Inktober Wrap-Up

As an artist (or at least, someone who wants to be a semi-professional artist once they graduate high school), I can tell you that completing Inktober even though you wanted to quit is the best thing you could have possibly done. Always keep at it, no matter how frustrated you get, no matter how much you want to throw your pencil/stylus across the room and scream at the top of your lungs. Get used to that feeling of infinite frustration, because it never completely goes away. Obviously you feel it less and less as you get better, but some days you just won’t be able to draw this one character’s arm and it just – it just – it just won’t, it j – KIVWIIUWGWDIHI *flips over table*

As for drawing advice, just remember that literally everything is a trial and error process. Sure, you can look up a drawing guide to help if you have absolutely no idea how to draw something, but in my experience, the best way to learn is to just jump in headfirst and draw the thing wrong a thousand times until it starts to look right. Then take a step back. What about the “right” picture makes it better than the others? What can you do to try and produce the “right” result more often? No matter how often my art teacher told me to draw a bunch of ovals to draw some strange balloon person, I kept drawing people using my own process I developed over time, and they came out looking much better than my oval-person drawings.

Despite the fact that I literally just talked negatively about my art teacher, I do recommend you take an art class, depending on how serious you want to get. It doesn’t have to be a big, professional thing – it could just be a locally-funded project in the town rec center’s basement. Though you shouldn’t do exactly what the teacher does all the time, as what works for one artist won’t work for all of them, you can definitely learn a lot from the processes of art professionals. If you don’t want to or can’t take a class, I also recommend you look at other artists’ drawings to see how they draw certain things, how it differs from how you draw the thing, and which version of the thing you prefer. Animators are especially helpful to watch to learn about anatomy and how to pose limbs for certain positions and whatnot. My personal favorite animators to learn from are szin, Claudia Cacace, and Mushie R. However, they all mainly animate songs from musicals, so you might want to find other people to watch if musical theatre’s not really your genre.

And finally, don’t be afraid to stylize things a little bit to find an art style that works for you. I can tell that when you draw these pictures, you’re trying to copy Winx’s art style exactly. I want to clarify that THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. If that’s exactly what you want to do, then carry on. But if you’re not dead-set on doing that, maybe try and play around with other styles of art. Here’s a way you could go about doing this: find some random stock image on Google or whatever, preferably one with people in it. Try and redraw it exactly like it is, like you’re trying to make a mirror image. It won’t actually be perfect, but just try and match it as much as you can. Then, a day or two later, sit down and try to draw that picture again, but with no references – just from muscle and visual memory. Then compare the two drawings. What’s different between them? Which one looks more aesthetically pleasing to you personally? Then take that drawing and compare it to the original image. What’s different between these two images? (A lot of the differences will probably be in the face, because faces are hard to draw.) Once again, which style looks nicer to you? Now take a critical look at Winx’s art style. What do you like and dislike about it? Use all of the above information to hodgepodge together a basic style for drawing stuff. (This will take a while, and it’s going to look terrible for the first long while you try it, but just keep going until it looks nice.) Then try and draw Aisha and Nex in this new style. Do you like your new style drawings better, or the old ones?

I understand that I just told you to ask yourself a lot of questions and invest a lot of time into this that you may not have, so I’ll stop here. I hope this made any amount of sense and helps you somehow. Like I said earlier, just keep going no matter how much you want to break something in anger. Everyone has ten thousand pictures in them that they’ll hate before they get to the ones they like. If these excellent Inktober drawings are the ones you think of as “bad”, who even knows what your good ones will look like?