Confidence Issues With Art

Well, yet another thing that's pestering me.

Here's the thing, I'm working on a couple of stories... but thing is, I kind of like the whole "telling the story" thing more than I like the work that goes into putting it in a visual medium. And as you all know, I consider pure text to be inferior. So I'd like to put my works in a comic of some sort.

Now here's the thing.

For the whole last year up until my tablet broke, I tried to wrap my mind around practicing art. But it just wasn't working. I could never build up the mental stamina to do more than one or two pictures a week, and after several months I don't think my drawings improved at all. In fact they seem to have gotten markedly worse and more and more of them wind up unfinished.

The obvious solution then, is "get a partner." The thing is, I don't trust partners. Partners are liabilities. Understand, most of the time I try to partner with people for any project, it usually winds up with either my partner having "real life problems" (I've come to understand this is code for "too busy playing Halo and partying") or else they want to add too many of their own ideas and we wind up with a literal case of Creative Differences.

So I don't really work with partners, but I can't do it alone. What's a guy to do?

Keep it Simple. Try simple art at first, until your artistic ability improves.

Suck it up and start doodling 24/7. No pain no gain. If your lazy about it you have no one to blame but yourself. Start looking up tutorials.

Doodling never did anything for me. >_> Unless by "doodling" you mean "general quick drawings"

Not like my art has improved much over 7 years, but still...

Yeah. I mean that. General quick drawings, not scribbling a loop-dee-loop.

Scott Adams (Dilbert) can't draw, and it hasn't hurt his career one bit. Go with the talent you have. If your storytelling works, it doesn't matter how good the art is.

Pick up a new medium. I think getting rid of an art rut is pretty easy by switching from a medium you're familiar with to one you are less familiar with. It gets you out of a sort of auto-pilot "drawings go like this" and the differences of process can help you find new ways to think about making images.

Or do those drawing exercises like drawing objects upside down or forcing yourself to fart out an observational drawing in 5 minutes or drawing still-lifes without looking at your hands and paper. The important part is just building up the habit of drawing with quick little things. If you can't even manage quickies, I'm not sure how you'd manage a comic, they take freaking forever sometimes. >_<'

On the drawing front, I find doodling helps - and by doodling, I mean drawing a bunch of tiny things that don't really lead anywhere. I'm pretty prone to Attention Deficit Creator Disorder myself, and I find if its just a doodle it doesn't really matter if you finish. Just fill a page with hands or faces or patterns or something, in whatever style you can think of. Even try emulating other styles that clash with your own, or fill the page with something you're bad at drawing from different angles until they look right.

Also, if you find that a picture is lacking, try staring at it for a while until you figure out why it seems to look wrong. Its the sort of thing that comes from experience I find, which is just something that will come to you in the process, but if you work at it and cross reference it with RL and other works of art, you can usually figure out why something is iffy or off-putting and fix it.

Also, XKCD. Detail does not a hit make. Simple is sometimes preferable.

Also also, there's more you can do than just drawing a comic to give more life to a story — there is such a thing as audio dramas, you know. Or movies.

edited 2nd Feb '11 8:03:19 AM by Dec

Re: the Dilbert and xkcd examples—I'm doing serious stories, not punchline-of-the-day humor strips. You wouldn't read Spider-Man or even a Carl Barks story drawn entirely in stick-figure.

I'm kind of thinking AHR is right—I need to tackle it with the level of dedication that Koreans tackle training for Starcraft, even if it means spending less time with my other hobbies for awhile.

No shit he's right. That's kind of the 'duh' answer to your dilemma right there. Can't get anywhere without work and dedication.

Also, it is completely possible to make deep, complex stories with just stick art and simple shapes. Order Of The Stick is a great example of doing a lot with a little, fleshing out both characters and plot masterfully. The art of storytelling and the art of drawing are, while related when it comes to comics, completely independent of each other. It is limiting to think you can't do well with one without the other.

<3 ali