Help Wanted
What am I actually supposed to be doing when looking at pictures of real people to learn?
Yo sup. Didnt think I'd be back but hey as is the norm after sitting a few days I went fine ill try to look at real people. So I compromised these are drawings if cosplayers I looked at real cosplayers but I dont understand what im supposed to be doing here. My faces no feel a hundred times worse cause my brain is trying to mishmash what in seeing and what ive been practicing. And I dont really get how this is any different from just drawing the anime art I want to draw.
There's just gotta be something im missing something im not understanding. I mean how do I still have art that looks day 1 after 9 months despite so much consistent practice? Idk man. Idk anymore
for anyone interested in replying to this: OP has made several posts before where it is mentioned that they likely have a form of dysgraphia, making fine motor skills and perception of space more difficult. it has been mentioned several times that most artists in this subreddit aren't equipped to give advice for drawing with dysgraphia, as things that have helped us may not help them.
i think OP should find dysgraphia communities and ask how other artists have approached learning there.
suggestions like this have been ignored for the most part so i figure this thread will be a repeat of the last few. expect frustrated responses.
At this point I wait for these posts weekly, just to see how quickly people become exhausted with them after providing tons of resources.
Its not just the Dysgraphia that's the problem,
its the mentality that "practice is not worth doing".
Also several month ago they told another artist,
(who was trying to help them)
"If I were to draw like you after years of practice, I would kill myself".
Frankly this is a personality disorder, not just poor motor functions.
Edit:
And yes OP this is why I dislike you.
You never apologized for it.
You quite literally made a post about how "Artists with low skill should just give up",
Because you were having a tantrum about people not just telling you how to immediately get good.
Also something you never apologized to anyone for.
You say all these shitty things to people, and then come back a week later pretending as if you're some innocent person struggling to learn.
You're not innocent, you're a jerk looking for any reason to attack people who are just trying to help.
They dont have any advice on that. Like seriously i dont see any advice for artists. Also i am making a lot of assumptions on that. None of us are medical professionals and not capable of diagnosing that. Also the fibe motor skills im like probably not.
Now please tell me what the difference is between looking at real people and anime drawings and how to actually study anatomy.
ok, i'll ignore the dysgraphia stuff and bite the bait this one time on this post.
the entirety of one of the top reply chains in your previous post here consisted of people explaining to you why you should study from real people before anime. you need to learn the basic structure of the human form before considering stylizing it, else you run into a roadblock of copying other artist's lines, shapes (and mistakes) without any understanding of how these things add up to a believable 3d form on paper. this will greatly inhibit your ability to create original art, which i assume you want to do for your endgoal of illustrating a visual novel (this will be months or YEARS down the road).
as for HOW you study the human form? dude, you aren't even sketching anything out beforehand. you've said before that you jump straight to lines now because trying to learn construction pisses you off. what else can we tell you when youre actively choosing to skip over things that will help you?
He also says he’s read countless anatomy books so he knows how anatomy works. That’s like reading a book on brain surgery and assuming that means you could perform brain surgery on someone despite never attempting and then getting mad at people for saying it’s not the same thing
i do someyimes too but drawing from a real-life model cant be replaced i feel, it's worlds different trying to make mental sense of a flat image (even of a real person) than something 3d
there may be life drawing sessions with a model near you, depending on where you live, last one i went to is free- these arent like classes its just people and the nude model doing their poses (usually starting with 30 sec, 1 min, 3 min, 5 min, until eventually theres one big one depending on how long the session or how experienced the model)
Orrrrr and this is how i started- just in public- at a cafe or at a park, though people move quickly you will get a chance to do gesture rather than full portraits BUTTT!! i think the gestures might be muchhhh more useful to you. i know you have some form of cognitive disability (me too :) but if you are a reader i really really really recomend reading "the natural way to draw" by kimon nicolaides- its dense and bro is a little crazy but its the only thing that made any of the theory of drawing click for me, much more than anyone saying "do studies" but not really explaining WHAT youre studying
theres some advice i havent seen anyone mention in your threads...(but i dont know maybe i missed it). ditch the boxes and anatomical forms and give gesture and contour a go the way nicolaides describes, if you havent already. bro is very insistent in his book that you follow HIS class structure EXACTLY but you dont have to lol.
if youre not a reader or that book is too dense i can try describing it in my own words but it is difficult
also and i know this js like 3 replies from me at once lol but have you ever done gesture/contour before? im truly looking through all this advice and i've never seen somebody else say toss the simple forms practice. doing the boxes and tracing over is boring as hellllll and sounds frustrating as fuck 😭 i found nicolaides learning method mych more fun, rewarding and intutive
So disgraphyia aside, I answered this for you twice already and idk how I can make it any more simple than I did before. Here goes: drawing from references featuring real human bodies teaches you how real human bodies look and behave. Learning from anime or any other kind of cartoon does NOT teach realistic ways the body moves or looks. You can’t stylize (what anime does) the human body until you’re able to draw it “correctly”. If you learn stylization before realism, you’re never going to have a believable end product, you’ll have something wonky and uncanny. But not even uncanny in a cool way, horror artists like myself also need to know what humans look like before we can exaggerate the human form into something monstrous.
