Avatars for the Shuffling The Deck video game.
Faces and hands...the bane of my existence. For as long as I've been drawing, you'd think I'd have this down by now. Alas, practice has always defeated me. That fighting through constant failure, over and over and over again, until you start to fail less and less...it's hard to do. It takes it's toll, and I've always just given up. Lately, though, I'm really trying to fight through it. Fight through all of the god-awful drawings. The deformed, repulsive things I've created and deleted and created and erased and created and crumpled up and thrown away. And you know what? It's working. Who'd have thunk it, eh? I mean, they always said that that's what it takes, but I just wanted to skip to the end. I just wanted to be good. I always thought that I could just WILL my hand to listen to my brain and just create something that looked the way I wanted.
One thing I've found has truly helped me is looking at other artist's work. Now, a lot of artists would probably pull their hair out at that admission. It's a cardinal sin. You learn from life, not from copying another artist. Of course, I'd never copy another artist. And, of course, I learn through observing the real world as well. Interestingly, though, it's the stylistic choices of other artists that have really opened my eyes and understanding. Why does this artist draw eyes in that way? Why does that work? Why does this artist's exaggerated anatomy look so correct? What's it based on? Really analyzing the decisions that other artists make in their drawings has been my map to figuring out what my own eyes have always refused to see. Understanding why exaggeration works has been the key to understanding what it's based on in the first place, and I look at the real world differently as a result.
Are these drawings perfect? Lord no. I have millenia to go before I'd even qualify myself as "good". But I'm getting to the point to where I'm not embarrassed anymore, and that's a massive step forward for me.
