What I've Learned Through One Year

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Prologue
And so...I write it anyway.
It's a continuation of my deviation below

I've Been Drawing For A Year! by Hananon

I know I'm still nowhere in drawing nor art. But I'd like to share my personal belief which may be useful for some of you. It's really subjective so it's really fine if you disagree with me. I might even become a hypocrite and do a contradiction things in the next year as I still in my early phase and my mindset might be really wrong.

Sometimes I've been asked about how I practice but I can't say it for sure...
What I have and develop instead was a bunch of mindset that I think important to me which are:

1. Talent didn't exist
As a 'I didn't believe in talent' advocate, I start my path in drawing one year ago by buying a secondhand drawing tablet Genius G-Pen F509 (lol I say it many times already). That time my friend told me a motivation word like "Emangnya lu bisa gambar?"...It's in Indonesian...in English it's something like "Can you even draw?".

I'm amazed how much people believe in talent especially in artistic skills like drawing and music. Talent was like an excuse of not being able to do something. Everytime you see someone good at something you say "He/she is so talented!" and everytime you can't do something properly you say "I just have no talent in it.".

What if we drop the talent in the first place? It will become something like this...When you see someone so good, you will think there must be some way to achieve that. And when you can't do something, you will think I must practice smarter. When this process repeated over and over, seeing someone so good, think about the way to achieve that, and practice harder and smarter. There's no way you won't improve that way.

2. There is always time to practice
I've been drawing for a year now. Some of people might think it's 'only' a year. But for me it's definitely not just a year because I have done about 150 finished drawing. If one drawing take roughly 6 hours...150 x 6 hours would yield 900 hours. On the other hand, with 365 days in one year, It's roughly only took 2,5 hours/day for drawing.
Not that much either.
But well, sometimes 6 hours of effective drawing can be a 10 hours to one day in the real time.

With that being said, as I allocate my time to practice...there's always things that need to be sacrificed. In my case it was my college study (in informatics), time to hangout with friends, playing games, watching animes. :iconpapcryplz:. Fortunately I manage to finish my study and will graduate this October. As for other sacrifices, it's just me being more strict with priority. I've seen some of you are also struggle with your study, family, social circumstances, and even sickness. So I guess my condition is not something unusual. But I've also seen many people talking about how they want to be good at something but rather than practice, they spend too much time to watch anime, youtube videos, or playing games which didn't really important to him/her.

What I can say for sure was there's always time to practice by sacrificing something. To sacrifice something is just can't be avoided.

3. Art block didn't exist too!
Well I must admit I say it too somewhere along this one year...just to look cool. But have you seen me stop drawing for a long time? Once I do that was when I'm so busy with my college stuffs and it's really distract me a lot when drawing (that guilty feelings) so I decided to stop drawing for a while to finish it...yet my urge to draw always win after all lol.

Everytime I feel like I got an art block, I just dish it away by drawing anyway or take a little rest. I think that an art block is just our excuse to avoid looking at our suck creations that become popularly used this day by artists...after all it's cool to say "Damn, I got an art block!". But there's no way to improve just by doing nothing and keep saying that cool words. At least, not for me.

4. Marketing is a part of doing art
Being on DeviantArt to showcase my drawings was definitely a huge help to keep my consistency throughout this year so I didn't quit in the midway out of the depression haha. It's really fun to receive comments and I even manage to got some watchers (and haters) through the process.

I also spend some of my time to strengthen my online presence by making account on other art sites as well. I do this because I believe marketing is also a part of doing art. Some of you may say "I draw for myself", "I don't need to share it", "I will be known in no time when my art is good", "I won't shame myself to do marketing", or something like that. But really, being able to inspire other artists or just able to hear "I love your drawings" or "thanks for the tutorial" was a pure joy and motivation that you can't get if nobody is looking at your arts right now.

The simplest way was to upload what you draw to art sites, write some description, make a tutorials/step by step, submit to groups, share it on your personal social media (to your friends) after you finish drawing something. In that time, you can't draw something else either right? I call that "blank moment" after we finished a drawing. It's usually took about an hour to one day. You can market your art at that time.

