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I think something else I really want to stress, for you and for anyone else who sees this in the future, is that drawing involves an INCREDIBLE amount of waste paper.

I get the impression that a lot of people starting out think they should, or somehow have to, draw something perfectly the first time.

But people who have been drawing for years just draw and throw things away, redrawing and redrawing until it gets closer to what they want.

Watch videos of studios making animations, or watch videos about the creative processes of the artists who you want to emulate, and really pay attention to how many versions of each drawing they make.

Like, in some of the ‘Inside Studio Ghibli’ videos you’ll see animators sitting in tiny cubes drawing storyboards by hand, with so much waste paper and thrown away drawings around them that the paper literally is up to their ankles.

Kind of like this - but OH MY GOSH it’s like they just took three reams of paper and poured it on the floor to start the day.

I swear, in one of the ‘Studio Ghibli’ videos it looks like there’s 8 people sitting in a tiny room 8’ by 24’ and every one of them is smoking like a dragon and the room looks like a trash can exploded, covering everything in discarded drawings that weren’t what they wanted.

Sure -they had erasers. But the point of the drawing was to figure out what they wanted to say, and when they’d figured out what they were trying to say they drew that instead and threw away everything that lead up to it.

For me, one of my ‘Wow I want to draw like they do!’ heroes is Johji Manabe. He really helped me understand how many dozens of drawings it can take to make one final work. His sketch books show designs after designs after designs, going through page after page of working an image until he got the pose he wanted for a single panel.

Kōsuke Fujishima was just the same - he would draw a single leg five different ways before he picked the final one.

And even Masamune Shirow (which is a WHOLE different conversation - so let’s focus on the stuff he was doing in the 90’s, ok?) just kept reworking drawings over and over and over until he got something he was satisfied with.

So, like with juggling, failing to draw what you wanted to draw is normal and a part of the process.

And just like with juggling, where the first thing you have to learn is how to drop the ball, and more importantly become COMFORTABLE with dropping the ball - with drawing you have to learn how to let go of things that aren’t what you wanted, and get comfortable with throwing away sketches that are just another step in a larger work in progress.

@ChickPea
I think the most effective way to get anatomy into your head, and into your arm and spine so that you just draw it automagically without thinking about it, is to do a series of things.

First, draw pinup. Just poses. Draw one a day. A book that can help with this is “Daily Pose 1007”. This is a book that was published in 1995 by Bijutsu Shuppan-Sha. It’s available in English or Japanese, but the language doesn’t really matter because it is just page after page after page of stuff like this:

Used copies are available on Amazon for less than $20. You can also get it on eBay, but it’s usually closer to $35 to $40 there.

If you aren’t comfortable drawing from sight, just trace. Trace until you get the feeling for the asymmetrical shapes of arms and legs and hands and how odd the human body can be when you look at it in detail.

Then, when you are getting bored with pinup or feel you’ve hit a plateau, there’s two paths that really can take you to the next level.

a Gesture and Contour drawing class will teach you how to “use a line to investigate a form”. It will help you draw what you see. With Gesture Sketching you will learn to create the outline or core of a person on a piece of paper, and capture their movement or a sense of their posture and the physical “attitude” of the character. With Contour Drawing you will be able to follow just the outline of a figure - cutting “the figure” out from the white background. Both of these will take you to the next level. You’ll be able to quickly, really really quickly, sketch a person.

At the same time, a way to take what you’ve been practicing with your daily poses is to start creating sequential art - comics.

For every person whose work I have idolized, they started as pinup artists. They created pretty drawings and were doing what I feel was pretty amazing work.

But then, they started doing a graphic novel, or a web comic. And they went from being really good at drawing pinup art to being absolutely incredible at drawing absolutely gob smacking work of art.

Take any of your favorite mangaka - your favorite fan artists - your favorite professional cartoonists - all of them were doing pinup, and then at some point started working on a larger project.

Projects where those individual poses they were drawing suddenly had context. Movement. Purpose. And their ability to draw absolutely exploded.

It’s not just that they’re drawing MORE figures - it’s that they are DRAWING MORE. When you’re doing pinup art, you might be doing one pose a day or every other day. But when you start doing sequential art you will suddenly find yourself doing DOZENS of poses a day. Just to finish a single page, you might have to draw one person 10 times.

