...because I still don't understand anything after about 3 years!
Hello, this is my attempt to improve my drawings by 2026. I will try to blog weekly since it's kind of a pain to scan and upload images. I will try daily for sure but posting it is another story. Gotta scan the stuff, and email it and then upload it... bit of a hassle. Would do more digital and it would make it more convenient to post daily but I have a giant XP Pen 15.6 and the only time I can use it is at work so getting it set up isn't very convenient and I think I want to improve my pencil drawings first anyway.
I'm gonna ramble for a bit, I guess to introduce my journey so far but mostly so I can recap for myself how much I've gone through and to keep myself from being discouraged to quit... again. So you might want to skip by using CTRL + F to find END RAMBLE cuz it's a lot of pointless blabber. 
BEGIN RAMBLE
I've wanted to draw ever since I watched Dragon Ball Z at a very young age (I think I was 5?) I even made my own characters and villains. ...they all had terrible names that I won't go through especially since they are all lost to time. I thought I kept them somewhere but I guess when I had to move I just threw the whole binder out. I drew mostly male characters since I found it very difficult to draw female characters so I never drew them. Dragon Ball Z lead me into sort of an anime rabbit hole and I really only liked this artstyle even though I did enjoy other cartoons like Batman TAS and Spider-man, I didn't grow up with comics but Toonami so the anime artstyle mesmerized my tiny brain. ...actually looking back I was pretty embarrassing about it... I didn't do Naruto runs down the hall but I did make my freestyle English class project all about it... my teacher gave me a C- since it didn't really have a point to it... haha... anyway, point is I became obsessed with it and it was the only style I wanted to draw in but couldn't and the only guide I could find at the time was a really dogshit book by Ken Penders with... some historically terrible drawings lmao... like more legendary than the funny Sasuke drawing... this caused me to give up, maybe around middle school, thinking it was inaccessible and only the Japanese could draw that way. I was told to go to school for it but didn't know how to go about it and if they could even teach me to draw the way I wanted to. I thought they only taught you how to draw real people and objects and my dumbass was like "uh no I wan draw animu only, why draw real ppl what a waste of time" not realizing you need to learn to draw reality before you can draw cartoons... This mindset lasted all the way to my 20s...
Ironically... into my 20s I did start drawing real people... I started making goofy caricatures of my co-workers. At first it was really mean spirited, but eventually I toned down the more attention the drawings got... wouldn't want to get fired now... but one co-worker saw them and wanted to join in and... his drawings were always better than mine... he could draw with just a ballpoint pen, and capture their likeness easily without erasing and it really looked like a cartoon. While mine looked like... something a child drew. Flat and lifeless. Man I wish I kept an example to show. But he really knew how to make things look 3D while capturing their likeness and people started going to him more for funny drawings. The jealousy reignited a desire to draw better so I finally went to college for a few courses and...
I didn't learn a thing. Well maybe a few things. The exercises taught me a bit about values and shading techniques and trying to draw from life but I never really understood their methods. I don't know why but I just couldn't understand the things I was being taught. It's the same as when I read a book. I know what I have to learn but I don't get it and I just copy and hope I do it right. So unfortunately I didn't learn much. Well one lesson, I did botch entirely because when we were asked to pick an object to study and draw for 3D form understanding and shading I picked the most complex thing to study... a turtle shell... other people picked an apple, a flower, a seashell... I picked a f**king turtle shell with layers and layers of detail and the teacher even warned me that I might not benefit from trying to study it but I already the dang thing from ebay so I was going to try to make it work. I passed the class but didn't retain anything that helped me draw better and gave up drawing again for 3 years.
Until the pandemic hit and I got a job from a hiring agency for some security gig at a retirement home. It was really easy... I just sat there for the most part... browsing Twitter... but eventually I fell into an art rabbit hole and I saw a lot of people from Argentina, Spain, Cuba, China, South Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Canada and of course America drawing interesting styles, cartoony and anime and so on and the styles really appealed to me but mainly seeing someone able to draw accurate anime illustrations as well as fusion styles made me realize it's not exclusive to Japan, people just choose to draw how they want and create their own style. If they could do it, so could I, and I bought Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I don't have pictures of my studies but after reading it, I was able to draw my first female character. And for some reason I chose a character with a lot of complicated details and a pose that I did not understand at the time... but the drawing looked so good to me at the time that I was so happy that I continued trying to learn. I focused on female characters since I could never draw them before and this one turned out better than I expected. Before going back to male characters I want to master being able to draw a female character. So for awhile posts will mostly, if not all, be female characters. I do want to go back to my roots and draw original male characters of course. But anyway, I had too many books I haven't used in 7 or more years so I tried to get through them as soon as possible. I would end up drawing each page at least once before moving on. This... was probably what led to the next turn of events.
