Comments by "Cestarian Inhabitant" (@cestarianinhabitant5898) on "James Jani"
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Yeah, as an artist I see this, working hard for the sake of working hard a lot, like ridiculously much, to the point where maybe 80% of beginner artists are doing it, or more. I always try to tell them that if you practice for 10,000 hours drawing badly, the only thing you'll master is drawing badly. It's usually frowned upon when I say that, although there's the occasional person that agrees.
I think it might be fairly important to mention however that artists are more vulnerable to this idea, learning to draw is hard, it is outrageously hard, it goes to the level of possibly needing to entirely change the way you think from the ground up, how you visualize things in your head, how you actually see things when you look at them in day to day life, how and what you memorize of what you see, and this is before we even get to the difficulties of drawing straight lines, smooth curves, or near-perfect circles (that last one I still haven't nailed, I also struggle hard with ellipses).
The toughest part of learning to draw is learning what is called 'perspective', it's a series of techniques used to create the illusion of the third dimension on a two dimensional surface, an artificial Z axis, at it's core, it's very simple and most artists will look at it and think "Ok yeah that's easy, now I know how to do that." Not realizing that there's 1 point, 2 point, 3 point and curvilinear perspective, the last one being by far the closest to reality, and considerably harder to learn than the former 3 which are all real damn simple, but that's not all. When initially learning this technique, you will typically be taught how to draw a 3 dimensional box on a 2 dimensional surface, and it's undeniable that you pretty much need to master the act of doing so to have any hope of ever becoming a good artist. You will also be partially taught how to draw a cylinder, but probably not completely.
But what they don't tell you is all the complicated stuff, and you have to really dig, I mean really DIG, deep through the internet if you want to figure out how to draw circles and ellipses in perspective (which is mandatory knowledge to draw a successful cylinder). But that's the simple stuff, what's really complicated is when the objects in your drawing are not all facing the same direction, if they're rotated side to side, that's not that hard, hard, but not that hard, if it's rotated vertically, god help you, that's to say nothing of if it's rotated vertically and horizontally.
We still haven't gone into what's called foreshortening (close objects appearing disproportionately larger than distant ones at a certain proximity; e.g. a finger looking bigger than a head if it's pointed right at your eye) which is also a part of perspective but I have never once seen a defined technique for drawing it, every artist just eyeballs it and hopes for the best, they learn it through observation by drawing from photographs, for years, until they just 'get it' more or less.
Now picture, if you can, the difficulty of drawing a human that looks properly 3 dimensional, a human in a pose, with all of their limbs pointing and angled in different directions (because that's actually what people usually look like, and incidentally what's most visually appealing, a guy standing straight like a statue? not that visually appealing, a guy in the middle of a punching motion? Exciting.), you have to essentially reapply your perspective techniques for every limb, the problem here isn't reapplying the technique for each limb, that in and of itself is doable, but understand that each time it's reapplied for a limb pointing in a different direction, it has to be fully synchronized with all former instances of that technique (e.g. used for all the other limbs) and if even one is out of sync your picture's probably gonna look amateurish at best, or garbage at worst. It'll feel "off" to people. And these techniques for synchronizing perspective for objects pointing in different directions at different distances, even if it's just for boxes, you're gonna have a hard time finding that out through the internet, you have to dig really hard for it. But if you wanna get your foot in the door, this is absolutely necessary for you to have a chance at all.
But most artists? Most artists just learn 1 or 2 point perspective, and say "oh that's easy, look I can draw this one box that looks more or less decent, how great, now I don't need to learn anything more about it" and then they try to draw, for years, sometimes even decades, maybe knowing they're bad at perspective but procrastinating learning more about it because it's too 'technical' or 'boring' or something along those lines, or they just care more about the colors (or tell themselves that, rather than admitting their biggest weakness to themselves) and then after drawing wrong for maybe 15 years, they'll ask themselves, and maybe others "where are my improvements? why am I not getting better? I've been drawing for years but it still looks like shit?... What?"
And the only reason, is because they never actually learned to draw, they just drew, they just drew and drew with no regard for whether they got it right or wrong, assuming that if they draw enough, if they work hard enough they will automatically end up becoming good in a while. But it's far from that simple, I didn't even begin talking about composition, gesture, light, color theory or anatomy which are all fairly important things to learn later on, but you gotta start with perspective, it's not an exaggeration to say that your perspective drawing abilities could just be shortened to your 'drawing abilities', because that's what it really is, that is how important it is, you will never draw anything good without it. But most artists don't even want to acknowledge that, because it's hard to learn, and complicated, so they just 'work hard' instead.
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