And you will suddenly learn consistency, and speed, and your stamina for drawing will go through the roof.

But - it’s a journey.

And it starts with the kind of stuff you can steal from the office supplies cabinet. Grab a pad of whatever kind of paper you can. What kind of paper it is DOES NOT MATTER. Grab some pencils. What kind of pencil it is DOES NOT MATTER.

Sure - over time you’ll learn to HATE some kinds of paper. And you’ll learn to DEEPLY DESPISE some kinds of pencils.

But, you can draw with a stick of charcoal from a wood fire on a rock. People did for centuries, and still do.

So get some paper, get a pencil, and find something that you think is pretty and draw it. Draw it again and again until you can feel the “Oh - THAT’S why that line is like that” grows in your head.

For me, I started with Kōsuke Fujishima. I took pages from his manga, and then tried to re-draw them.

Start slow - work for 20 minutes a night. Then after 2 weeks try 40 minutes a night. Then after 2 more weeks, try to draw for an hour every single night. Or morning - your call, just make it consistent so it settles into your circadian rhythms like eating or sleeping. Make it a part of your life.

My last suggestion is to keep drawing the same thing over and over until it ‘works’ for you.

Sketch your idea, and redraw the sketch again and again until it feels like what you’re trying to say.

Rework the characters. Rework the poses. Move things around. Add characters. Take characters out. Keep drawing it until you have something that feels right in your head. Go for whatever aesthetic you are hoping for as hard as you can.

Don’t stop until you are happy with it. Or, if you’re the kind of person (like me) who will NEVER EVER be happy with something you drew, set a deadline. Give yourself one week to finish and publish a page.

Then publish it, no matter where it’s at. No matter how you feel about it. Get it off your drawing table and out of the door so you can start the next page.

If you start today, one year from today you will be drawing things that probably are close to what you wanted to draw.

And then you’ll be able to draw whatever you see in your head.

And when you can draw whatever you see in your head, you’ll be able to draw what ever you want.

Even if it doesn’t make any sense.

[warning: boobies]

I wanted to be the ‘butt guy’. I wanted to draw butts that make people cream their pants just looking at the drawing. But I ended up the ‘boob guy’. I don’t even know how that happened. But, it is what it is >_<

In the end, I don’t know if we really have any control over our own style - the ‘how we draw’ that eventually ends up being how we draw.

2LDR: Start drawing. Start with things that please you and that are like what you want to draw. If you can’t draw it from scratch, practice drawing over someone else’s work until you “get” their style and aesthetic. Then do it with someone else’s work. Keep doing it until you can do it without a reference.

If you share any of those works, credit the person who’s work you are referencing. Make it an homage to them and their work, not a theft.

Then, when you’ve got ‘this is how to draw a hand’ down, and have ‘this is how I draw an eye’ in you so deeply you don’t remember how it even works, you just ‘draw a hand’ and ‘draw an eye’ and you don’t even have to think about it, draw your own stuff.

Draw so much pinup art you get tired and bored with it.

Then do sequential comics. After you’ve done that for a couple of months, get a copy of Scott McCloud’s ‘Understanding Comics’ and he will blow your mind and take you to the next level.

Then take classes. Sign up for a Gesture Sketch clinic or club or class - whatever the art department at your nearest university offers. It might be between $5 and $20 a session. And that will level you up again.

And draw.

The way you learn how to draw is to draw.

And always remember the words of Lauren Faust (paraphrasing); “Everyone has a thousand crappy drawings in them. The good drawings are on the other side. So to get to the good drawings, you have to draw that thousand crappy drawings to get them out of the way.”

So draw a thousand drawings. If you do 3 a day, you’ll be done in 1 year. And then the good drawings will come.

And if you don’t know where to start, take a drawing that you really love and recreate it 10 times. Steal like an artist and work that same drawing until you see the next drawing that you want to work 10 times. And then the next. And then the next.

Steal with reverence. Make every drawing an homage to what you love the most about that artist’s work. And work it and work it and work it until it feels like it is your own.

I always wanted to draw, instead of practicing in a wholesome way, I’m drawing it lewd, do you know what kind methods you accomplish with?