(Part 2) Top products from r/ArtistLounge

I just want to start out by saying: screw those haters. All good artists started out as excited novices and got better through years of practice. I've been drawing for over a decade, and I started out at the same skill level that you did. No one just picks up a pencil and immediately has a flawless understanding of how to make art. You're one of my very favorite people on reddit and an exemplary moderator, and people who hate on beginners are people who don't understand how learning works.

/fume

General Art Advice for Beginners:
I did actually volunteer teach an art class on drawing people for middle schoolers, so I've worked with beginners before. Something important to understand is that humans are very difficult to draw. Even though people make very interesting subject matter, it's kind of like picking up a violin for the first time and trying to play Beethoven's 5th symphony by ear. Sure, after a few thousand attempts you'll probably have it down, but you'll have a much easier time starting with boring basic stuff like notation and scales. I'm going to talk about the way I taught their first few classes, because it seemed to work pretty well.

The first day of class, we talked about learning the tools, and how to get a full range of shade out of the pencil. A good beginning art exercise in general is to try to produce a smooth gradient from the lightest shade you can make to the darkest. I still draw gradients all the time in the margins of my notebooks, and it's the first thing I attempt when I pick up a new tool. Light and shadow is how you create the feeling of depth in art, so being able to produce a full range of shades with your tools is the first step to being able to draw believable 3D objects. Even if you plan on drawing people in a minimalistic (source) or stylized (source) way like these examples, being able to draw light and dark, thin and thick lines will help you to give dimension to the image. Even these 'simplified' drawing styles use line weight and shading to show the form of the person.

The next step I recommend for beginners is to draw some simple 3D shapes. For the middle schoolers, I brought in a bunch of building blocks/simple kids toys and a flashlight. I pointed the light at the blocks from different angles and pointed out to them where the highlights and shadows were, did a bit of talking about why some areas are in shadow and how it helps the brain understand the object, and then we all drew spheres/pyramids/cylinders/cubes together for a few hours, trying to get it to look as detailed and 3D as possible. This is really easy to do at home, is a very beginner-friendly exercise and it makes excellent practice.

A few classes later, I showed them how you could stack some cylinders on an angled triangle block and make something that looks like a leg. We used the blocks to make 'people' shapes and tried to draw the block person. It's a really good exercise to break complicated shapes into simpler ones- I still will pretty much always start figure drawings with the arms as simple cylinders, the hips as a bowl shape, the feet as triangles. You can do this with every day objects too- a bed looks like a rectangular box, a water bottle looks like a cylinder etc. It's pretty easy to draw a rectangular box in perspective, and it's much easier to draw bed details on top of a rectangular box than it is to freehand a bed in perspective with no guidelines. While you're learning, I recommend periodically drawing simple objects around your house- its generally easier than drawing people, and it's great practice.

Those are the fundamentals that I would recommend you work on before looking at resources on how to draw/paint people. Art tutorials will often start with framework/simple shapes, but having control over the tools, understanding how to draw 3D shapes and working on breaking down complex objects into simple ones really makes a good foundation for the information in tutorials.

Learning Resources: I want to echo what /u/GodlessGravy said and point you towards the books of Andy Loomis. This book in particular was recommended to me by my figure drawing teacher, and does take you through figure drawing step by step. I'd also recommend (eventually) investing in a good anatomy book for reference. I use one called Artistic Anatomy and have found it to be very thorough- and it fits in well in a budget. There's also this tumblr blog which is a great compilation of resources.

My personal favorite place for art tutorials is youtube. I'm a pretty visual learner, so nothing does the trick for me quite like a video. These are the all the art channels I'm subscribed to (a lot of different styles, some quite advanced stuff mixed in here):

For Tutorials:

• bluefley00 (tutorials, stylized, concept art)
  
• marcobucci (tutorials, realistic, painting)
  
• KienanLafferty (tutorials/draw-alongs, stylized, cartoons and concept art)
  
• MarkCrilley (tutorials, stylized, anime)
  
• Sycra (tutorials, mixed styles, lessons) <- Probably the most helpful for beginners
  
  And for speedpaints:
  
  
• Saejinoh (anime)
  
• Spoonfishlee (concept art)
  
• 梁月 (Liang Yue) (realistic paintings, sometimes done in real time!)
  
  Advice for IWBM specifically: Based on what I've seen of your work, it looks like whatever you're using for digital painting does not have pen pressure capabilities (or maybe the pen pressure isn't enabled, or maybe you just have a very steady hand?). For digital artwork, ideally you want something that reacts to how hard you press on the pen, and responds by making the lines thinner/thicker or lighter/darker. Working without pen pressure makes your job much harder!
  
