fast rendering tutorial for when you dont want to put in any effort

How I Study Anatomy

Everyone says NEVER TRACE!! THAT'S ART THEFT! Ok but we can do a little crime in the name of Learning.

Trace to learn, not to earn.

I like to take my own photos, but you can study whatever you want. Link back to original photos, and don't post copied artwork unless the artist is dead, cool with it, or both.

As always with learning, start every sketch with the intent to throw it away (trash for paper, quitting without saving for digital) This takes the pressure off and lets you make Bad Art, which is very important.

So let's make Bad Art of a Deer because I happen to have one handy

Start with a photo of your subject in a nice/neutral pose with all four feet visible. (so not like me)

Freehand copy it. Try not to stylize, focusing instead of matching proportions and pose. Don't get too detailed!

It's ok if your art looks terrible and has broken legs. I've drawn LOTS of deer so I have a leg up. Everyone's art sucks in their own eyes and here's where mine went wrong:

Either lasso-distort (recommended for beginners) or redraw a copy of your first sketch with your reference behind it (scaled to match the main body of your sketch)

Put the original and modified sketches together and compare the differences. Write it down if you want. This shows you where your eyes saw things the wrong size, so you can correct for that next time.

After learning about both deer and yourself, try freehand copying again.

Marvel at your newfound knowledge and skill!

but there's always room for improvement

You can stop here and move on to your real drawing, Or do another freehand-fix-compare cycle. I actually overcorrected my "draws heads too big" and veered into "heads too small."

Another note on tracing: Learning HOW to trace is more important than anything you could learn By tracing. Draw the Anatomy, not the outline. In real life, things don't have outlines, they have bones.

These are from the same shoot which is extra useful for consistency. The lines are minimal and follow where the animals joints are, and only important parts are drawn.

You won't know what Important Parts means right off the bat, which is where in-depth study comes in. You need to do learn the hard parts to do the easy parts right.

Next up: how to study bones and muscles.

How to study Bones and Muscles

"Study the anatomy study the anatomy" but they never tell you HOW. It's not "read a book," It's more like flailing around wildly and crashing your browser from too many tabs.

This is going to be about How to Make a bones and muscle chart. Because even if your art sucks, you learn so much more by doing than by seeing.

References I gathered: X X X X X X X X

Get Set up. Get a photo, like above, but it doesn't have to be the same photo. And now... gather reference.

We'll start with bones. Search up "[animal] skeleton" and get photos or super scientific illustration. Add in things like "top view" to spice it up.

Next, search "[animal] skeleton sketchfab." This pulls up 3D models that you can rotate in your browser. Remember that these are art and the anatomy is only as good as the artist, so pick a good one.

Time for bone!

The spine is the most important, and in a lot of animals it will surprise you. Draw it in over your photo and then add spikes because skeletons are punk. These are not scientific and I didn't count them because their number doesn't matter to art. So you better be referencing from scientists and not me!

The rest of the bones and some notes. These are my notes to myself about things I want to remember. My personal discoveries in anatomy that made my art better. You can make the same notes but also make sure you have your own thoughts on there as well. that's how you help yourself the best. Be as detailed or vague as you want.

Same deal with muscle. Here are my personal notes to myself. Label stuff that is important to you. I actually grouped a bunch of muscles together based on what is visible from the outside. Muscles are way more complicated than this, but Baby's First Anatomy Chart gets to be simple.

This is good enough for me because I have intimate knowledge of the other muscles working under and over these ones. Feel free to add as many or as few muscles as you like. You chart your own course.

This is very VERY much not an anatomical chart. I'm sure there's nerds out there pulling their hair out looking at this. But listen, it works for art!

And you know the wildest part about this?

I don't need to look at it to use it. The act of making your own anatomy chart puts that knowledge in your brain. Like how you can make "cheat sheets" even for tests that don't allow them - the act of making the sheet helps you remember what you struggle with most.

And after all that complexity? Your simplification will be based on Real Knowledge and you'll put those random circles in the right spots.

Look at all this hard work you've done. Eventually this will be second nature to you.

Show me what you make! I'd love to see what creatures yall make anatomy charts of.

Photo Reference Packs

I put together some photo packs and uploaded them to my gumroad. You can use them and this guide to study! So far there's only a Doe and a Fawn pack, but if I get sales I will put in the effort to do more for deer, horses, cats, birds, and anything else I can point my camera at.

Doe Pack

Fawn Pack

Got asked if I had any tips for new artists during my stream today and I figured I'd put them here too:

Anyway that's all I've got for now, might add more tomorrow when I'm less tired(and I encourage additions for other artists as I'm self taught and had to learn most of this the hard way and thus I'm sure I've missed stuff) but yeah, just draw my dudes, this is supposed to be fun. You deserve to have fun.

