Past midnight… My laptop is playing the birds singing in the Atherton tablelands.
birds singing in the Atherton tablelands
Today I drew a goblin warg rider on the tablet. Here’s what helped me.
Not sure how you can find the software you are going to like. Today I was trying to copy the style of an artist that had drawn a few pictures for a megadungeon of mine but everything about it was hard. When I finally switched to a messy brush, the process finally agreed with my brain again. So what makes software good for me?
My favourite software has a super complex brush and just six undo steps. So the brush really is the most important part, for me. You need to figure out what the most important part is for you.
I like fountain pens and water colours and I have a real brush, paper and ink at home, too. But these materials I can’t undo, and I can’t quickly paint over mistakes. Perhaps, one day… But not today.
Another important part is finding photos online. If you don’t do it, you will suffer. I suffer a lot because I keep skipping this. It’s why I can’t draw wolf paws. Or beautiful people. Drawing beautiful things is hard because our brains are extra good when looking at proportions and curves.
The most important aspect is a time limit. Set yourself a limit. When I started, it was one hour. You have one hour to make a picture. If it’s shit, it’s shit. It happens. Tomorrow, you can draw something else.
The time limit has multiple positive effects.
You learn to start with the important stuff.
What is the important stuff? It’s what you’re spending the most time looking at. That is: if the thing has eyes, it’s the eyes. Next: mouth, nose, hands, and then it starts to get murky. You’ll learn not to spend so much time on the stuff. There’s that wolf paw in the foreground and then there are some shadows in the background.
You do not waste time on details you aren’t going to need.
I have that fear of emptiness, unfortunately. They say that ink drawings work because of the white space. I really have to force myself to not fill it all in. Don’t be like me.
If you do have to fill stuff, I like to fill it with texture instead of solid colours. Two dozen brush stokes with a dry brush to draw fake fur, fake hair, fake grass, fake clouds. Whatever it is, if you look at it carefully, it’s nothing. But at the periphery of the picture, seen from a distance, the mind fills the texture with meaning. The scribbles turn to fur, hair, grass and clouds again.
What I’m trying to say is: find out what you can do instead of drawing all the details that take a lot of time but aren’t central to the image.
But most of all, you learn how to stop.
You will learn to stop endless fiddling that doesn’t really help when you’re done.
When time is up, you will have a picture!
You might not like it. Or you might be surprised to learn that you do like it after all.
I can’t stress enough how important this is. It gives me great peace of mind. An hour later, I look at my picture and there are so many things that need fixing. And I look at these things and think: instead of spending an hour fixing these things, I’ll draw a new picture tomorrow. One hour is all it takes.
Use the pictures in whatever you wanted them for. I used mine to illustrate my monsters. It teaches humility without dejection. At least that’s how it worked for me. Not all pictures are good. Many are bad. Some are good. Some are surprisingly good. But the effect of using them in a PDF is the same as observing the time limit. I look at the PDF, and some of the pictures aren’t great, and I think to myself: I could spend an hour on every one of these pictures and redraw it, or I could illustrate another PDF.
I never go back.
This thought process helped me get over the hemming and hawing, the insecurity, all the road blocks to getting started. Getting started was the hardest.
You can do it.
I think our society places a lot of emphasis on specialisation, professionals, on finding the best, consuming the best, liking the best, and our globalised capitalist world enables this. But look around and ask yourself: who in your household will illustrate this PDF for your? If you don’t see anybody, then perhaps it’s going to be you. You probably won’t get the best pictures. Capitalism could get you better pictures. But it’s like playing an instrument at home. Take that recorder, that flute, that keyboard, that guitar and play a few notes or chords, and sing. The difference between you and a rock star is that you are actually in your living room, doing it.
Doing things ourselves teaches us that we are humans with the capacity to do many things. Most of us can talk, sing, dance, play an instrument and paint a picture. And we can be pretty good at it, but often we chose not to. We have access to so much great recorded music. In the old day, you had to play your own instrument, sing your own songs, if you wanted entertainment after dinner.
What I’m trying to say is to not look at the great artists out there and think that you’ll never be as great as them. I’m trying to encourage you – and me! – to enjoy the act of doing it, to enjoy the things we make, like children, perhaps these works are not the best but they can get better, and perhaps they’re good enough.
Find a tool that you like, put a time limit on your effort, and do a thing. And tomorrow, do it again.
It worked for me.
As you can tell, I’m really trying to talk myself into this. 😆
I want to draw more.
This PDF of mine needs more illustrations and I don’t want to ask anybody to do it for me. I feel so much better when I do it myself. The hobby is not “having the PDF” but “writing and painting and layouting and programming and making the PDF”.
Examples of past drawings:
The later one with a few reused monsters…
Initial sketch and a few details
Good enough to go with a hairy beast
#RPG
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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And more importantly: it’s a fun pastime!
I find that when you’ve repeatedly done something - drawing, playing the guitar, writing short stories - you develop some sort of crave for it (or at least I’ve done): I feel an itch to pick up the guitar in my bedroom and just play anything for a few minutes, or even seconds. Then I put it back and continue with what else I was going to do. It’s like scratching your back, or farting: it’s extremely satisfying in the moment, and that’s that.
Am I good at playing the guitar? That’s the wrong question. I don’t sit down to play because I am supposedly good at it, I do it because I have an itch.
– Jensan 2023-01-03 20:50 UTC
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Well put! 😄
– Alex 2023-01-04 08:06 UTC
