Portraits of a drunken, cross-dressing elf (art thread)

[lady ayami chan]

This thread pleases me.  

[ThisEmptySoul]

Color palettes are something I used to wonder what the point of was, then it struck me one day how much time would be saved if I had some sweatdrop And if I ever did start working on webcomics like I keep saying I want to, then palettes are going to be a necessity. I have yet to take the time to build some up, though emotion_facepalm Being the lazy artist I am, I'll probably end up just doing a search for downloadable, premade ones. ninja Some colors I would still need to pick out myself to suit my characters specifically, but I know there are skintone palettes out there at least.

But you've definitely grown. Even if you think your old artwork borrowed too much from others, there are still things that you probably learned from the experience. A lot of artists started out by drawing or even straight up tracing work from other artists until they eventually branched out. It's pretty normal. A cartoonist on youtube I'm subscribed to said he got his start by tracing pokemon.  

[Kits Rose]

It's normal to copy people's work that you admire. Fine artists do it all the time. They're called master's studies. Or something like that, anyway, I'm not sure of the exact term. It's a good way to learn.  

[Kairanha]

Master studies are done to teach beginners to make their own process/order of operations where the end result is known so a teacher can see where in the process of making art that the student is struggling. It's impossible to know exactly how the original painter of the master study worked through their process to finish and doing master studies definitely doesn't transfer the original painters knowledge and experience that it took to make the painting in the first place. The things master studies have to teach is very limited and after a point an artist just gets better at copying and not much else. As with any other subject that involves learning, copying the right answers doesn't mean you know anything at all about the subject matter. Any artist that said that they never copied anything is full of s**t. Every artist goes through that phase, but to keep growing as an artist you kind of have to grow out of it and accept that failure is part of the process. You can't expect every piece of art to be "master" level. An artist is going to have far more bad ideas than good ones and you have to get them out there to know which is which. Creativity is like a muscle. You have to use it for it to grow and the people who are always grinding away and making something are going to quickly surpass the "talented" artist that only wants to work creatively on their good ideas and spend a lot of time waiting around for them.
I do think master/style studies are a necessary bridge that every good artist needs to cross over, but once you do get over that bridge you shouldn't hang around it or obsess over it too much. There are far grander things waiting on the artistic journey.
When I see someone get stuck in a loop of copying others work, I don't really like it because I see it as wasted potential. The world is made of science and art. With science there are fundamental truths about the world and universe that can be discovered with the scientific method. If Isaac Newton didn't come up with the theory of gravity, someone else would have. It might have taken another century or two for someone that brilliant to be born and make that realization and come up with the mathematical formulas to back it up but it would have been done eventually. Gravity doesn't require people to exist. It's a fundamental force that is out there that can be discovered.
Art is different though. Without da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, van Gogh, Monet, ect; the art that they made would never get made. Not by anyone else. Someone might get close, but it would never be exactly what they would have done. It would be gone from history forever and humanity would be all the poorer for it. So yes I place a great deal of importance on an individual honing their own creativity even if they aren't good at it. That's not the point. You're putting something into the world that would not have otherwise existed without you. Civilizations and governments will rise and fall and aside from historians, nobody cares, but great works of art can inspire imaginations and influence culture throughout time.
That's just my two cents on master studies though. Take it with a grain of salt.

Also started a new portrait painting.

 

[ThisEmptySoul]

When someone stays in the copying phase forever, that definitely is a problem. Most artists I've come across tend to branch out on their own volition because they begin to find that something from their imagination either hasn't been drawn yet or isn't easy to find, so they have to learn how to draw things on their own to get out the ideas that they want.

There were a couple times, however, that I saw people in the art shop forum selling pictures that were poorly drawn details on a preexisting base they downloaded somewhere. I don't have a problem with using bases to learn {such as trying to learn drawing hair in different positions, coloring practice, and outfit design} or if you're in comics/animation and need a time saver every now and then, but these people weren't trying to get better. They were just making a quick buck off of people who didn't seem to realize they were using bases and were fooled into thinking the artist could draw because just look how well done that base is!

To be clear, they weren't even tracing this base or hand-drawn copying it. It was a digital copy-paste with some of their own scribbling on top, which I think is a more unethical kind of copying than freehand copying.

I think when you try to draw it yourself, you learn something. Something gets trained into your muscle memory and it creates a sort of short-cut in your head like, "Oh, when an arm is in this position, it looks like this." The real problem of copying the answers {art-wise} isn't that you don't learn... it's that the answers you're learning might not be "correct", because every artist has their flaws and some might choose to purposefully distort anatomy for stylization purposes. That's why life studies are recommended for serious artists.  

[Kits Rose]

I agree that master studies can only take you so far. It is a good way to learn when starting out, but I also agree that an artist needs to branch out and get away from them. Most do, eventually.

I really dislike it when I see people selling pieces that just customize a base. It's just a way to make money (in whatever form it is) with a minimal amount of effort. The people I've seen do pretty much what Tes said. They may have drawn the base originally, I don't know, but they don't re-draw it each time. They just add the details to make it close to the character they're commissioned to draw. To me, it seems lazy, and doesn't help them get any better as an artist.