Within 3 or 4 years of that time, I realized I wasn't improving as fast as I had hoped and even though I had gotten significantly better at copying since then, I ran into a lot of problems. Really time consuming problems. I'm talking about spending 2-3 hours on the face, not being able to draw from imagination, bad proportions, distorted figures and so on. And when I asked helpful artists who followed me for advice on how to improve things... a lot of the times... I had no idea what the person was talking about... I even opened a thread on here in which Brohawx helped me with a pose. But admittedly the information provided kind of overwhelmed me, so I saved it and put it aside until I was ready to try the pose again. And I did this a lot when I asked for help... I told myself "eh we just need to do more gesture drawings or read more books I'm sure I'll understand what they said eventually" Uh but eventually never came. And the artists that had been following me and supporting my work and daily practices stopped paying attention to me. I thought maybe I had to draw something more impressive for them. After some time coping I eventually just accepted that a lot of the stuff I had been posting... is not very good and I haven't improved much in the last few years. After opening yet another thread here, trying to figure out why I haven't been improving, Brohawx hit me with an eye-opener. I had been only copying and not understanding the material given to me. I had no consistency on what I wanted to learn, only trying to get through the books as fast as possible, thinking the one sketch I did would stay in my brain. I also only did on and off drawing (only 2 hours a day and not always daily) admittedly I got into Gundam building and Pokémon card collecting and I would devote more time to those instead of drawing where I would not draw for weeks or a few months... so yea it's not a surprise nothing stuck with me. To remedy this I am going to change a few lifestyle habits, Browhawx did suggest a routine for me
End of Ramble (kinda)
Practice a subject from observation for the morning, draw the subject from imagination and at dinner study my favorite artists and their work and read a book.
To be honest I haven't done it as much as I should, I have a niece that always wants me to play with her before work and even though work is busy until the last half of my shift, sometimes I get lost playing mobile games and looking at Twitter or Youtube... so these are bad habits I need to change big time. Already cutting down on the unnecessary gaming, going to bed earlier and waking up earlier.
And I have been starting with the Loomis method again. Before I didn't understand any of the lines at all. Why is the small circle in there, how can you tell where it ends and where it fits? I mean it is still hard to figure it out but after drawing it several times, it is slowly starting to make intuitive sense. I can remember how to draw it facing the front, 3/4 and side now. But the other angles are still a challenge.
I plan on drawing all the angles of the head with a mannequin first for the next 2 weeks or until I feel comfortable with it, then learn the planes of the head for 2 weeks or until I feel like I understand it and then gradually build from there. Every day I will try to draw something at least 10 times and then try it without looking at a reference 10 times and then compare. Additionally I will try Veil's method of learning anatomy where he did 60 1 minute gesture drawings for 6 months. I suck at gesture, I have no idea how to go about it without it just looking like a stick figure but hopefully throughout the 6 months I figure it out, feel free to give some pointers or feedback on them.
But yea my roadmap until December (including 60 1min gesture drawings for 1 hour daily)
May wk 1 practice drawing heads until a full face can be drawn, draw spheres daily
May wk 2 practice drawing real faces from ReferenceAngle.com, draw cubes daily
May wk 3 practice torso and arms and anatomy of them, line exercises for straight, curves, crosshatching
May wk 4 Pratice pelvis and lower limbs and anatomy
June wk 1 Practice shading
June wk 2 Practice full poses without clothes
June wk 3 Practice drawing clothes and hair
June wk 4 More detail practices with full body
July wk 1 Finally practice perspective
July wk 2 Moar perspective
July wk 3 finally read the damn Alphonso Dunn book you bought 8 years ago
July wk 4 Values and Color Theory (because I still don't know what color theory even means)
August wk 1 Actually look at the Youtube Art School that I bought... <.<
August wk 2-4 Focus on Art School Materials one at a time each week, no more blitzing through it each day.
Sept-Nov: Actually, now that I look at the contents for the Art School it’s pretty lengthy so I could just focus on this for the next 3 months…
END RAMBLE (for real this time)
Anyway here’s some stuff I drew to start understand the head from the last two weeks.
There's technically 8 pages worth of circles but eh I don't think it's necessary to upload them all, the main take away is I still don't have the pen control for a good circle yet.
Here are the heads I drew
Sorry the images are not landscape... scanner put them that way... if you made it this far and you're curious how I would practice drawing from a book? Here are some of the drawings...
Yea I just drew it a few times and called it a day and moved on... It's kinda daunting to draw all those bones so I didn't really spend much time here..
I only did each pose once, I figured I would understand it more as I delved deeper into the book.
I was so focused on why the eyes looked so bad I didn't noticed how off balanced the pose was.
But I should have tried to do at least 3 drawings for every page I went through even though trying to get it right took a long time. It seemed like something was being learned through repetition.
OOF yea this is an example of a page I should have took more time with.
And to end things off here's a page I did from Taco's Secret Character drawing book. I tried to draw the face 3 times but didn't like it each time so I pressed onward.
So yea that's that, see you next Monday with more head practice.