  If you're interested in graphics tablets which will have dynamic pen pressure, the cheapest ones are around $50-$80. If you're willing to pay extra, good tablets are a solid investment. My Intuos3 has held up for at least 8 years now.
  
  But you don't need to get one right away! You can get a better range of shades in your art just by messing with the brush opacity, which is a feature all good digital art programs (even free ones) should offer. Just turn down the opacity of your brush, and then you can lay in lighter lines and work up to darker ones. You can quickly do a loose sketch with a low opacity brush (maybe 20%?) and then reinforce the lines that look right or that you want to be bolder by passing the brush over it again. That's a good way to 'cheat' in some of the advantages of pen pressure. I find that a small brush at a low opacity, set to a 'multiply' blending mode will imitate the feel of a hard pencil quite well. If you really can't seem to get a dynamic range of shades with your digital tools, I recommend switching to traditional for a while.
  
  And as always, the best advice for any artist: practice! The more you draw, the faster you'll improve. :D And if you ever need an essay about some art-related topic, feel free to bug me for it. I can be one of your free resources.
  
  (Obligatory apology for the wall of text. Obligatory reminder that I love you and you're awesome.)

Hey, man! You're stuff looks good, keep it up! And honestly color blindness isn't an issue. Just make your style saturated colors.

So, I do notice things that I once did when I was in high school that you also do with your drawings.

First, lets talk about equipment. You said you use a Wacom Bamboo tablet, and Sketchbook 6 pro. While a bamboo tablet is excellent for beginning drawings, if you want to improve noticeably, my suggestion is getting an Intuos Wacom tablet. The smallest size goes for about $80 bucks, and it is more dynamic than a Bamboo tablet. Secondly, I used, what I am assuming you have, is Corel Sketchpad 6 pro? If you can, try to get Corel Painter X3. It's a much better program. Now, this might be hard, since it is a $500 dollar program, so I would suggest getting an "extra-legal" copy on the website with a cool looking galleon ship on it.

But I also believe this: you should stop exclusively using the tablet from here on out, until you're in a professional setting. Why you would do this is because you want to train yourself classically first. A lot of artists use tablets as crutches, or just started out using a tablet, but you want to draw with a pencil first (or even better, a pen, so you can't erase, and this will train you to be faster, and be better at line quality). And draw a lot with it. I essentially go to Starbucks with a sketchbook, a fountain pen, and a ball-point pen, and draw people walking in, for 3 to 4 hours. And draw people who are leaving, that way, you have to remember what they look like from your head. This helps you conceptualize what a person looks like. Once you're comfortable with pen and pencil, then you can start doing a lot of tablet drawings again.

Gesturally, your drawings look pretty good, but structurally, your drawings could use improvement. You want to start drawing with 3D shapes so you can get an idea of perspective with your drawings. Also, and what I think is the most important to you, this is the ONLY way to get better at shading! Shading a person is hard. Shading a box is easy! Now imaging making a person into a bunch of boxes. Now, your brain has something to comprehend with shading. My bible is this book: http://www.amazon.com/Figure-Drawing-Invention-Michael-Hampton/dp/0615272819/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1395995139&sr=8-1&keywords=figure+drawing+by+michael+hampton I carry it with me wherever I go. It will show you the best ways to draw bones, then muscles on top of bones, and skin on top of muscles. Can't draw skin without knowing what's underneath, and can't draw muscles without knowing what's under that. https://www.vilppustore.com/Storefront.htm#!/~/product/category=7091955&id=30369340 This book helps with clothing.

All of this is a jumbled mess of writing (why I am an animation major, and not an english major) so if you need to know anything else, just reply to this comment. And I've been academically drawing for 5 years, so, I barely, but confidently, know what I'm talking about. :)

Some of the newer ones...maybe. But as a means to block out shapes and forms it is very concisely set up. You can find the same info online too but it has a pretty solid core for most aspects of drawing. Perspective, shading, for-shortening, and basic proportions. Once you can break a body into basic shapes at the right proportions you can go deeper into anatomy. Which, if I remember it even touches on this too.

Does it have a comic book slant? Yes. But most really skilled comic artists spend a great deal of time understanding anatomy (rob liefeld not withstanding).

Breaking down the depth of the eyes and slopes of the nose. That comes after you understand to basics.

Now the one I am recommending is Stan Lee’s how to draw comics the marvel way, the original. I saw a newer version and was not as impressed. But the original is still sold online.

https://www.amazon.com/How-Draw-Comics-Marvel-Way/dp/0671530771

Edit: saw you hand work and you are on the right track. Hands and feet are super hard to get the hang of.