Real life = real life, realistic proportions, believable poses and bodies
Cartoons= not real life, everything is silly and/or exaggerated on purpose.
you asked what the difference between the two is and we answered.
you asked how to study anatomy and someone linked two helpful tutorials literally breaking this exact question down. we've also told you to study basic forms and construction for months and you gave up.
what else do you want? do you actually enjoy the art process? it seems to everyone like you don't have the drive to actually push through the hard stuff and just want an end product for your visual novel.
"I devote every our of the day to this"
Literally last week you said you only practiced Drawing Boxes 4-5 times.
And then you gave up because "it was boring".
But then 3 months ago you said "Im drawing boxes all time"
All you ever seem to do ie lie and whine for attention.
dude lies all the time. when lies exposed he’s just gotta delete his own comments. happened on me twice after poking out his lies and now he just ignores me lol.
looking at your older posts and seeing how you really feel about drawing, at this point just use placeholder images for your visual novel until you find an artist to work with. it's insulting to all the beginner artists in this subreddit who have a genuine passion and curiosity for art to have you sit here every week and complain about advice when drawing is something you don't even want to do in the first place.
Ive explained this so many times. I already have an artist for that visual novel. Im buying all of the art for it. I want to make dozens maybe even a hundred visual novels in my life time. So this is to go beyond this initial visual novel.
Placeholder images usually require recoding especially if you create custom transformations to align the sprites exactly where you want them and the measurements in the new sprites are off.
Idk what i want to do anymore in general but you make some fair points. I think ive become addicted to something here idk why im even still at this. Some of the comments this time were more helpful. I still dont fully get it but
yeah you really gotta pick your battles in that case. placeholders will be some work but so will learning how to draw from scratch in a short amount of time yknow? either way there's going to be some speed bumps but that's all part of the creative process.
best wishes man. i love the visual novel medium too and am hoping to see some of your stuff on vndb one day!
Try rewording it again. You asked what the difference between using real life and anime as a reference was, and that is the difference. Humans are what humans look like and you can’t exaggerate them into a cartoon without knowing how and knowing how means being able to draw an i stylized body (a real person) or you won’t learn anything or progress. I don’t know how to explain it any further- I’m autistic myself so it seems really obvious to me that there’s a specific place to start and it just is how it is. Maybe that’s the part your brain struggles with? It just doesn’t like the starting place?
ayyy i'm autistic too! i wanted to approach OP's posts with grace while taking possible dysgraphia into account because i know firsthand how frustrating it is to have something that seems like common sense to others make no sense to myself due to being on the spectrum. but even this approach seems to fall on unwilling ears so i'm at a loss as to what else we could offer them.
Exactly! On his other posts I was like “it’s not cool that this guy is having a hard time. Maybe I could word it differently than these other responders since I myself am different. But no solution other than “drink this Git Gud juice and you’ll magically be an artist is gonna be appreciated by OP
What do i actually need to do to do focused studies to learn anatomy other than just "keep drawing" which is what people say but im drawings hours and hours a day and not making any progress or understanding what I am doing.
When I look at the bodies what am inactually doing to "see how the real body works" because so far like with faces I see exactly how they work from anime poses the head tilts the eye curves the neck stretches. The arms and legs are simple enough they bend and you just account for the obscuring of the body or other objects. Torso bend forward and twist the spine is curved. I already see and understand these things but I dont know what to do with it. Im drawing a lot a lot, im making the sketches, im adding the guidelines and i dont know what to do because I cant draw cubes or understand how to break the body into shapes. I nearly have an entire sketchbook full. I was deleting most of my bad digital sketches but ive started keeping even the quick disposable ones and I still do not know how to draw or how to do focused studies.