I wanted to add that, while it's not exactly a drawing tip, you gotta try to stop putting yourself down and pointing out all the flaws in your work or how "bad" it is and apologizing, especially when showing it to others. Not only does this constant hyperfocus on your flaws/things you struggle with really fuck you up mentally and form a feedback loops that just makes you hate your art, it makes it really hard for other people to support you and offer real tips and feedback. (You don't have to ask for feedback ofc, but if you want it this mindset and behavior will get in the way, trust me.)

Like I'm the bitch who tries her hardest to reblog EVERY peice of art I see on tumblr or twitter that I like to Support The Arts and the ONLY thing that consistently gets in the way of that is the creator putting themselves down in the caption. I can think of a lot of times where I really liked someone's drawing but couldn't make myself reblog it because the post had like three paragraphs of the creator talking about ALL of the things "wrong" with it(many of which I hadn't even noticed, or if I had didn't care about). It just made me feel like I was indirectly supporting that mindset and I didn't want to do that.

I do still struggle with this sometimes and I absolutely get the drive to do this, but you gotta stop. Just send your art out into the world, say you did your best(or just don't talk about the "quality" of it at all) thank people who support you/show interest/offer feedback(IF you want constructive feedback, again, it's okay if you don't) and move on. It's hard, but it helps, trust me, it really helps, so either do it or just it till you make it! It's worth it!!

Heavily paraphrasing Cold Crash Pictures on YouTube but in his video about bad dinosaur movies he said something along the lines of "I convinced myself that it was better for my art to not exist than for it to exist in some imperfect state and thats bullshit" and ngl framing it like that literally changed my goddamn life.

Your art will never be perfect but it deserves to exist anyway, and you deserve to enjoy making art regardless of the "quality" of what you create, don't forget that.

It also helps me to remember that post about unfinished art that essentially said "You would never say a musician practicing their scales is wasting their time, so don't tell yourself the time you dedicate to drawing(or writing, ect.) a waste just because you didn't finish what you made. You were still practicing, still learning. Time spent creating is never wasted."

Seriously it may seem like I'm focusing on this a lot but fear of making bad art or wasting your time is something really hard to get over once it's taken hold and it helps to get the drop on it, and tbh this advice has been some of the most helpful to me as an artist, even more than stretching and doing warm up doodles. So yeah, drill both of these into your head, they're important.

Fantastic art

Weirdly Specific Artist Ask Game

Didn't see a lot of artist ask games, wanted to make a silly one.

(I wrote this while sick out of my mind last year and it's been collecting dust in my drafts, I might as well let it run free) 1. Art programs you have but don't use

2. Is it easier to draw someone facing left or right (or forward even)

3. What ideas come from when you were little

4. Fav character/subject that's a bitch to draw

5. Estimate of how much of your art you post online vs. the art you keep for yourself

6. Anything that might inspire you subconsciously (i.e. this horse wasn't supposed to look like the Last Unicorn but I see it)

7. A medium of art you don't work in but appreciate

8. What's an old project idea that you've lost interest in

9. What are your file name conventions

10. Favorite piece of clothing to draw

11. Do you listen to anything while drawing? If so, what

12. Easiest part of body to draw

13. A creator who you admire but whose work isn't your thing

14. Any favorite motifs

15. *Where* do you draw (don't drop your ip address this just means do you doodle at a park or smth)

16. Something you are good at but don't really have fun doing

17. Do you eat/drink when drawing? if so, what

18. An estimate of how much art supplies you've broken

19. Favorite inanimate objects to draw (food, nature, etc.)

20. Something everyone else finds hard to draw but you enjoy

21. Art styles nothing like your own but you like anyways

22. What physical exercises do you do before drawing, if any

23. Do you use different layer modes

24. Do your references include stock images

25. Something your art has been compared to that you were NOT inspired by

26. What's a piece that got a wildly different interpretation from what you intended

27. Do you warm up before getting to the good stuff? If so, what is it you draw to warm up with

28. Any art events you have participated in the past (like zines)

29. Media you love, but doesn't inspire you artistically

30. What piece of yours do you think is underrated

two (2) people asked how i did the matchbook thing so take this

this is just a simple idea but if you spend some more time you can get real krazy with it:

making fake prints is so fun please do it immediately free resources under cut xoxo

New more mature way of dealing with being bad at things I thought i would be good at

Sitting whispering to my self " being bad at stuff is normal part of on the way to being good at it" over and over (still angry)

I see a lot of folks confused about step one in the tags and to explain: what they're doing is just a color wash. Typically it's done with a color opposite on the color wheel to the primary color in a piece (though can be other tones for various reasons). It helps to make the final colors pop a lot more than they would if painted directly on a white canvas as the wash will show up in tiny spaces between the paint/in thinner areas and create contrast.