Inspired By This WIP By @astranite

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!

Actual things that happen in the 1897 Dracula novel, without context:

A character has ominous nightmares and attributes them to eating too much paprika

Dracula first appears wearing a fake beard

The person he was trying to fool with the fake beard immediately realizes Dracula and Beard Guy are the same man, due to both having really firm handshakes

We are told parrots are immortal unless fatally wounded

A Texan cowboy opens fire on a bat flitting around a window, and lodges a bullet in the wall of an occupied room

A woman is called a polyandrist for receiving blood transfusions from multiple men

An incorrectly addressed telegram leads to two deaths, multiple druggings, and several children being assaulted

Dracula, while trying to maintain a low profile, takes a lovely trip to the zoo and freaks out the animals so badly that he gets mentioned in a newspaper article

The one character who knows anything about vampires spends a good two-thirds of the book refusing to talk about vampires

Dracula went to Satan's Witchcraft Academy and somehow this is only brought up in two throwaway lines

A character gets stuck inside a circle of communion wafer crumbs

A major plot point of the book is Dracula (who was said to be a brilliant scholar and has the strength of twenty mortal men) realizing he can move boxes without human help

Someone is referred to as "manifestly a prig of the first water"

Two characters have a hobby of reading train schedules

A hospital lets a mental patient escape to see what will happen

A character starts vomiting up feathers from eating whole birds

A doctor refuses to give a medical diagnosis and instead makes a speech about growing corn

Dracula impersonates another character just by wearing the same clothes, despite being taller and visibly much older. This deception is successful.

A character "cleans" a room by eating all the insects in it

Suddenly: rats. Thousands of them.

The heroes progress in their efforts through "the wonderful power of money," i.e., bribery

Dracula has three other vampires in his castle. Their relation to him is never explained, nor are any of them named.

A character insists his salvation depends on having a pet cat

Dracula is thwarted by flowers on more than one occasion

A group of vampires stand in the hall outside a man's bedroom, talking loudly about their plans to eat him. When he comes to the door to confront them, they run away laughing

Dracula wears an unfashionable hat and gets roasted for it

A group of Romanians encounter a disheveled, shouting man and, "seeing from his violent demeanour that he was English, they [give] him a ticket for the furthest station on the way thither that the train reached."

A boat crashes due to Dracula having the munchies

A wolf is thrown through a window and immediately runs off, confused and covered in glass

Dracula makes a bed

Two movies I like

I'M DOING AN EXPERIMENT

To prove something to a friend, please

REBLOG IF YOU THINK ASEXUALS BELONG IN LGBTQ+ SPACES

LIKE IF YOU THINK ASEXUALS DON’T BELONG IN LGBTQ+ SPACES

okay people who have been fighting to unwhitewash the clones, now is your time to help māori!!

What’s happening

- 182.41 hectares of our ancestral land in Wairarapa has come up for sale.

- This whenua backs onto our maunga Tararua, our awa, Waiohine and is near our whānau urupā, Te Uru o Tāneroa.

- The tender price is between $1.2-1.5 million.

- Our whānau are trying to raise money to meet the tender price.

- Our iwi has not settled, so we have no collective financial base.

- Our whānau want to buy back our whenua and establish papakāinga and sustainable business to bring our people home to Wairarapa.

If the tender is unsuccessful they will keep all donations for the next bit of land that comes up

Givealittle

#LandBack Help us buy back our ancestral land in Wairarapa

#LandBack. We have a once in a lifetime opportunity to buy it back and help recreate a hub for our Ngāti Kahukuraawhitia people.

(information has been copied from @/amscraig on twitter, who is a member of the iwi attempting to reclaim their land)

it is so disappointing that this is the only option to reclaim illegally stolen land for the iwi, but the government wont work towards settlement with many iwi so we have no other choice

if you have any money avaliable to donate please do, anything would be appreciated!

Its the Eve of Black History Month so lets kick it off by pissing off White queers by reminding them that: Y’all have the capacity to be racist as fuck! white gays can be so blatantly racist and not realize it! I don’t care how good your intentions were or if you didn’t mean to be racist, or if you have BLM in your bio. Trans and cis alike, any insistence that you couldn’t possibly be racist blinds you from learning how to accept any rightful criticism or taking accountability for your actions. 

When your first instinct to being told you’ve been racist is self defense, all that tells the queer black people around you is that 1) You are too inept to acknowledge you are being racist or 2) You’d rather preserve your feelings than listen to the people of color around you. It is exhausting to have to coddle white queers who think they are too oppressed to be racist.

White People Can And Should Reblog This.

If you have achieved something, please remember to observe a mandatory period of basking in the warm glow of your achievement like a lizard on a stone, lest you teach your brain that effort is futile, actually, because it didn't get to enjoy its happy chemicals, so, naturally, nothing good ever comes of trying. (And no, avoiding punishment is not a reward!)

I recommend, like, 5% of basking time in relation to whatever time you invested into achieving the thing minimum. And if you can't make your own bask, friend-brought is fine (= tell your friends!).

Today I learned about an incredible artist named John Conrad Berkey. He created cover art for many science fiction books, and also created artwork for NASA! But he’s most famous for his incredible Star Wars illustrations.

George Lucas actually bought several John Berkey science fiction illustrations and used them to help pitch Star Wars to studios. And many of Berkey’s pervious artwork was used as inspiration for Star Wars’s visuals.

Berkey was later commissioned by LucasFilm to create posters for Star Wars, shown below:

"Berkey's imagination and expressionistic style quickly set him apart from other sci-fi illustrators. From a distance, his paintings appear very exacting and perfectly rendered. But upon closer inspection, they reveal a beautifully loose and freely abstract style."

―Rusty Freeman, Vice-President, Collections & Public Programs, Plains Art Museum, Fargo, North Dakota

You can check out Berkey’s website here, and read his Wookieepedia page here

my main criticism of solarpunk is why isn’t it happening