ratcreature | still thinking about how to practice drawing...

...which of course conveniently procrastinates any actual drawing practice. *g*

Anyway, after my last post I thought a bit more about getting back into the habit of drawing regularly, and I don't think just looking for a random list of prompts somewhere is going to work for me. When talking about this in the comments of my previous post I realized that I'm kind of looking for the online equivalent of an informal drawing group.

I mean, if it was just about prompts I could take the fanart100 table or any other prompt list out there and simply try to do a drawing a day. The problem is that I don't really want to do a drawing prompted by "brown" or "middle" or whatever. And it's not that I don't have any ideas for art either, in fact I have a file with a whole list of fanart ideas I want to do eventually. The real problem is that I'm not practiced enough to make drawing my ideas effortless fun, so any elaborate thing, i.e. basically anything more challenging than a cartoon monster doodle, goes like this:

I have a cool idea, do some thumbnail doodling, realize that I have no idea how to draw that movement or expression or perspective etc, and I get stuck with the half-finished stick figure that pointed out to me that I fail at drawing a foreshortened hand or whatever else I'd need to make that drawing work. Then I get frustrated and get back to reading some fanfic instead. Some time later I gather my resolve and browse through drawing books to get a clue how to fix my problem or do a bunch of google image searches and browsing through books in the hope of finding some reference I could use, try again, fail again, get discouraged, do something else, rinse and repeat. Which kind of explains why I only post fanart every couple of months I guess.

I think to get back into drawing maybe something that would work somewhat like a classroom setting with drawing exercises might help, though not necessarily as formal. IIRC, the last time I managed to practice regularly was when I met weekly with a group of other people who also liked to draw for fun without being art students, and we just drew and practiced together. I'm guess I'm looking for the online equivalent. We'd meet, and posed for each other in different positions (with he clothes on though, heh *g*) or pick some chapter from a drawing book that explained something and practiced that, that kind of thing. There was no formal commitment or anything making drawing stressful homework because it wasn't an art class, and you theoretically you could just not draw or skip coming, but it still really worked as incentive. And this kind of "practice drawing" had a lower threshold for just sticking with a drawing than when I try to realize some idea and get frustrated and abandon it.

Obviously the practice posing part wouldn't work out so well online, but maybe the practicing together part could. Maybe if a few others are interested as well, a community like that could be feasible. I mean, I have a bunch of drawing books with exercise suggestions, and also some idea of things I just want to practice, but I rarely stick with doing any exercises alone, and I bet other artists also have a pile of both, so what if we collected these for the community?

Then once a week there'd be a mod post with say five drawing exercise suggestions for different "craft aspects" and artists could pick and choose one or more to do over the week (or don't do anything, it's not a challenge after all), and over time this way there would also accumulate a backlog of drawing exercises by topic as a resource. The themes could be things like anatomy, portraits, making humans look diverse (you know, not just drawing anatomy mannequin bodies when you draw from imagination rather than life), perspective, drawing emotions, different media, animals, landscapes, light and shadow, whatever, but a mix of topics each week and not too constraining. Maybe some of the prompts could come with links to online tutorials and stuff on specific topics, or page scans from the drawing books an exercise came from. And the community would be open to both fandom and original stuff, and to any level of elaborateness and skill or style, that is you could do just a quick doodle, or "real" drawings, whatever you feel like and fits the exercise.

It would be a bit of work initially to collect practice suggestions and put them online, but otoh it could work as incentive and be fun for people who'd like to practice but don't have the opportunity (or means or inclination) to be in actual RL drawing classes or take courses or meet with other hobby artists in RL or something like that to practice.

So I thought I could do a poll to gauge the interest in such a community (btw, if I were to create such a comm it would be most likely on IJ because of 6A/LJ's recent polices wrt artwork, that make me uncomfortable with the idea of creating a drawing community on LJ).

[Poll #1049048]

Only answer this next poll if you answered "yes" or "maybe" in the previous one, since it's questions about how you'd like such a community set up if you were interested at all.

[Poll #1049049]

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Do you know art_apart? I watched as it was founded after similar thoughts, and despite everyone being enthusiastic, it's not active. Perhaps an option would be to suggest challenges there?

I know of the community and looked at it when it was created, but understood it to be an art beta community for concrit and help on art, especially for fanartists wanting to do original art, analogous to an older community that was for fanart. I'm planning a community where the mods post exercises and members respond. Not a community for help on any artwork.

