Someone Reading This Has The Need And Ability To Schedule An Appointment With A Doctor And Has Not Scheduled

I don’t think any movie will make me feel the same ethereal sense of otherworldly sorrow and disembodied awe as that scene in Lord of the Rings where the loyal son is sent off into a doomed battle to please his vindictive father while Pippin sings a mourning song of his people

I was like 12 and high off this shit

I just discovered foodtimeline.org, which is exactly what it sounds like: centuries worth of information about FOOD.  If you are writing something historical and you want a starting point for figuring out what people should be eating, this might be a good place?

here's some more unsolicited adult advice as someone in her 30s who knows there are a lot of twenty somethings and teens that follow her: if you're trying to build a new habit you really want, and are struggling, you have to break it down to the smallest building block possible. If you're failing, you haven't thought small enough. I know it's possible to hear stories of people who just snapped into new life mode one day by "just deciding", but truly what's happening there is a confluence of events and experiences that force the brain into some sort of epiphany. You cannot will an epiphany. It'll never work. For most times of your life, you will need to build habits intentionally, and that means not working against yourself and to set micro goals. like laughably tiny goals. because once that easy tiny goal is met, you can build off it, tiny goal after tiny goal until you reach your big goal.

so for example, if you want to be a morning person that gets up at ass crack dawn so that you can work out, eat brekkie, shower, and get to work at a leisurely pace, and you're not that person because you will hit your snooze button 800 times, you have to get the big picture goal out of your head. think smaller. "I want to get up 15 minutes earlier than I normally do." If you can't do that, make it 5 minutes. "I want to cook breakfast every day" hell no too big. "I want to eat something, anything, before I leave the house" hell yeah, fantastic. When you go to the grocery store to make sure there are things in the house for breakfast, if you keep buying bagels and microwave sandwiches that you ignore, you gotta think smaller. SMALLER. What's something so easy to eat that you'll never say no to. Is it a yogurt? Is it a handful of grapes? Is it a hostess ho ho? is it hot cheetos? FORGET the big picture of the fantasy put-together woman preparing a full nutritious meal that you'd be proud to admit to. Think only of the smallest goal you can achieve. If you know you can't say no to an ice cream sandwich, put a ton of ice cream sandwiches in your freezer and have one for breakfast every day until it's so instilled in you that you gotta get up to eat something you can start diversifying.

It sounds like, from the lack of habit place, that must take forever. But really it doesn't take too long to form the habit once the discipline kicks in. the trick is that you have to give your brain something easy to become disciplined to. If it's too hard, think easier and smaller. No one has to know. Literally no one in the gd world has to know that for 4 weeks when you were 22 you had an ice cream sandwich for breakfast every day. who cares. If it gets you eating oatmeal with fresh fruit in a few months who cares. you did it, yay. smaller, easier. if you can't do it, think smaller and easier. smaller!! EASIER!!! You are not thinking smaller and easier enough. break your brain thinking how small and easy you can go. SMALLER. EVEN SMALLER, SIS.

I’ve just gotten into digital drawing and I’m getting disheartened by my lack of progress, and frustrated at how bad I am at drawing without a reference. Is it possible to improve drawing even if I never go without a reference? Or do you have any tips for drawing just from your imagination?

Hey there! Long response ahead. You may find it reassuring to know that it took me around half a decade to get good at drawing without reference, and for a good chunk of that time I was drawing daily for 3 or 4 hours per day. It’s not an overnight thing, it’s not even a within-a-year thing; your brain genuinely needs the time to learn to generate images & volumes rather than to solely perceive them.

In branching out to digital, you and I inadvertently added a slight layer of difficulty to this process of learning to draw without reference. It’s more noticeable now than it will be in a few years time, but here’s what I imagine you’re dealing with (as I dealt with when I started digital): any drawing knowledge you gained through drawing traditionally seems like it’s gone, or at least really hard to access. When you try to sketch or paint digitally it might seem like you “forgot” how to address proportions, values, anatomy, volumes, color, etc.—but when you go back to drawing traditionally, it all comes back. That’s just the nature of moving to a radically different medium. 

If you practice consistently for a few more weeks, you’ll notice that things start to come back to you. After a few months to a year, and digital may feel as natural (or more natural) to you than traditional. If you’re exclusively drawing digitally during this time, you’ll likely have trouble learning to draw without a ref, just because your mind is still adjusting to this very big change—but that’s to be expected. Accordingly, I’d recommend that you keep drawing traditionally as you learn digital, and do your non-reference drawings traditionally, for the most part. This way, your brain is only handling one major change at a time (digital vs. imagination). Once digital is like second nature to you, you can do more imagination drawings there.

On drawing from reference: Stepping away from the logistics of brain stuff, you absolutely can improve as an artist if you never go without a ref. I know hundreds of artists who make incredible work that stems from clever use of references. Art made with references is valid; if you don’t know what something looks like, there is literally no shame in finding pictures of it in order to make a good piece. I do it frequently.

There’s also this spectrum of ref use that I’ve picked up on: on one end, there’s art that may nearly be a copy of some picture (e.g., essentially a study with a few details changed); and on the other, there’s art in which the artist takes little samples from many, many photos or other art pieces and incorporates them into one cohesive image. It’s easier to start from the former end and head towards the latter. The convenient part of using small portions of many references is that it’s not difficult to transition to doing drawings from imagination. When you focus on a small visual, it’s easier to remember it than if you were trying to remember one very large and complex set of visuals (e.g., it’s easier to visualize an eye than the entirety of a face).

Described above is a more gradual solution for drawing without a ref—that is, slowly using less and less reference over years of remembering and learning. I also recommend the brute-force approach (I employed the two in tandem): making yourself to draw from imagination, preferably with a direction in mind, and seeing how far you can go before you encounter too many gaps in your knowledge to continue. When you can discern gaps (e.g., not knowing what an arm looks like at a very specific angle), take note of a few that you find important, and study them. You won’t be able to figure out everything quickly, so don’t fret about that. This is very much an active learning approach, and will likely get you results quicker than the method mentioned in the paragraph above. It’s also scarier, as you’ll be humbled pretty quickly by the ocean of knowledge that you are without—I know I was :)

As is proper for an answer addressing drawing from imagination, here’s a study of a photo. I’ve been trying to figure out how to paint in Procreate as of a few days ago, and it’s been quite interesting. I still prefer Photoshop, but the app certainly has its merits.

I’ve been pretty inconsistent with posting recently, and it’s mostly due to schoolwork. Junior year for my major is notoriously heavy, so I haven’t been able to paint illustrations (outside of commissions that I’m finishing) and answer questions, sorry about that!

My comic inspired by “Variations on a Theme” is finished!! I hope you enjoy :) More under the cut!

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