drawing of the day #3: when you're stuck, go back to the basics
Here's my artwork for today!
I have been chipping at this art since mid-December, spurred on in wake of wanting to get better at line art in general. I've always loved drawing fashion illustrations, so with FFXIV releasing a much needed update on removing glamour restrictions, I've been freely able to dress my characters how they wanted to!
It's kind of funny how I wanted to improve on my lines because of a very negative experience in X's art community some time earlier this month: a very popular artist known as asamiarts was caught tracing generated AI images stolen from Japanese artists. A full document of that can be accessed here still. I saw her art earlier before this callout came out, and I was thinking "man, I love her line work", so finding out it was all traced this whole time honestly pissed me off to no end naturally. So I looked into the art from notable Japanese artists whose work she stole from (also in the document), and studied a little from there, though I did remark to a friend while looking at their work that "if I try to emulate their lines I'm gonna end up developing carpal tunnel" from how light and thin their lines are.
This year I've mostly been doing my own studies and practice in private. I've honestly hit a rut for a very long time due to a lot of factors, and my art has completely suffered from it, both on a personal and professional level. For a good long time, it didn't feel good to even put to sketch, especially not digitally - it was very hard to articulate exactly why, but I feel like the creative rut came from a lot of unaddressed problems - problems that I'm only now getting a chance to address and improve on. But those problems are very personal, so I won't talk about them at length here.
I've found that by addressing these problems, slowly but surely I'm beginning to break free of that rut and problem with focusing. If you've read my previous posts, you'd know why I'm taking the time to blog more and use social media less, and honestly I really do want to think that effort is paying off a little, with how much more willing I am to go back to drawing. But it's not just drawing as I've always done - I've been going back to the fundamentals and trying to apply what I've learned, even if only just a little, into my work as a whole.
It's insane how much even just small bits of learning and practice over time pays dividends. For this instance even just applying a quick primer of "how to make your line work NOT suck" gleaned from short videos on tiktok, youtube and instagram already made my line work not feel dead for once! It was pretty satisfying how it all came together in the end, and I'm happy to say that I'm really glad I managed to come up with a piece of artwork that I can be proud of before the year ends.
I feel like many times when you feel stuck on something, it's really beneficial to go back to the basics. If it's drawing you're stuck in, going back to the fundamentals helps immensely. If you can't bring yourself to write, maybe small writing exercises helps. You get where I'm going with this (hopefully). Retracing back your steps can really help with recentering yourself, and I think that's true with life just as much as it's true with a skill you're trying to develop or pick up again.
Here's to another 10 years of art and creating despite the advent of generative AI - and may we all never stop creating!
(I will be editing this post with videos that helped me with improving my line art - I just need to find them back)