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although i wish i drew more often i'm fairly pleased with my skills so far, but the thing that evades me is comic / cartoon art. every time i've tried to do highly simplified drawings it just... nothing comes out.
is it possible to only have an eye (hand?) for semi-realistic art? I feel like this is backwards, like i should be able to do the other thing easier than what I'm actually doing
It's hard to explain what I mean beyond... it just doesn't work. I ask my brain "please draw a *simplified* wolf head" but it just won't do anything unless i try to actually shape out a muzzle and add shading
it's like i don't fundamentally understand what a doggy head is shaped like, in order to reduce it to its fundamental forms. i guess that's how i feel in general? like, the drawing i've done all feels like... focusing hard on one little part of a form at a time
focusing hard on drawing a chin over and over and over until I get it right, then moving on to the next part. like tile rendering a jpeg. everything comes in blurry and wrong, and then I go through one square at a time erasing the blurry junk and putting in the details
i guess what's at the root of this - and the reason i took so long to start trying to draw seriously - is that I was never able to doodle. my doodles are... nothing. gibberish. i can't even draw a stick figure, i'm not joking.
like if i try to draw a stick figure i have to erase and redraw it six times because I get things just monstrously wrong. it looks like a childs very first attempts. when i'm 'done' it feels... empty. like i made nothing at all.
i feel like there's this spark of life that cartoonists can put into their drawings, and when i see their "embarrassing doodles" from their childhood it's already there. i feel like this is what is meant by talent, and that I don't have it.
That doesn't mean I should stop trying, but idk. I feel like... someone who's trying to learn Rachmaninoff when all they really want to do is plink out the mario overworld theme. I'm making good progress but not actually towards the goal I want.
every time i tried drawing in the past I tried doing cartoony stuff and it went nowhere. it was just... nothing. So I finally started trying to do somewhat realistic stuff, and that was a concrete goal I could aim for.
But it was never what I wanted. My dream is to be able to make little four-panel comics. That's what I always wanted. I want to express scenarios I see in my head through bold, easily comprehensible linework.
whenever i see people do ultra-quick sketches it's just like... here's four lines that describe the outside of a body, and then four more for the arms. but when i do that, i put the arm in the middle of the body. then i erase it and try again, but the magic is already gone
it sounds like i'm getting in my own way here but this is just how my brain works. it's like Getting Over It. you can't do every single step of the climb separately. it's a series of chunks of extremely precise movement
yeah, you get to pause between sections, but within the sections you just go. and if you miss a movement, you missed it. don't fight it. just go back and try again from the start, because you'll never get back into the rhythm after you drop it
