Hi!! First of all, i absolutely love your art! Your style reminds me of paintings, and it looks absolutely gorgeous! And second, I'm learning drawing too, but been having some difficulties with it (particularly with anatomy and lineart) do you have any particular literature you could recommend to improve? Or online lessons? And out of curiosity, what software do you use for drawing?
Thanks for the question, and I'm really glad you like my work… The somewhat awkward thing is that I'm also troubled by issues like anatomy myself, and I don’t think I've found any particularly good solution lol Also, I haven't received any formal professional art education, so the following answer is just for reference. It would be great if it can be of some help!
Like almost every hobbyist, I started out learning from some "classic textbooks" you could buy in bookstores, such as Bridgman and so on. But at the time, I felt those tutorials did very little for me… I think my progress mainly came from watching online drawing videos. Observing how something is drawn taught me much more. As long as you can find them, watch process videos by artists you like! They’re far more useful than reading any number of books! After learning some basic techniques, I would combine them with my observations of real life and classical artworks, and make some aesthetic adjustments. In fact, this step is the most important one, but without a foundation, it’s difficult for an ordinary person to put it into practice… Below are some basic technical video tutorials that I personally found very helpful. They are all free videos; I haven't taken any online classes.
【Anatomy】 The human figure drawing method I currently use basically comes entirely from David Finch’s How-To-Draw-xx series. See his YouTube homepage: https://www.youtube.com/@DavidFinchartist. DF is a comic artist with extensive industry experience, so his drawing tutorials, especially his methods of simplification, can help you draw human poses that are as accurate as possible while as fast as possible. They've been very helpful to me.
【Coloring】 I watched Marco Bucci's tutorials on color theory: https://www.youtube.com/@marcobucci. Personally, I think one only need to understand some fairly basic concepts:
Color is relative. For example, within a warm color scheme, you don't actually need to paint in cool colors; you only need to shift slightly toward cooler hues, and the eye will automatically perceive them as cool. This is probably the most important point in my mind.
An object's local color will shift toward the color temperature of the current lighting environment, and our eyes will automatically perform white balance and recognize the original local color.
Also, in the context of digital painting, I think it's useful to watch some videos explaining HSL color adjustment, just to roughly understand how color picking and color mixing work in digital software (How to "shift slightly toward cooler hues").
To me, the color part is basically a math problem, and there's also a lot of room for subjective handling. It’s nowhere near as frustrating as anatomy and similar things…
【Rendering】 https://www.youtube.com/c/STEVEHUSTONDRAWSfromlife. I don’t feel his figure drawing tutorials helped me much, but his rendering lessons are quite good, especially the parts that help you understand space and depth of field.
A special recommendation: https://www.youtube.com/@GigiSpaccanuvole. I don’t know why, but watching his videos taught me a lot of things that I can’t quite explain clearly right away…
I also like watching all kinds of artist interview videos to learn about their approaches to drawing. There should be many videos like this on YouTube, and you can search according to your own interests. Some of my favorites are: https://www.youtube.com/@nycomicssymposium, https://www.youtube.com/@smangachannel.
Finally, the software I use is Procreate, a drawing app for iPad.
