not actually silly; unsolicited advice about a thing that helped me
@jk sorry if you're not looking for tips, but just in case it helps, the most helpful thing for me was to pay super-extra careful attention to the proportions of what i was drawing
use a reference, and see how far away things are from each other, or how the size of something compares to other things
for example, realizing pichu's head is twice the size of their body isn't super-obvious, but instantly made mine much better
not actually silly; unsolicited advice about a thing that helped me
@jk oof, sounds like a sensory nightmare having your tools be like that :T
the good news is that it doesn't actually need to be perfect as long as you keep the proportions in your mind while doing it
and with plain paper, there's actually a trick to emulate having basically perfect dexterity too!
not actually silly; unsolicited advice, abdl art
@jk the trick is, instead of drawing single lines normally, you instead draw many, many extremely short and extremely light lines
the average of those strokes is going to likely be extremely close to the thing you wanted to draw, and it's really easy to adjust as you are drawing
like this thing i sketched..! (CW: abdl) notice how the lines aren't actually solid? that's the only reason i could ever do that on paper
not actually silly; unsolicited advice; second sketch is also abdl art
@jk the last thing is that guides are actually extremely helpful and underrated for making faces that look good!
you can use them to eyeball facial proportions, and also to align them in a way that makes sense
you basically just imagine them as if you are drawing them on a sphere, and anchor your features from there!
faces are hard, but this puts them in easy mode
not actually silly; unsolicited advice
@jk anyway, apologies for the weird examples, but hopefully this is helpful..!
you can definitely learn to draw, and if it's something you want to do, i hope you hang in there! ^^
i'll admit it can be a bit tricky to pick up; i legit thought i would never be happy with what i could draw--but it turns out, getting better doesn't always need to be a frustrating experience, and a few tricks can go a long way~
not actually silly; unsolicited advice
@jk hee, i know that one. something that's kinda nice about the "1000 lines to estimate the One True Line" technique above is that it actually lends itself really well to just never erasing anything
like, if you make a mistake, just draw over it again. it actually doesn't look super out of place, and can drastically speed up your sketches if you avoid erasing anything but the most egregious mistakes
as you said, perfection is actually a pretty bad goal
not actually silly; unsolicited advice
@jk oh! and if you do erase something, it doesn't look bad to redraw it if all your lines are already made up of tons of strokes
as opposed to trying to graft singular lines together
not actually silly; unsolicited advice
@jk (oh and, no prob! i know it can be a bit discouraging learning to draw, so i'm happy if i can prevent that feeling in other people)