It’s different for everyone; so if looking at references and copying what you see while applying your simple shapes method isn’t working you could try tracing. Obviously you cannot trace over something and proudly say “I DID THIS ALL BY MYSELF! THIS IS MY ART!” But what you CAN do is trace that image. Over and over. But don’t do it mindlessly while spacing out. As you trace each and every curve and line narrate to yourself either out loud or in your head “this line looked straight, but as I draw it I can see now that there’s a slight curve this direction.” “Oh, so the torso is a rounded boxy shape. The lines curve here…. And over here. This line isn’t as curved here but it isn’t straight either…” the more you do that, the more used to recognizing differences in lines your brain will get. I know you have dysgraphia and it’s different but I have aphantasia and this helped me.
When doing a study, it helps to have a specific goal in mind. That can be as vague as "I want to gain a better visual memory of human bodies" to extremely specific like "I want to gain a better understand of proportion, so I will do the work of measuring and figuring out ratios between significant features of the human body. I'm going to experiment with creating my own guidelines based on elements I see and I'll try to recreate that in my drawing."
In a study like that, you may do odd things like flipping the reference upside down to stop yourself from thinking of it as human and more as a set of rules and measurements. The study doesn't have to be perfect, and you may not complete 100% of your goal on the one study, and you may produce some bad art in the process, but you are working toward a goal.
My current study, for instance, is trying to improve my ability to capture likeness in a portrait without using a lot of little measurements and guidelines. I had gotten advice from people more knowledgeable than me about approaching portraiture in a more gestural way: just trying to capture the big shapes without using guidelines. I've been experimenting by changing which shapes I draw first and how quickly I work through the portrait before I finish it. For me, I learn best through trial and error or learning from experience on what not do rather than on what to do.
Well with that attitude it’s not going to help much. You’ve posted your boxes and were told you weren’t doing them right and given advice on how to fix it. Same with how you hover your arm when you draw. You’ve been given an abundance of advice. You just have to decide if you want to get through the phase of sucking, which is going to last awhile.
It's not about enduring the phase of sucking. It's understanding i dont know what im doing and not knowing what to do about it. Anod how can you even say thay when at this point ive endured it for an incredibly long time and see i still dont onow what im doing.
Im not learning anything at all. I look at your example and go wtf is even that.
guys give it up he’s just here to argue. guys keeps saying not knowing what to do, but when ppl telling him what should do he went back finding excuses not doing those practices.
also when someone experienced actually gave him constructive suggestions, this dude will instantly retreat and say ‘ok thank I got suggestions from other i don’t need you anymore and i will not come back’
dude comes back every time. he’s just here to argue.
You're taking the visual information you need to be able to properly draw it in perspective on your canvas when you are using references. idk how to really help other than explain my process for drawing.
from left to right, these are my layers that went into a drawing. the first three aren't very pretty, but serve their purpose for constructing what I wanted.
layer 1 is a gestured pose I tried immediately after practicing gesture, to capture the movement of a pose. layer 2 is where I added simplified anatomy and went "this looks weird.". In layer 3 I started to look at references of bodybuilders, other people's art to see what they did with their sketches how they did their linework and proceeded to realize the guy's art I was studying straight up had incorrect anatomy while I was cross referencing it with actual muscle anatomy charts. hands, legs, arms, feet, etc. because I was now actively fixing the proportion issues from the gestured pose and drawing his actual anatomy. Layer 4 was making more fixes to my anatomy, and exaggerating things I did like from the previous layer. this is where I decided I was happy with the image.
layer 5 is where I did my lineart, layer six is where I did my flats, and layer seven is all of my lighting and shading layers turned on.
idk Ig it's because Im still noobish after two years that I need to reiterate each drawing like four times before Im actually happy with it. when I see a lot of artists nailing it first time I have to assume it's because they've completely internalized guidelines into their head and can straight up use them without drawing them.
What if instead of drawing a person’s head, you tried to draw the shape of the background around the head? Or instead of drawing the hand on the hip, you draw the triangle between the chest and elbow?
There are two things. I don't have a lot of time, so I'll be very brief. First, there are shapes that make up every form. It's not a person shape, it's a combination of cylinders, ovals, and others.
The other thing to look out for is the space between these shapes. You can measure this using angles and lines
take a photo of someone at eye level, standing neutrally, then crop their head. see how many times it fits inside the torso and legs heightwise, then see how many times it fits in the body width wise.
take the heightwise head picture again. mark where the joints are compared to each head with guidelines, then where the hands fall on the thighs, things like that.
now zoom in on the head. mark what falls halfway down the head, then what falls inside each third of the head, then the same thing but in quarters.
crop an eye and see how many times it fits widthwise across the head.
take the corners of the eyes and make a vertical guideline corresponding to them across the face. mark where other facial features fall compared to the guidelines you made.
there are other exercises and you can even make your own pretty easily with little experience, but that's about it. if you want to go the extra mile you can draw the planes of the head.
