No mention of The Etherington Brothers' "How to Think When You Draw"?

post links, then.

https://www.deviantart.com/etheringtonbrothers

http://theetheringtonbrothers.blogspot.com/

http://theetheringtonbrothers.blogspot.com/p/every-how-to-think-when-you-draw.html

Im glad Line-of-Action got mentioned in this thread was about to post it

Another that i use regularly that i havent seen mentioned (sorry if i missed it) is Posemaniacs which is a great repository for 3d skinless models that you can freely rotate n shit.

Seemingly every year around this time i get really down on myself and that includes my art. I've discovered tho that even if art motivation is scrapping the bottom of the barrel i can usually be able to get some practice out and these resources are exactly what i need to break this funk. I've always just drawn to vent and have something to do when people bail last minute and plans fall thru but that happened so often over the course of years that i feel like im not terrible now. I dont think im great, mind you, but i'm very willing to learn and i think as long as thats the case i can keep improving :D

Really enjoying this channel lately. Spoiler: she tells you to study if you want to improve. No getting around it.

Took me a minute to notice BaM's new video on drawing cars, but I highly recommend it. You wanna know why I'm a full time propagandist for cubes in perspective, it's because getting good at it means you can do stuff like this:

@Simoes1000 here, time to learn and win more than 3 stars in your proyects :3

Is this a friend you’re pinging who asked for help, or…?

yeah xd he draws a lot, and he wants to grow here.

Made for Oddlem to assist in their Draw a Sphere Challenge

How to make a sphere in perspective (to know where its XYZ extremes are and plot an accurate shadow)

1. Make a cube. I'm not gonna go over how to make a perfect cube because that requires protractors and compasses and usually eyeballing it is gonna be fine.
2. Find the midsection of the faces by drawing Xs through them. These will help you find the center plane of the cube's XYZ axes.
3. Place ellipses in each of these center planes. These will show the outer edges of the sphere.
4. Finally, you have a dang sphere by making an ellipse that touches the outer edges of all those other ellipses. Not only that, but you have all the information you need for calculating a shadow: the XYZ extremes of the sphere and their corresponding ground points (what you get when drawing a line straight down to the ground from the extremes)
5. To calculate the extremes of the shadow, make sure you have a light source with a ground point. Draw lines from the light through the sphere's extreme points, then draw lines from the light's ground points through the sphere's ground points. Where those two sets of lines intersect are your shadow's edge points. Draw an ellipse that connects them all, and there you go.

This seems like the type of thread that should be pinned.

'Lighting MentorAt 7/3/20 04:14 AM, Skoops wrote:

I'm so happy you started this thread and mentioned 'Drawabox'. I picked up art again since last week and I also started with 'Drawabox'. I'm still at lesson 1 but I'm already very impressed!

I highly recommend Jeremy Vickery, he's fantastic at light and colors. He has a youtube channel 'Lighting Mentor' and his own website.

you love to see it, it always makes my day seeing someone get back into art!!

Naoki Saito – my golden standard for anime art channels. He mostly does redraws/reviews of amateur works which tackles a lot of the nuances that general fundies don’t really cover along with the usual art channel stuff.

Saito freakin rocks. Despite a lot of his advice being aimed at beginners, the main channel topics are rarely stuff I've heard before. It's all stuff that makes perfect sense and makes me wonder why nobody else is saying it.

@TurkeyOnAStick Can this thread be pinned? It can allow artists to share resources and recommendations easier that way.

I agree it would be a good thing to have a place where tips and advice videos is placed directly in front of people’s eyes.

The two things I think go against pinning it are:

-This thread started 4 years ago, and it’s only live because Skoops is investing effort into it and re-bumping the thread. It needs other community support to be a live hub of advice

-There has to be a limit to the amount of pinned threads; alongside Tom’s news threads we shouldn’t have a large block of stagnant threads at the top of the forum. If this thread was pinned to encourage activity, I would unpin the art forum lounge.

@SourCherryJack, what do you reckon?

I'm going back and forth on it being stickied. I can see the benefits of having it stuck right at the top, it might be good to have it super easy to find for anyone looking for it. However I feel like the way the forum is, we'll still end up with a lot of threads asking for resources for the specific (or not so specific) thing they're trying to learn anyway, and regs will continue to link the thread anyway - with an added "stickied right at the top ding-dong!"

Also I don't know if having it stickied would end up packing the thread with more replies and discussion that will make navigating the pages for resources more cumbersome. Does a resource thread need encouraged activity, if the activity might distract from the goal of being a resource tool? Does this thread want to be a discussion on resources as well as a hub for them?

