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Notes -
I never said otherwise.
The average person off the street can't become Terry Tao and win a Fields Medal, no matter how much time and effort they put into math. Their brains are physically incapable of getting to that level. We're in agreement on that point.
All I was saying is that drawing ability isn't intrinsically coupled to a superior faculty of visualization, and even the best artists still have to study and practice to reach a professional level of skill.
Regarding how many people are physically capable of becoming competent artists: I don't know the exact number, but I do believe that it's higher than is generally supposed. It's higher than the number of people who are capable of winning a Fields Medal anyway.
We have to distinguish between pure drawing from reference (e.g. portraiture, still life) vs creating original pieces. I think the vast majority of otherwise developmentally normal people are capable of learning the former to a competent level. I've done it, I've seen other people do it. It's a purely rote mechanical skill.
Original pieces are a lot harder but it's not hopeless. I started from absolute zero, I have no intrinsic talent for this. In fact I have anti-talent, progress has been abnormally slow and painful for me. But I was still able to make it this far. Obviously it's not pro level even by anime standards, but I think it's kinda cute and I got a few responses saying as much when I posted it online.
I also don't think I'm anywhere near the inherent ceiling on my abilities. I struggled for years partly because traditional art education is all crap and not at all geared towards people who naturally think analytically. Now that I'm learning how to take apart drawings the same way I take apart programs I'm starting to see a lot of progress and I'm way more confident in my ability to keep going.
That's interesting. I teach art, and admittedly have basically nothing to offer the kids who want to learn anime styles. Even the illustration markers make me twitchy (I hate so much that I can't guess how long they'll last, as an expensive drawing supply I have to ration between hundreds of children). I remember an interaction back when I was taking drawing as a teen too, between the teacher and a student who really wanted to draw anime, which was basically "I'm not teaching that, do you want to learn what I am teaching?" And she kind of did learn it, but seemed grumpy and not like she was heading the direction she wanted.
Do you have any examples of instructional materials that worked well for you?
Not really! I feel like I had to figure out the most important things myself.
These days I'm basically using the same principles you'd find in the Loomis method ("Drawing the Head and Hands" and "Figure Drawing For All It's Worth") but what really helped things start to click for me was tracing the construction directly over references and trying to think, "how would I actually construct this? Do I have a repeatable process I can apply to future drawings like this?"
I also find it helpful to watch videos of pro artists work and look at how they think about things and how they approach problems, like David Finch or this guy.
Interesting, thanks for the response.
I've never been much interested in story drawing, so don't know much about it. I guess I had always assumed there was a robust and parallel way of learning things like how to draw dynamic poses for storytelling that's unrelated to what I learned (I follow traditional landscape artists like this), and am surprised to hear that it isn't that well laid out.
Well there definitely is. Sort of. David Finch has a bunch of lecture-style videos on Gnomon Workshop, Glenn Vilppu has a bunch of demo videos, Michael Hampton has a figure drawing book that a lot of people like. I'm sure there are more Japanese-language resources specifically for anime that I'm unaware of. My problem was that I was too stupid for everything and nothing held my hand to the degree I needed.
A lot of these things go like, "well if you want to draw a person, then you draw a ball for the head, an egg for the ribcage, cylinders for the arms and legs, and 1 2 3... there you go, you drew a person". But whenever I tried to do it myself it just looked awful. I understood the basic idea, and I agreed that it made sense, but something was going wrong and I didn't know how to bridge the gap.
The problem is that there's only so much detail you can convey verbally. You can tell someone to use basic shapes like eggs and boxes and cylinders to construct more complex ones, but the catch is that if you don't draw exactly the right kind of shapes in exactly the right position and proportions, then everything will look like crap. That's where all the magic happens. The devil is in the details.
The head is a really instructive case study because it's a small and self-contained object that has a ton of complexity. I kept banging my head into the wall over and over again trying to get the Loomis head method to work and I didn't know what was going wrong. Yes I'm drawing a ball for the cranium, and then I'm attaching the jaw and marking where the side plane is and I'm drawing the features on the front plane, so why does it look awful every time? The books themselves didn't give any hints. There's so much detail that goes into even something as simple as the ball-and-jaw idea - where exactly does the line for the eyes/brow go? how long do you make the jaw, how wide? what is the exact ratio of the front plane to the side plane, when viewing the head from a given angle? how exactly do you arrange all the features, how far apart are they? - that you really can't write it all down, you just have to look at a lot of examples and figure it out for yourself.
The big first step for me was drawing studies of references (anime references in my case) and then overlaying my drawing onto the reference (digitally) to see how accurate I was. For the first time I could actually describe explicitly what mistakes I was making, instead of just having a vague feeling that everything looked wrong - now I could say that this particular drawing was wrong because the eyes were too far apart, or the jaw was too long. Now I had actionable items I could improve on in both my studies from references and my original pieces.
The next thing was taking references (still anime head references) and tracing the construction directly on top of the reference. Like, I knew that there was allegedly a ball-and-jaw construction lurking in this drawing somewhere, but I hadn't really internalized how exactly that should look (even for the more realistic heads that Loomis used I didn't have a good sense of how it should work, and I certainly didn't know how to apply the same technique to anime proportions). So I just took a bunch of pro drawings and went, ok if I was going to draw this I guess the circle would line up like this, and then we have the jaw here, and if I was going to draw a guideline representing where the eyes go it would go here... basically taking the drawing apart like a mechanic takes apart a car. And it really helped me start seeing patterns and shapes that I had never seen before, and it forced me to really focus on all these little details that I had been getting wrong this whole time.
Anyway I wanted to try and describe my thought process explicitly because I've never seen any book or video lay it out like this, and I hope it's helpful if you have any students who want to learn more about anime or Western comics. A lot of art instructional material just goes with a sort of "grind" mindset like "yeah just do 10k one minute figure sketches and you'll learn how to draw" but that sort of thing didn't work for me at all. I had to really slow down and think about what I was doing.
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I may well be worse than average at art. Sure, if you don't mean to claim that performance at it can be arbitrarily improved with effort (and I didn't think you literally meant it, just that you thought it could make someone a passable artist), then we just happen to disagree on what the criteria for being "OK" at art is.
In the most degenerate case, one can trace a drawing or use a pinhole camera, but I acknowledge that drawing from imagination is probably quite a bit harder, though I'm sure Real™ artists also use references.
Not bad! I'm glad your efforts paid off.
Now, I would certainly like to be an artist, but as experience has shown, it was not easy at all for me. Thankfully with AI, I no longer need to be constrained by my hand's ability to sketch what my mind conceives. It'll get the writers too, undoubtedly, I'm just grateful for a year or two of alpha so I can say "yeah I was good before anyone could do this". I suppose you'll still draw regardless, since you presumably enjoy drawing, and I'll continue writing.
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