do you have any advice of exercises people can do to get better at art?
like for example how doing a bunch of quick timed sketches of photos of poses helps people get better at anatomy
what would you recommend to help people get better at drawing faces, (expression or different shapes), and get better at things like coloring? was there anything that helped you?
(thank you in advance if you end up answering this! i got a new art program and am kind of excited to get back into the groove of working on and improving my art)
Hmm i'll do my best to give a good answer :0
I think the best thing for anatomy is figure drawing, which I myself should definitely do more of...Of course there are different things you can do it with it too.
First, I'd observe a bunch of poses and try to take mental notes of important things like shapes and angles. Basically, you're trying to deconstruct the pose with your mind so you can reconstruct/recreate it later with your own hand. And maybe if you want to have an exercise, pick a theme, like dancing or fighting or sitting and do a bunch of drawings of the same thing!! Or pick a character and make em do a bunch of stuff . Then find a stack of relevant references.
To help with that, it's okay to trace over poses, especiallyyy if you're trying to learn, bc the physical action of drawing it also helps to lock that knowledge in your brain. But when you trace, try not to "mindlessly" trace? Like really outline the shapes of the different limbs and stuff.
The other thing is to draw it while looking at it. So don't trace it, but recreate on your own from scratch. That's what you do with figure drawing. And you get faster the more you do it because you've trained your brain to know what information to look for and how to translate that info to your drawing.
And I said this before but If you're like me and find just drawing random people lacking in motivation, you can do what I do and turn those Poses into Characters I Like...I also love looking at superhero poses, because they really Push the angles and its suppppeeer fun.
Well, expressions are my favorite thing to do, so even though I'm lazy with drawing fullbodies, I love taking a character's face and making em do like 10 diff expressions.
I'll try to find my old post about shapes and faces, but yeah an exercise you could do is draw a bunch of weird shapes with some being more organic and some more geometric and then try to find a face you could make out of it!
And then for expressions, when I was younger and starting out I looked up those expression/emotion sheets? And then just took a character and make em do it all. I might make a separate post on just expressions though. But 80% of it is in the eyebrows I think lol they are just so expressive.
Hmm I should do this more but an exercise you could do is taking a premade color palette and trying to do a piece with just those colors, or pick a theme or mood--cool, warm, monochrome, pastel, etc and experiment with that. Or do like color studies (helps to use movie screenshots) where you try to recreate the colors of a photo.
Theres Probably good videos on YouTube but hope these help