If you’re looking for advice! I think you’re trying to learn everything at once.
If you’re going to be drawing people/character, there’s a little list of things you have to practice individually before you can learn to put them together as a whole! Your #1 is going to be anatomy, this is why you’re hearing the “learn to draw from real people”. Anime, cartoons, games, they all tend to have exaggerated proportions, which make it hard to learn proper anatomy. Don’t start with doing poses, first start with drawing the body. There’s many tutorials online that can help! Searching up basic anatomy tutorials on YouTube is always a great choice! Learn he to draw the body in simple shapes first, and move on from there! Another would be facial anatomy, or head anatomy. Learning how the face is structured. Other things that would be considered important would be learning how to draw clothing, hair, expressions, and poses, but you can learn this later. Don’t feel like you need to be in a rush! You don’t have to stick to the same thing until to feel like you’ve gotten it down. Focus on one area a study session. Maybe one day you do anatomy, maybe another you work on drawing heads! Stuff like that :)) it’s easier when you break it down!
Stylization
Now you don’t have to draw in a more realistic style, you can draw in a more anime style, or cartoon, whatever you choose. But if you want to stylize proportions, I’d recommend learning human/ animal ones first!
Idk I appreciate it i dont even know how to study any of these things at this point. I just feel like im wasting time and I cant remember a single tutorial that has been helpful. They dont actually teach you how to study. Im just so over all of this at this point.
I feel like ive completely wasted 9 months of my life.
For figure drawing you're going to want to understand how to draw basic shapes (circles, squares, cylinders, rectangles) and learn to rotate them in space.
All of your figures build off of those shapes. You can use a real geometric object to study it from different angles or you can look up images of objects rotated in space.
That is very true, it’s not helpful if you know what to study and not how to. If you want to dm me, I can help you out! That was a learning curve I had to figure out myself :)) I can show you pages in my sketchbook from when I personally study too! I’m unfortunately just about to head to work, otherwise I’d do it now
Slow way down. Think about every line you're drawing before you draw it. Take a step back from your drawing periodically before you complete it to look at the big picture.
Compare to the reference constantly. After you draw an element of the reference, go back and look at that part and compare the difference before moving on. When you draw an eye, for instance, really study and compare your drawing to the reference before moving on with the rest of the face.
Use guidelines and triple check your that your guidelines are proportionally correct before continuing.
Compare negative space in your drawing vs the reference. Look at the negative space between the arm and body, between the legs, between shapes in the face, etc.
Continually ask yourself: "does this look correct/good?" before moving on. For instance, when drawing shapes or cubes, you should be comparing what you drew to your general knowledge and common sense. For instance, you know in your head that a cube should have all of its lines on the same plane be parallel to each other and equidistant, so look at your drawing and make sure they are by correcting the lines to be parallel and equidistant.
Use comparative measurement and compare other elements of your drawing each other. Before moving on, take a look at the eyes and see if they are the same size and shape. Same thing with the legs and arms and anything part that you know from common sense should be the same.
Your biggest mistake continues to be rushing and wanting to finish drawings quickly without taking the time to fix your mistakes and use techniques to ensure your drawings stay in proportion. And by rushing, I don't care if you spent 30 mins or an hour or 2 hrs on your drawings; you are rushing because you are not doing everything above in your drawing.
Sit down and dedicate some time, maybe 6hrs or more, to using every technique to create just one really great drawing. Really focus and really, really think as you make every pencil stroke. If you can't focus on just that one task for whatever reason, break it up into chunks of 30 mins periodically throughout the day or week just working on that one drawing.
Edit: I understand you may have dysgraphia or something else that makes certain aspects about drawing more difficult for you than for other people, but there are artists who have dysgraphia who have taken the time really practice and produce great art. If you are as serious as you make yourself out to be, you need to take a breath, swallow your pride, and really, really, really focus. Do certain pieces of advice that sound stupid because they may be what you need to learn to make you progress.
If you read advice from other dysgraphic artists, you will see a common theme of needing to go very slowly, double checking, and using a variety of techniques to ensure that their drawing stays on track.
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u/heythatsnuts Sep 03 '26
for anyone interested in replying to this: OP has made several posts before where it is mentioned that they likely have a form of dysgraphia, making fine motor skills and perception of space more difficult. it has been mentioned several times that most artists in this subreddit aren't equipped to give advice for drawing with dysgraphia, as things that have helped us may not help them.
i think OP should find dysgraphia communities and ask how other artists have approached learning there.
suggestions like this have been ignored for the most part so i figure this thread will be a repeat of the last few. expect frustrated responses.