different fucking beast, especially when you're trying to write epic things that span many chapters.
There's no timeline I can give and no promises I can make, but there's stuff in the works. It is agonisingly slow, but painfully important to me at the same time. As I said, it depends upon a certain level of psychological functioning and I'm no beacon of mental health, especially not this year which has frankly been the worst of my life. So, we'll see what happens. Drawing my perverse little art, thankfully, has given me some sense of purpose and helped me keep going.
Closing off:
I'll keep learning and continue studying. If anyone knows of really good resources that helped them or others learn some of the fundamentals I'd love to hear it. In a perfect world I'd interrogate artists about their processes and what worked for them, but I'm too much of a neurotic idiot to be brave enough to do that.
Thanks for reading!
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8 months, 4 weeks ago
24 Aug 2023 10:45 CEST
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