I Can't Draw Either

As a wannabe creative, I made this blog so I could keep track of all the things I'm learning, and hopefully help other people get off the starting line too. I don't think I can provide proper tutorials, because I'm far from an expert myself, but I think if I show my working-out it will give other people more insight into my process if they want to criticise it or use it as a springboard for their own ideas.

I'll start off by illustrating roughly how it is I draw a basic outline for a cartoon person. It's going to look crummy, but it's only a basic doodle - the real meat gets added later on, using the doodle as a guide. It'll take more time to explain it than it will to do it:


How I Draw a Standing Stylized Person

(You don't have to do these steps in any precise order, this is just an example.)






























And that's how I draw people at the moment. Terrible, huh?

The good news is it's supposed to be terrible at the early stages. Nobody comes out with perfect line art right away, least of all the professionals - they draw a very loose and very scratchy doodle, then draw more carefully on top of it when they're happy with the result. The eraser isn't just used for removing mistakes, it's also for sculpting your work, adding to and subtracting from it until you have something you like.

So, obviously, the above wouldn't be the finished product I'd roll out - I'd keep erasing and re-drawing pieces of the doodle until I got something I liked, then I'd do a more careful drawing on top of it using the doodle as a guide. To illustrate, let me show you a drawing I did of a witch this Halloween:


This is the loose sketch I did in Paint Tool SAI (I used the red gridlines as a directional guide)…


…and this is the finished result I built off from the above sketch.

Naturally, all of the above is just the way I have of doing it right now. It isn't the way everybody else does it, and if you look around you'll find lots of tutorials detailing lots of different methods, though a lot of them do have similar processes. You should give them a look-around - I was surprised with how quickly I was able to pick up the basics using them.

If you think you've got a better or easier way of drawing than I have, let me know and it'll help me improve. Also, please ignore the fact that there were two Step 6s.

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