Also, I've never even considered joining art_apart because it looked to me to be for professional artists or people who want to be professional, to quote from the user info "art_apart is for all types of artists in all fields of the art industry. It's for students and professionals and all the people inbetween." which is rather a higher skill level than what I think about whn considering who'd profit most from practicing in a group like the one I suggest. I mean, I'm thinking of people like me who really don't do this professionally and don't draw all that well.

Well, I 'm friends with glock and know how it came about, and I read all the intro posts and for the reason you quoted have never posted any art TO it. I had had hopes and then felt excluded by everyone going on about how they wanted to earn money from their "art".

I didn't mean to reply again, but the art that has been posted there has often been very amateurish, and I think a fair number of people is like me, scared off by pretentions (that aren't even actively fullfilled). Dunno if you can find my own intro post or looked at the few posted pieces and the scarce comments. You're certainly in the higher rungs.

Basically, it was meant to further its members motivation and skills, which I saw as the similarity to your aims.

Basically, it was meant to further its members motivation and skills, which I saw as the similarity to your aims.

That may be, and in principle I'm all for not creating countless redundant comms, but even if my idea of weekly exercise challenges would be allowed by the mods, I think it'd be very hard to change the atmosphere there so that the people I have in mind would feel welcome too. I mean, artists who are just drawing sometimes for fun, who are mostly self taught and don't have a framework like art school or evening classes or something to encourage practice, but would like something like that just with low pressure and online.

I know of another person who might like to work on a group basis along with myself. I like the thought of doing the prompts on an informal basis, with critique if you ask for it.

Yeah. Just what I thought it would be, and even the mod herself. I still think there must be enough people who've never even had drawing in high school, and I know you're more professional (ie. able to replicate similar things and having a style) but I don't mean to disagree or dissuade or argue, just blathering on for too long because I'm remembering what a_a was meant to be.

For the question "Should the community just offer exercise prompts and leave it at that, or also some kind of option for group concrit of the results to better learn together?" I personally am more interested in focusing on my own practice than in seeing other people's. That sounds pretty self-centered. Yeah. I rarely read other people's drabbles, either. *hides* (And it's weird of me, too, considering how much I adore seeing people explain the progress of one particular piece from idea through creation... Huh.)

But I certainly don't want to limit how other people use the comm! So I would probably vote "Yes, but only if you can opt out if you prefer not get concrit on a piece." And I might not put the comm on my default reading list view, but instead use the thumbtack to track only those posts with prompt tags. Or, maybe I would feel differently once I got into it.

Oh wait, I forgot, IJ doesn't have tracking, does it? Hmm... Well then I probably wouldn't do that. ;)

It doesn't? But posts there have these "track this" buttons. Doesn't it work? In any case the goal would be to make the mod posts on a fairly regular schedule.

No, IT DOES! Yay! I just went and looked and I was going to come back here and comment to myself "Oh wait again, it does have tracking! IM IN UR JURNAL TALKIN AMUNGST MYSELF." But then you'd already responded, so I was not in fact forced to comment to myself again, and you were thankfully spared the catspeak. Except where you totally weren't.

Heh. It's understandable. It's confusing to keep all the differences of a whole bunch of similar journalling services straight. But with the policy changes and the problems pornish_pixies had LJ unfortunately doesn't seem the best place for an art comm anymore. I mean, it's not like I have a porn comm in mind *g*, but neither have I any interest to police drawings posted as responses for potential underage naughtiness combined lack of artistic merit, or whatever the n-th clarification of their TOS clarifications tried to outline, just because someone used a prompt for foreshortening limbs as prompt for a posting Harry/Voldemort picture or something.

Cool. Should I end up creating the comm, feel free to pimp it.

Would it be fandom-centred drawing? Because I'm going to have difficulty with a challenge to draw a specifi actor/character - especially if it's a show I don't follow.

I'd rather have slightly more generic challenges. Draw a street scene, draw a figure, draw 'tenderness' than anything too restrictive.

No, people could draw fanart if they want to, but the prompts would be general drawing practice ecercises, each week five different ones. I'd most likely pick exercise suggestions from drawing books I like for a start, and then later on others can make suggestions too. I think each week there's be at least one dealing with practicing to draw humans, and there might be portrait stuff sometimes, but wouldn't pick specific subjects, and the other topic could be about perspective, about practicing to draw light and shadow, clothing, backgrounds, animals... each would be fairly generic. Not like "draw a dancing hedgehog" or anything like that.

still thinking about how to practice drawing...

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