Now you, too, can draw like me!

     So, you might wonder how I went from zero ability to draw, all the way to a mediocre ability to draw.  Or you might not, what the fuck do I know.  The first big step was getting a Bamboo drawing tablet as a birthday present.  Before that, most of my experience was using a mouse in MS paint.  That looked about as good as you would expect, and if you are one of the unlucky few that remembers my ancient webcomic, you're already having PTSD flashbacks.  Bad enough it was a teenager's idea of "edgy".  Bad enough it was so full of itself.  Most of all, bad enough that Tripod still exists for some unfathomable reason.  Anyway, getting the tablet was a major step forward for me.  I started to approach drawing as someone who was actually interested in learning.
     As part of this process, I've been watching hour after hour of youtube videos.  This has been psychologically trying.  Did you know? Uuuuummmmmm that most people? Uuuuhhhhhh on youtube? Are really uuuuuuuuhhhhh terrible? At, like, talking? Long, drawn out grunts and heavy breathing, with every sentence ending in an interrogative inflection.  This makes the few who have the talent, ability to teach, and a lack of mong-mouth very special.  If, for some reason, you would like to draw the way I do, here are some of the people that have brought me here.

     Mark Crilley - This is the first guy I found that wasn't an idiot.  His focus is manga-style, which I honestly am not interested in, but he still covers lots of fundamentals.  He listens to the people who subscribe to his channel and covers topics they are interested in.  A lot of my earlier stuff was drawn using his lessons, which doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement, but that's more my shitty inexperience than anything else.  He's also not annoying to listen to, he sounds like a bit of a goofy dork dad, laughing at his own awful jokes and generally just having a good time.  He has dozens and dozens of tutorial videos, and I would definitely suggest checking him out if you're into this kind of thing.

     Proko - My previously mentioned pally-chum Ben pointed me toward this channel, and holy crap is it good.  Now, this is just the stripped down free version, and to get the full experience you have to pay for the online lessons (I do not do this).  Still, the free lessons are fantastic.  If you noticed any quality increase at all in my drawings, it was probably after I started watching these.  The videos are well-produced and informative, with a focus on fundamentals.  10/10 would art again.

     This guy! - I only watched a few videos from This guy!, but I wanted to include him because he's adorable.  I've never seen one person have so much fun drawing naked ladies.

     Draw With Jazza - This guy was exactly what I was looking for.  He covers cartooning, graphic novels (a very mature and adult way to say comic books) and animation.  He has a little bit of the previously mentioned "youtube poster problems", but at least he's Australian so it doesn't seem so bad.  He has convinced me that I need to get photoshop, so Adobe should be giving this fucker kickbacks.

     So, armed with all this knowledge, I got to work.  Recently, a friend of mine asked me to start screwing around and try to come up with images for a band he's working on.  Album art, poster art, whatever I wanted, and the grosser the better.  I am just brimming with shitty ideas for this, and so far  I made three images that I'm so very happy with, because they represent a pretty solid step forward in ability for me.  They still have their problems, but now it's more like I'm cooking with butane (a bastard gas) than runny turds.  Let's have a look!

 

     The more literary among you have figured out this one is called "fat man dancing around a fire".  It isn't finished but I felt like you should see it.  I still have some foot issues to work out and a hand to finish, and then I have to learn to colour and shade (so a long goddam time).  Do you like the waaaaay too tight jorts? I bet you do.
     One thing I've noticed is that as a complete amateur, it's difficult to not wear your influences on your sleeve.  Whenever I finish something I have to stare at it for a while to see if I'm just blatantly ripping someone off, and I usually am in some way.  Disgusting drawing with a non-sequitur caption is straight jacking of Will Laren, and I do it all the time.  Observe this second drawing:

     See? At least this is still a step up for me.  The arms look a little stiff but everything else is a clear improvement.  I'm keeping with the tight jorts theme because I can't stop laughing.  Someday I'm going to lean how to draw feet\shoes, then y'all better buckle the fuck up.
     Also no stranger to being plagarised by me is Kate Beaton.  Something about her style appeals to me in a huge way, and I think I figured out what it is.

