SethPup's Smut Hut

Improvement isn’t a steady line. In my experience, it happens in short bouts! It’s not enough just to draw every day; when you want improve, you gotta actually consciously put in the effort to improve. For me, that stage of looking at my art and thinking “hey, not bad” happens several times progressively. How it works is, you slowly improve, your quality catches up with your taste, and then you sort of plateau for a little while, and then your taste slowly improves and your art starts to look bad by comparison, and so you work to improve until your quality catches up with your taste again.

So how do you improve when you want to improve? I have three personal rules!

1) Draw a lot! This one is obvious, so I put it first. Everyone tells you this, but I think the misconception is if you just keep drawing, you’ll get better, and it doesn’t really work that way. It’s more like you’ll start to solidify what you’ve already learned, and what you know how to do will become easier to do. It doesn’t directly help you improve per se, but developing that habit of drawing constantly and consistently is detrimental to improvement.

2) Reference! If you don’t know how to draw something, look at a bunch of pictures of that thing and draw it better! An even bigger misconception than the last one is that this is some how cheating. It’s not! All those famous artists from ages ago we glorify and idolize that created masterpieces? They all used models. ALL OF THEM. And to take it even further, it is also okay and encouraged to reference other artists. I do it all the time! Any time I come across another artist’s piece that I love, that does something in a particular way that makes me go “oh yeah, that’s my jam!” I’ll try my best to emulate it, just to practice, so I can see how they were able to convey that particular thing and start utilizing it in my own work. It’s not plagiarism, that’s just how our style and skill evolves. If we all learned in a vacuum with zero influence, everyone’s art would be terrible.

3) Experiment! Just try new things! Have you been using the same tools for years? Pick up and try some new ones. Haven’t really been thinking about how you use color? Do something crazy and weird you wouldn’t normally do! Want to learn to paint but you don’t know how? Just go for it and fuck it up, because that’s how we learn. Most the time when you try something new, you’re going to fuck it up, but the point is you keep stepping out of your little bubble of familiarity until you find some new stuff that you enjoy. If you’re like me, you probably have a laundry list of things you want to try some time in the future when you figure out how to do it, but what you really need to do is start screwing shit up until you stop screwing up.

That was more than I intended to write, so I hope it helps. I know what it feels like to be stuck in a pit and hate everything you draw and wonder why you can’t be as good as the artists you look up to. Just remember, don’t give yourself such a hard time! Just find something you enjoy drawing, and if you do, you can just ignore all of these rules, because what really matters is that you enjoy it, and if you enjoy it, you’re going to improve no matter what!

A while ago I would reference other artists like Meesh, Daigo, and Kihu, who are all very good at that stuff. From there, when I’d make porn I’d sketch everything out, and then spend like 90% of the time on the face, just playing with different variations, pushing extremes, just totally exploring what I could do with the face to make it both hot and a little funny. When I did that last strip I scribbled about 10 distinctly different expressions just because I have so much fun with it. It’s like, my favorite shit in porn.

It literally isn’t!