💠Its Naptime Friends💠

for all the artist following me

Have two sketchbooks: One for finished and high-quality art (stuff made with Prismacolor or Copic if you use that or art for your portfolio) and the other sketchbook for more messy doodles. This way you have a place to try new things and mess up as much as you need. When I only had one sketchbook I was scared to draw in it because I didn't want to mess it up

Do studies. I cant tell you how much I've improved just by doing studies of shoes, hands, noses, and all that. This works for when you have art block too since you’re not really making stuff up and just learning how real things work.

Learn from others. I’ve never taken a real art class because 1. I can’t afford it and 2. there’s no good art classes/programs at my school. I’ve been following several artists and learning from them over the years and they’ve helped me tremendously. Just please do not steal art because that is never okay.

Break down concepts. If you notice there’s something wrong with your piece then figure out why. You can’t get better if you leave mistakes and don't try to understand whats going on. If the color is weird figure out if the values look right or maybe its the saturation of the color.

Watch youtube tutorials. Here are some youtubers I think are pretty good art teaching all things art: Draw with Jazza |  DrawingWiffWaffles |  Proko |  Baylee Jae

Have an inspiration folder/blog. Sometimes you just need a collection of starry nights or a misty forest or even a French bakery. All of those things can help you get inspired to draw. It could even be completely unrelated to what you plan to draw.

There are no dumb ideas in the creative process. If you want to draw a lizard in a dress go for it! If you want to draw various pastries with faces do it! Don’t let the thought of it being too dumb stop you because if I’ve learned anything in my several years of drawing it’s that an idea can lead to another and another and another and you may get a really good idea just from doodling dumb things.

Here’s a few things that can get you started on drawing better:

Dynamic poses | Dynamic clothes | Dynamic figure drawing

COMPOSITION | PERSPECTIVE | CONSTRUCTION

Anatomy:

Legs

Arms

Hands

Heads

Body (Female) (Male

Color Theory

Improving your sketchbook

firstly, line of action is an extremely useful website for doing studies. it has stuff for figure drawing, faces, hands, animals and even environments (though i’ve mostly only done the figure drawing)

ALSO when doing art from life (or photo refs): it will look bad at first. and that’s OKAY! when you’re drawing from life, there are all sorts of reasons that what you do will look off while comparing them - perspective distortion, lack of practice, scribbly look from drawing fast. BUT HERE’S THE THING: when you look back at them later, they look really good! and there will be a noticeable improvement in your drawings from memory. it feels kind of magical, actually!

there are also a lot of useful books i could recommend but i’m forgetting the titles and authors of like 90% of them so maybe i’ll get back to that later someday. in general i’d recommend to remember to read - in the case of art, video tutorials are actually pretty good (though i could rant for hours on their usefulness on other subjects) but written tutorials and books are very useful as you can look back and reference them.

also: tracing! not great for doing art most of the time, but fantastic for learning! even just a few photos can be helpful. something good to do is pay very close attention to shapes and proportions when tracing (or, for that matter, when drawing from life/reference.) proportions are pretty important in getting stuff to look right - but also they’re something really fun to mess around with when stylizing.

one last thing: a note about sketchbooks - sketchbooks shouldn’t be treated like anything special! they are literally just something to draw in! if you’re worried about expense, crappy notebooks can still be really good for doodles & studies & so on. but seriously, do not treat sketchbooks as some kind of special thing that has to be arranged just so or only certain things drawn in. it baffles me that there are people out there who do that.

(audio from buzzfeed unsolved)

They were gay all the long!

That’s pride alright lmfao

“When I was growing up, my parents spoke to each other in Spanish, but they didn’t speak to us in Spanish because they were told not to. In school we weren’t allowed to speak it.”

and also???

“… But America is the only country that promotes monolingualism. Here it’s English, English, English. Every other country makes their children learn a second language very early on. So as my political and social activism grew, I was like, ‘I really need to learn Spanish.’ So I did.“ 

idk how many people i’ve known growing up in texas whose parents speak fluent spanish but they don’t speak a lick solely because their parents were afraid or told not to teach their children. it’s unspeakably common and doesn’t in any way shape or form diminish someone’s claim to or pride in their heritage. 

http://marknewman.deviantart.com/gallery/?catpath=/

^^ this one is called “Grandpa’s Favorite”. 

^^ this one is called “Iris in Bloom”.

I know I'm super late to the Tangled party

But I'm working on a small comic about the 7kAU, this are some of the warmup sketches I made.

Sonic the freaking Hedgehog.