To be honest, by doing this, I'm known by my friends as an artist itself so it's easy to talk something about art-related stuff when I'm asked about it or when I need something from them. Some people online also come and ask me to join their projects and I sometimes got commission work. Also my DeviantArt easily becomes my online portfolio for my drawings which I believe will be useful later.

5. Reference is not always useful
Hehe now it comes technical part of the drawing itself. Realistic drawings and anatomy have become a bible in drawing this day. Really, how many of you being told "You should learn from real life first". True it's useful...as one of the way to practice drawing. There's also a minus of doing that which is the imagination, creativity, and dependency to use the holy "reference".

How about me then? As usual, I do what I like to do.

You should have seen me doing photo study which later become "copying what i see"...not really interesting to be honest. But as time goes on, I try anime, go to semi-realistic, go to drawing a photo, and back into anime again. I end up like anime/manga style the most. When I draw a pose, I always improvise. When I can't improvise, I look at some interesting pictures to inspire me. References used when I need it the most so I'm not really depend on it everytime I draw.

Same as colors, color pick colors to use it on a drawing was like a sin. The more you do that, the more dependent you are to do that everytime you draw. I have a special time called "color diagnosis" everytime I see an interesting piece by other artists. I don't draw while doing that but instead, I analyze how they choose the colors by color picking the entire picture and see how the color wheel react to that. When I draw again, I apply the principles that I deducted instead...not the exact colors itself.

6. Hardware didn't matter but software is important
I think it's only apply on digital art. As you can see my drawing tablet I use was not as fancy nor it's a brand new. Don't ever think that by having expensive drawing tablet will improve you art dramatically...Sure it will helps...but only a little. In this digital era, you only need a standard hardware to start and improve in digital arts. As for me, my benchmark was

"As long it's not broken or lag, then it's good enough".

On the other side, for software, it's important to try it out when you have a chance. Don't hold yourself to get a software that you think better just because you're too lazy to learn it. For me I use MangaStudio (for now). I migrated from SAI because I see a lot of features didn't exist in SAI. Although I really comfortable using SAI for drawing, I don't like using back and forth from SAI to Photoshop just to do some minor editing. MangaStudio was like a combination of SAI and Photoshop. The more efficient I use the software, the more I can experiment and finished a drawing.

7. Experiment is a must
If you watch some cool artists, you must have seen them saying "experiment" word. It can't be avoided really.
Stick to one exact style and saying it's my signature style wouldn't be that useful in term of practice. But maybe I will do that too when making some art products haha.

When I first started until now, there's no exact style that I stick on nor I think it was useful, as I say before I just do what I like to do. There's no reason to confuse "which style should I focus on" when your drawing is still not pleasant to eyes. What needed was actually to draw a lot so you can experiment a lot too. No wonder a lot of artists say "Draw a lot" or "Practice a lot".

As a backup of the way I do experiment, I almost always make a step by step of my finished drawing. The purpose was none other than to be able to draw in that style when I want/need to. Sure if it's useful for some of you, I'm really glad for it, but actually I make it for myself, to remind myself when I forgot how to do it.

Epilogue
Phew, I think that's all for now. It's a really good writing practice really haha >///<
For the next year, there are some little goals that I'd like to achieve and share.

My goals are:
1. Make at least one little illustration fanbook (20-40 pages) and sell it! I need to decide the style and fan domain first.
2. Make a light novel. In the end I don't want to be known as a fanartist so make something original is a must. Out of all choices, light novel was the most viable. I can't bring myself to imagine how hard to make a finished comic/manga after all. But I need to learn how to write a story properly to achieve this...not to mention I need to relearn and expand my English.
3. Make or join a doujin circle / art studio. I'm pretty aware of how limited one person can do no matter how skilled they are. So in the end I need to do this if I want to make a bigger impact.

Lastly, thank you very much for your support all this year :heart:
I hope that my second year of drawing will be interesting as well~


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© 2015 - 2024 Hananon
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Drikkzee's avatar
Every first beginner should read this to avoid common mistakes, those 3 statements on the top are 100% TRUE. without them we'll procrastinate all day.

Nice journal Clap