 

     Buttock detail!  Between Kate and adventure time, modern cartooning is approaching a singularity of butt detail.  It's like looking into the face of God.  You know what? I think I'm going to quit my job and just draw butts full time.  If you're ever walking the streets of Halifax and see an awful-smelling homeless man laying down chalk monuments to the human butt, say hi and toss me a quarter.  Your butt might be immortalized.

I'm jacked up on Melatonin fruity chews, LET'S DO THIS

      Man, turns out I will take any excuse to not practice something.  It's been hotter than the devil's jalapenos here, and it makes me want to learn science so I can find a way to send the sun into the super-massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy and just never have to deal with that total asshole again.  I'm sitting here with two fans going, intermittently spritzing water into them so they blow a semi-refreshing blast of stale water on me.  My back soaks every chair I sit in and I have history's worst case of silly-putty-scrote.  The only comfortable way to get food in me is to either barbecue it, or order pizza.  The gas those options give me, coupled with the ridiculous humidity of Nova Scotian summers, makes my apartment feel like some kind of shitty jungle.

     Nevertheless, I've begrudgingly continued to draw stuff.  I was getting pissed at it because I was changing methods so often that I felt I wasn't making any progress.  I've finally found a few youtubers that both have the skills to teach and the vocal ability to not be some mealy-mouthed motherfucker, so that listening to their videos doesn't make me want to push strangers into traffic.  At some point I'll do an update talking about them, but this isn't that update.  For now, let's talk about some of the garbage I've been churning out.  Remember in my last update when I mentioned that I had been doing lots of stuff, and most of it has been so awful so as to have been thrown out?  Yeah, look at this and try to imagine how bad that stuff was.

     Hey, I'm pretty sure that's not how legs work.  And I'll tell you this, I'm 100% sure that's not how the human pud works.  And mother of god, you know that Neitzche quote about the abyss staring back? Those nipples.  That's what he was talking about.  Anyway this was an example of the approach I've been taking lately, putting a lot of work into the head/face first.  I find some awfulness of body can be forgiven as long as the face is fairly convincing.  I didn't do any shading on this because I have no idea how to effectively use gradients yet, and I should probably worry about getting other things under control first.  Things like basic colouring, like at least the skill level a five year old would bring to the table. 

  

     See what I mean?  Probably not the best example of foreshortening either.  For those of you that aren't artists like me, foreshortening is when you make something smaller/larger to make it appear farther away/closer to the viewer.  At least the right hand looks kind of ok.  I was getting really frustrated with myself at this point, like legitimately asking myself if I was even really trying.   Of course I was, I'm just not good yet.  Try telling that to someone going through it, though.  Sitting around realizing you're bad at something isn't very high on the average to-do list.  It probably sits around the same spot on the list as literally anything involving diarrhea.  It was coming from this dark place that I set to work on my next one.

      Haha, ok!  I was actually way happier with this.  This is a second attempt at Matt, a character I posted a way worse drawing of in an earlier update.  Honestly, name something that isn't immediately funnier with a pot belly.  Think about David Bowie, in his prime, and add a huge pot belly.  Think about Kevin Costner, fumbling through an English accent with Morgan Freeman, and give him a big old pot belly.  Think about starving children in Africa, and-

Uh.

     So anyway, yeah.  I've been trying lately to come at things from a "character design" standpoint.  Not that I'm near where I want to be before seriously starting to create things, but this was something I picked up from some of the youtube channels I've been watching.  Just by making the heads I can usually figure out everything else really quickly.  The head tells you what a character is thinking, how they feel, whether they need a pot belly (they do), and many other things.  I've been doing speed runs, as it were.  Using the same technique over and over again to just drop deuce all over my bamboo tablet and see what happens.   On my first attempt, I of course drew some gross nerds, and also accidentally drew Ziggy.

     While none of these are what I'd call great, they're an obvious improvement for me.  Faces that are starting to look like actual faces you'd see in something?  At this rate I'll be drawing pot bellies and puds like nobody's business.  My plan right now is to add more fine detail to some of these existing faces, and then finally start trying to maybe give them some bodies that don't look like shitty mannequins.  Jesus, at this rate, I might actually learn how to draw someday.