Question abt drawing: been trying to attempt learning how to draw forever but I always have trouble getting over the obstacle of having to learn/study things like anatomy and shading, which then causes me to stop drawing and have a harder time picking it back up. I know it's important for improving your art and yourself as an artist but I can't help but see it as tedious and overwhelming, especially the anatomy since it's more on the science side of things and science is not my thing lol. Do you have any advice on how to get over it or work thru it?

i think there's a couple facets to this question. firstly i'd recommend you consider what exactly your end goal is in learning how to draw: do you specifically want to be able to produce anatomically accurate figures and true-to-life shading, or do you just want to be able to make something for fun that looks good to you? one of the most helpful things I ever learned at art school was that accuracy doesn't matter if it looks good. 99% of my art isn't strictly anatomically accurate, and part of that is stylization, but even when i'm doing realistic figure drawings i like to lengthen limbs and exaggerate curves in order to make my drawings look better. So if your only real goal with art is to make something that looks good and enjoy the process, my first piece of advice would be to stop worrying so much about stuff like perfect accuracy! if you use references and keep pushing yourself, the skill and understanding you're looking for will come naturally with time. before I was ever classically trained, I got pretty far just by drawing my favorite characters in different poses and situations over and over again, and that experience laid the groundwork for when classical training did become available to me. Just because you're not necessarily doing serious figure studies doesn't mean you're not getting valuable practice--what it means is that you're having FUN while you're practicing, and having fun with your art is the most important thing!!!

Secondly, you mentioned anatomy being on the science side of things, which suggests to me that you may be looking in the wrong places when trying to do more serious anatomical study. if you look up 'anatomy' or anything similar on a web search engine, you're likely going to get a lot of very complex scientific illustrations. and while those aren't necessarily devoid of artistic value (I took a class all about scientific anatomy for artists last semester and it was GREAT) for a beginner who's just trying to learn how to make a body look like a body, they're not what you're looking for. what is going to be much more helpful for you are sites like line of action or quickposes. these sites are basically repositories of figure drawing images, and you can set them to automatically switch to a new image after a certain interval of time. if you really, desperately want to improve your anatomy specifically, what I recommend is going to one of these sites, setting it to the shortest interval possible, and trying to copy the pose as closely as you can before time is up. this might sound crazy, since the shortest interval is usually somewhere between 30-60 seconds, which obviously isn't enough to get much down. but what this will do is force you to look at how these models' bodies are constructed and translate it onto the page quickly and without overthinking it. be warned, your first maybe hundred of these are going to look like shit. but if you do this enough, you're eventually going to gain an intrinsic sense for 1. how a body works and 2. the easiest way for you personally to construct a body when drawing it. even without knowing the scientific names and anatomical rules, you're going to get a FEEL for how things work, which is much more important and useful to you as a character artist.

Finally, i think the most important thing to remember is that no art is bad art, even if you're not satisfied with the end product. when you're first starting out as an artist, you're going to make things that don't look right and you're going to be frustrated with yourself because of it. i vividly remember crying over a sketchbook at maybe age 11 or 12 because I was so upset i couldn't put exactly what was in my head on the page. Skill comes with time and practice and that is a frustrating fact of life, but no time spent doing something you enjoy and are passionate about is wasted. It might look bad now but you are laying the groundwork for your future success, and someday you're probably going to look back on your past work and say "I can't believe I thought this looked bad back then. for my age and my skill level i was doing AMAZING." And as previously mentioned, it's a lot less discouraging when something looks bad if you had fun making it, so try to have FUN with your art. draw things you enjoy and are passionate about and don't worry if it looks bad. focus on the experience, the skill will come in time. you've got this!!

portrait practice with SILO characters rahhhh (for each i tried to work from reference as much as i could and then switched to tracing so that they Looked Right.)

