Shapes and Colors · 3:43am Dec 6th, 2017
The formula seems to be repetition. Draw a circle, then draw it again and again and again. Oh, and using your finger to draw is bad practice. Well, that sucks, but dropping a hundred dollars on a stylus seems a little...excessive. I haven't noticed any improvement, but I've been drawing for...oh, a week? Maybe a little over that, and from a stance of never having drawn before.
Maybe it's a skill that requires a certain amount of activation energy.
I barely remember much of school, but I'm not entirely empty-headed. I do remember some things. There are these things in animals—I think they're enzymes—that can barely do anything until they receive a certain level of energy, after which they chow down (or do whatever enzymes do) like crazy.
So maybe drawing's like that. Because right now stick figures are out of reach. An oval? Don't make me laugh. A simple line or circle? Give me five minutes and a big eraser, and no guarantees. If I find a step-by-step tutorial online, I might be able to make something that looks vaguely like the end product. Again, no promises. And no, I'm not paying you to get your retinas removed if you somehow see it.
It's so different.
When I started writing, I looked up some online guides to make sure I knew how to use punctuation and grammar correctly, and that was it. Off I went, writing 60k words of the most terrible HTTYD fanfiction to stain the site.
But that's the thing: after learning the basics, I just wrote and slowly got better from there. It was satisfying on a visceral level to be able to see what I'd written a week ago and compare it to whatever I was currently writing, because there would be a noticeable change.
Art is different.
A week ago, I drew circles because I don't know anatomy or colors or how to put anything together. Now, I still draw circles because I still don't know anatomy or colors or how to put anything together. It's frustrating.
Where do you find a guide to something so comprehensive? For writing, there are twenty-six letters, dashes, periods, commas, colons, semicolons, em-dashes, and numbers. All you need to do is push them in a semi-coherent order and you'll start to get better at doing it. For art, I sit down, I draw squiggly lines, I look at some art online, and then I sit in the corner rocking back and forth and sucking my thumb.
Maybe it's just me.
