advice, tutorials and random words

August 26, 2014

Anonymous asked: I love your tutorials! Thank you so much for creating them :) I was wondering if it would be ok to ask you about sketching advice? Often I've found that my sketches are rigid or use too many strokes and I'm not sure how to fix them. I admire your sketches for being simple and flowing and I would love if you could share some advice on how to achieve that sort of feel. Thank you so much and have a good day!!

shattered-earth:

!! Thanks a bunch, i’m flattered anyone would come to me for advice >_<. I was going to just link to some resources i remembered from back in the day but apparently searching for “furry lines” these days just yields tutorials on drawing furries ah aha ha >_> So lemme just try to do a quick write up with examples!

“Furry lines” as I call them are a VERY common technique beginner-intermediate artists use. It’s something every artist will naturally break through on their own with more and more practice sketching and drawing, but I think you can expedite the process by identifying why you do it and purposefully working away from it!
Here i’m using gardevoir as a “mental image” of what you want. You want those pretty flowing lines of the figure in your minds eye, but you want to get it just right. You lay down one stroke, and see it’s already wrong, so you go ahead and lay down another to correct it. It’s kinda right, but also kinda wrong, so you try again. Over and over till the end. Over all it looks kinda right.. but the brokeness of the lines destroy the fluidity and well, unintentional “furry” look haha.
The things you will want to remember is that, you will never get it right in one stroke, especially not in a sketch (which by definition ins’t supposed to be perfect!). You will probably never match exactly whats in your minds eye so there’s no point in trying to get it so precise with so many strokes. Instead focus on LONGER strokes that can still be wrong
And when you realize you can’t really be “perfect” you have less urgency to do those short furry lines to get it JUST RIGHT. You become more comfortable getting it all wrong, and going over it again in longer strokes. The end result with a lot of retraining is you still don’t get things perfect, but they are they actually wrong? or just not the same as what you wanted in your mind?
You still need to do lots of personal practice, just practice making long strokes with your ELBOWS and SHOULDERS NOT your fingers! Lots of pages of just lines, random doodles and stuff to understand the feeling of fluidity. Doesn’t have to be something in specific, just teaching your body what feels right and what feels wrong. But coupled with understanding WHY the furry lines are wrong and WHY you want to do it i think will help you move faster.
I hope this helps you, Anon! Good luck master the non furry lines XD