Without colors or context, this simple and stupid comic of mine feels so, so tense; It's ominous. The difference from the tone of my last doodle is low-key hilarious though. But please, *insert ace joke here* cause I swear this is nothing serious. I don't even know why I gave in so much effort or show ya'll my progress before finishing, yet here we are. -Bubbly💙

for the next year thing: i seriously love your style, and genuinely enjoy everything you post even if it is from a fandom im not a part of!! that being said, kakairu in your style is the best!!!

Awww thank you (*꒦ິ꒳꒦ີ)

I have a big kakairu project going on but I seriously don't know how it will go ;;; I hope I will find enough free time to be able to share my love of ninja dads with you all ♡

Goddess（＾∀＾●）

idk man you guys infected me with the cowboyF!Leo thing but bc I have no chill whatsoever when it comes to such things I started doodling around and horsegirlP!Leo has entered the chat too and I have no fucking idea were any of this is even going if anywhere but apparently I am cooking? I see if I can sort out this mess a lil and draw a little more. the fuck is my life right now smgh.

[tucks hair behind ear] so i may have finished fullmetal alchemist: brotherhood

I love the idea of a pred and prey relaxing together, pred's stomach growls, prey says "let me help with that" before crawling into pred's mouth, and then both relaxing again with prey curled up going to sleep and pred calmly and happily rubbing their belly

can i get some bowuigi requests pls or just Bowser and Luigi related

Worst thing about learning a new language of my own violation though is that its made me a fucking nerd. I just found my friend's flashcards on quizlet and got excited. I get excited to hear some french words in everyday conversation. When my friends are reading a book i have to resist the urge to go WHAT LANGUAGE IS THAT. Im just super excited to consume french and spanish language and phrases and im a fucking nerd about it now

Tbh as an autistic person who's in the top percentiles on some measures of intelligence and in the bottom percentiles on other measures of intelligence I often feel like I'm living my life like that one SpongeBob scene where he makes a circle by drawing an incredibly detailed portrait and erasing lines until only the outline is left. I rank pretty high up on vocabulary and my brain always defaults to Big Words, but I don't want to sound pretentious or make it hard for other people to understand me so I have to actively work to mentally convert into smaller synonyms as I'm talking/typing, which means I start off with the type of obtuse language you would read in a research paper or some shit and then I have to intentionally put in More Effort just to sound normal. And if my brain is too tired to make connections appropriately then sometimes I can't even remember synonyms like "bad" and I end up having to stick with malicious or malevolent or smth in a simple shitpost, which is basically like I'm trying to draw a circle and my brain just tells me "sorry buddy best I can do is the portrait" 😭 help

This is a post mostly for me.

Just reflecting on my very FIRST karfef fan art I did in July 29, 2013 and this last one I recently did almost exactly a year later in July 15, 2023. It was completely unintentional! The recent one got a little boost of notes and I ended up looking at my karfef tag in my blog just to reminiscence.

It’s been literally a decade since I’ve been enjoying drawing homestuck, maybe a bit more. And it’s definitely been twice that since I’ve started liking art in general. Sometimes I don’t feel like I’ve actually gotten any better at art, but things like this do remind me that I have gotten better even if I don’t immediately see it.

I may never make art a career but I really do enjoy drawing and my heart is full when I make drawings I am happy with. Doesn’t matter how old I get, I don’t think I’ll ever stop.

life is weird and complex because it doesn't matter if you have 2 hours of free time or have the whole week off, you will always have a game you want to play, a thing you want to read, inspiration to practice your craft, some niche topic you want to research, an activity you want to do with friends, and you will always, always feel like there are not enough hours in the day to do it all

there will be days when you have free time and no energy to do the things you want to do, there will be days when you have so much energy that you can't decide what you want to spend it on, and you'll think that those days are wasted but i think that doesn't matter, and that life is at its best when you are at that point when you have so many options in your hands and so many plans for fun you will have in both the present and the future that it keeps you up at night and derails your sleep schedule and even motivates you enough to wake up every morning and helps you go through anything you have to do so you can spend more time doing what makes you happy, i really think thats what we're here for

I finally understand the struggle of having a fav character who is hard to draw...

going to draw astarion me thinks