A page like this would work better as an editable and updatable newspost. I'd be down to update the Art101 resource pages to reflect what's in this thread as well, but that still doesn't solve forum visibility for a resource page unfortunately.

All of this to say: I fall on the side of not having it stickied, but encouraging more people to share links to it more frequently.

I do agree if we land on pinning this one the Lounge should be unpinned, but I think the Lounge has had enough traffic to be deemed a successful experiment in pinning it, and unpinning it might kill it completely like the last handful of times the old thread was bumped.

(which is to say if a thread survives only because it is pinned, is it worthwhile? - another question on it's own to be sure)

Sorry for the uninvited input. I shouldn't be sticking my nose in the mods' decisions, but I wanted to state my agreement with SourCherryJack's concerns.

In my opinion as a follower, this thread does not benefit from having anything that isn't a tutorial or link to tutorials (with proper briefing of what the learning resource is teaching) posted in it at all (this very reply I typed is polluting it). I activated notifications for this thread (which is what I think anybody remotely interested in it should do by clicking the heart icon at the top) so that I'd know when something new was added to it and I never commented on (for example) how somebody FINALLY shared a comic tutorial on how to make paneling decisions out of courtesy for fellow followers who are not interested in my opinions on whatever is shared here.

As a user, I believe keeping posting links to this thread is a good enough solution. Sure, some QoL is nice and all, but as a few wise game developers I interacted with said: you can't idiot-proof your game. You can try, but is it worth it?

Look at the help forum, for example: when somebody gets caught in a false positive for the audio portal's copyright protection, we have to direct them to the audio appeal thread, which is pinned to the audio forum. Likewise, I often see people asking for art or animation related advice in the help forum instead of the art or animation forums, and so they'd still not see this thread even if it got pinned.

I appreciate the consideration, though I do think it's fair what Jack said, that this is a thread that I and other users constantly link to anyway, and I don't see that changing even if this thread was stickied (there's a strong correlative link between people that don't research or use the search function and people asking for the exact kind of advice this thread offers). It kinda exists in a pseudo sticky state already, being the only consistently cited repository for these sorts of resources, so it never really goes away.

If I were to advocate for something to be stickied, it'd be something that could be better curated and organized, less croudsourced, more me occasionally editing a locked thread and making changelog updates. Maybe that's better as a newspost, I dunno.

My opening post was just my short list of the best resources I could think of (at the time) to get the ball rolling on discussion, but beyond that it's really just a grab bag of different assorted resources. I'd like to put together an updated list, since a lot of good new stuff has cropped up over the last 4 years, and some of the resources that were more active at the time have slowed down or stopped updating. No telling what the next 4 years will change.

For now though, if you want this thread to stay on the first page, feed it! Go out there, find some resources, add it to the pile. Bump this sucker with relevant content.

Back in the day 👴🏻 we had (have) a communal account called Art 101.

It’s also for tutorials and helping navigate around the art portal, and it follows the above approach where it is easier to manage and present information on a news post, rather than fighting against the time-based hierarchy of a forum thread.

I’ve held my tongue on mentioning it because, just like this thread, it needs constant attention to remain relevant. I also agree with the sentiment that pinning a thread and prefixing it with “Read me first!” will not encourage people to read it first.

I’m totally fine with not pinning this thread, and I would not be surprised if in a few years time another *better* advice thread pops up with refreshed tutorials, activity, etc.

Don't nobody go getting any big ideas, capisce?

I have no idea whether this has already been posted here, but @TheGarbager619 sent this to me somewhat recently and oh man does it have so much stuff.

https://characterdesignreferences.com/visual-library

Literally who?

Is it an idea to have a Wiki page for this? Obviously that page can't be pinned on the forums, but it would be a centralized place that people could point to that's also able to be updated consistently by whoever has access to that page.

Hey, in case anyone is still looking for resources. I have a YouTube playlist showcasing many creators that should take you through the fundamentals. All of the videos are ones that I have watched as I have tried to get better throughout the year. It's not perfect, but it might help you find someone cool that you vibe with as a teacher. I ordered the videos to build off of one another. So, if you want to learn about one specific subject, you can find the videos together.

Does seem like it'd be a worthwhile project for me to have some organized editable thing that I can add to over time, like a Google Sheet or something. I think when I have less stuff on my plate, I'll give it a go.

It is a good Idea, but the main issue with this is that you need people to submit and that can be hard to come by In the long run.

The upside to it is that you can have multiple contributors to the page, so it doesn't all fall on Skoops' shoulders.

This thread is also supposed to have multiple contributors, it’s just that Skoops is the only Art Forum regular who goes out of their way to look up tutorials to put in the thread.