Look of some of the classic painters, Da Vinci has great hand sketches to review or grays anatomy of useful but you can download for free online.

One thing that helped me with getting a softness of form in hands was old Archie comics. Incredibly simplistic but had a delicate aspect to them. All about shapes and form.

Some of my favorites right now:

• Designing the Secret of Kells (Also recommend the Song of the Sea one, I've yet to buy it myself, but it's by the same people~ Tomm Moore, et. al~ Also, watch the movies if you haven't!)
  
• Santa Lilio Sangre
  
• The Art of Journey (Highly recommend playing the game if you have a PS3/4(even better), gorgeous!) (On a side note, holy carps this book is expensive now...)
  
  I have so much more - several boxes worth, really - but most of them are in the states (I'm living out of the country, currently) and I do miss them dearly. This awesome thread is threatening my wallet. xD haha~
  
  
  EDIT
  
  I just remembered that the MET has a TON of art books, etc that you can download for free! HIGHLY recommend to just peruse and stuff! Download pdfs if you want to, as well! I know I have. c:
  

I'll second James Gurney's books, his blog and his "In the Wild" video series.

I really like the Complete Guide to Drawing Animals by Gottfried Bammes. It brought together a lot of concepts about anatomy in art that I hadn't really fully understood until I read it. Similarly, I think Sarah Simblet's Botany for the Artist has beautiful and inspiring art.

I'm a big old paleontology nerd, so I have a lot of books on my shelves with fantastic paleoart: Dinosaur Art, edited by Steve White, is a great showcase of modern paleoartists, and Feathered Dinosaurs is full of gorgeous paintings by Peter Schouten. For drawings of dinosaurs of the non-extinct variety, I'm fond of Katrina van Grouw's The Unfeathered Bird.

And I just got a copy of Shaun Tan's The Bird King and, oh man, I really love it. His imagination is incredible. Highly recommended for when you're in a creative rut.

The best way (I've found) is to start big then work your way down to the minutiae.

Proportions and gesture are the two most important fundamentals of figure drawing. Start with those. Even if you don't want to draw realistic people, say if you prefer cartoons or comics, learning proportions will still help you to exaggerate features in an appealing way. When you've gotten a good feel for creating dynamic poses with gesture and figures with proper proportions, then you can move to anatomy to learn how the muscles interact; where they lock and fold into each other. Although anatomy is a very complex science, once you have it - you have it. Everyone have the same muscle structure.

The head and hands are something completely different. I've found that the head and facial features are as hard and as valuable to get right as the figure is. In some cases it's even harder. Don't worry about the head at the beginning, get the figure right first. The face should be it's own study.

I wouldn't suggest mastering each body part individually. If you learn to draw all the body parts one at a time then piece them together, you won't get a feel for how they all play and work with each other.

Things like rendering, color, composition; they are all different fundamentals completely. Should you learn them separately? Maybe. Or maybe not. It depends on you. I'd say to slowly start adding more and more fundamentals to your figure drawings as you improve. Add a bit of shading to the muscles, play with some colors in the skin, see how the pose will affect the composition of an art piece. Just don't lose sight of what it is that you want to improve on and don't fall back to your comfort zone when things are getting difficult.

If you want an in-depth, comprehensive look, I recommend both "Figure Drawing for All It's Worth" and "Drawing the Head and Hands" by Andrew Loomis. Those are the books that helped me. They really go in depth on not just proportions, but rendering and clothing as well. Here they are if your interested:

https://www.amazon.com/Figure-Drawing-All-Its-Worth/dp/0857680986/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3UIR07P1BNGJT&keywords=figure+drawing+for+all+its+worth&qid=1567575739&s=gateway&sprefix=figure+dra%2Caps%2C133&sr=8-1

https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Head-Hands-Andrew-Loomis/dp/0857680978/ref=sr_1_2?crid=3UIR07P1BNGJT&keywords=figure+drawing+for+all+its+worth&qid=1567575739&s=gateway&sprefix=figure+dra%2Caps%2C133&sr=8-2

tl;dr

Gesture -> proportions -> bone structure (manikin) -> anatomy -> face & hands

Just as a footnote, some colors you'll only be able to find in a hue, because they don't make the original pigments anymore. An example is Indian yellow. It used to be made from feeding a cow mango leaves & collecting it's urine. This makes cow very sick, so you usually can't find it anymore in its original form. Nickel Azo yellow is a good acrylic alternative.

Hues aren't necessarily bad, what they are is a combination of pigments to mimic a color. Take a tube of paint and flip it over. You'll see a pigment code, they usually start with the letter P, like PY1. Better brand will list the pigment name. Hues or pre-made mixed colors will have multiple pigment codes. For folks who want to know more about pigments and want to look up pigment codes check out http://www.artiscreation.com/Color_index_names.html

But why not go with cadmium yellow/red hue or cobalt hue? Yes the colors look almost the same from their true pigment counterparts, but because of what they are made of they will mix differently. Artist grade pigments have series numbers in their pricing. That's because pigments have different costs in how they're manufactured and the price of the pigment itself. Instead of having all the paint be expensive they rate the paint so you're getting what you pay for. Cobalt, cadmium, and others aren't cheap to make, sometimes the ore is toxic and in demand by other industries so the price is high, or the manufacturing of the pigment is complicated.

But why buy all these colors? Why not get red, blue, yellow, and a white and black and mix whatever you want? It's because pigments don't work that way. Buying a CMYK palate only works if you are working with dyes. Pigments behave differently, and will mix differently depending on what they are made out of (organic, inorganic, or synthetic) it's the reason why you may see a bunch of reds that look almost the same. It's because they are not and you'll get different mixes and effects with each. Btw the pigments are the same in Oils, Acrylics, watercolor, and pastels. The difference is the binder.

Anyway. What I would recommend is this book: The Artist's Handbook of Materials and Techniques: Fifth Edition, Revised and Updated (Reference) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0670837016/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_uRj4xbP0TYA6P it'll tell you everything you'd ever want to know about painting ever. I've read it (because I'm a nerd for this shit) but you can just use it as a reference book if you want.

Footnote: if you're buying paint from Blick, Utrecht is decent, the Blick artist grade is good too, and is the only Blick brand paint I'd suggest, gamblin is good too. Windsor & Newton I find too oily but some folks like that. Rembrandt mixes their paint too light, their cad red dark is like cad red light in other brand!s. Gumbacher imho is shit. Gamblin 1980 is a good cross between artist and student. Doesn't have a ton of fillers and it contains real pigment, but also can be oily. You can mix between brand so don't worry, you're not marrying your friend to one type of paint. Stay away from Bob Ross paint. It's overpriced shit, you're just paying for a name.

And if in complete doubt, get brushes. You can't ever have too many brushes.

Good luck!

I have more advice but I am currently at work. For the time being I would like to once again recommend Robert Henri's "The Art Spirit". It's not specifically aimed toward any type of art but it's an awesome source of inspiration for the budding artist! I will jump back in with specific drawing advice this evening. :)

Artists Helping Artists interviews all sorts. I was really impressed with the Larry Moore interview. I even bought his book Fishing For Elephants, which I highly recommend. I just started listening to The Savvy Painter and they interviewed Jennifer Gennari who I was really impressed with.

On the design/illustration side there is the Creative Pep Talk.

edited to add Fishing for Elephants link.

My number one art book is definitely The Skillful Huntsman

The book focuses more on design and visual story development than actual techniques, but it's still great inspiration and has a lot to learn from.

Check out the book "Force: Dynamic Drawing For Animators." It's been a great resource for me and helped me make drawings that feel more lively and not flat and stiff.

I love the drawings of Kley. They still inspire me. [Drawings of Heinrich Kley] (http://www.amazon.com/Drawings-Heinrich-Kley-Dover-History/dp/0486200248/ref=pd_sim_14_1?ie=UTF8&dpID=51J0fYUAoCL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR116%2C160_&refRID=0FGJ73ZEDQJ3WD57WRPS)

https://www.amazon.ca/New-Acrylics-Complete-Generation-Acrylic/dp/0823031594/ref=asc_df_0823031594/?tag=googleshopc0c-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=292942809563&hvpos=1o1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=13904807460932317148&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9001425&hvtargid=pla-452997108388&psc=1

I found this book really helpful for explaining mediums and newer colours and what can be done with them. Also, the photography in it is fantastic.

I own the book How to Paint Like the Old Masters by Joseph Sheppard, and he specifically uses the color over grey scale technique. It's an extremely effective approach.

I HIGHLY recommend this book, You Can Draw in 30 Days by Mark Kistler. This helps learn the basics in bite-sized pieces.

https://www.smile.amazon.com/You-Can-Draw-30-Days/dp/0738212415/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1536155701&sr=8-1

Definitely check out Burne Hogarth's Dynamic Anatomy

it gets into the thought and theory behind figure and form, and helped me through some major roadblocks

buy a roll of LEDs and a transformer. No heat, long lasting.

https://www.amazon.com/Govee-Changing-Cupboard-Decoration-Installation/dp/B07RY76LGX/ref=zg_bs_17534489011_3?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=QY3G56VWCDDDYP445XSW

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