"What should I learn first?"

Hey everybody.



When I started off my art journey, I made the mistake of getting straight into anatomy. While I had plenty of good intentions and genuine curiosity, I failed to see art holistically and zoomed my focus soley into anatomy. In essence, I payed no mind to the overarching idea of the art fundamentals and tunnel visioned myself for quite some time.



As most of us know, art tackles a plethora of topics ranging, but not limited to construction, anatomy, color theory, composition, storytelling, gesture ect.



Things work best when a plan or outline is set in stone before initiating a project. If you had to projectize art and sequentially start from the ground up from what we already know, how would you (personally) arrange each fundamental from most to least crucial?



This is not to say that one element of teaching is greater than the other, but when we open the canals to the art world, it's easy to get overwhelmed with every ferry that vies for our attention.



Feel free to share your story. I'd also encourage to share any mindset shifts, ideas, and hard lessons you learned along the way. I want this to be a citation geared for beginners and advanced artists alike so that they can continue to find meaning in their projects.



Best regards.

About 2-3 years ago, I decided to finally take art seriously as I had been interested in it but never devoted time to practice it. I first started by buying the book "The Natural Way to Draw" by Kimon Nicolaides. I studied the book rigorously for about 2 months, following the plan, and then I dropped it and started an art class in college. After that class, I was on and off and basically threw away all of my knowledge as I bounced around the country. One thing I only realized recently was that I kept trying to make an exact replica of my reference. Too focused on details, too focused on perfect lines. "Use the reference, don't copy it!" was advice I was given and it really made me rethink how I draw. I think it depends on what your goals are in art, as "becoming a good artist" I've learned is too broad of a goal.

Hello and good evening, and welcome back, and how do you do?

When I was first starting out with drawing practice, I'd done some one-on-one art instruction, then thru the Salem YMCA's art program back from 2003-2006, then later did some drawing practice from how-to-draw books, where my first attempts were a bit too stiff, but that didn't matter at the time, because I thought I could only practice the drawing once, yet it took me longer to figure out how to get better at drawing loosely. So then, later on, attended an art class at the Salem High School art department, where I'd really got back on the wheel in gesture drawing since the YMCA, but that was when I'd learned how to use a timer for quick sketches. One was for one minute per pose. Felt a bit of pressure, but I'd gotten thru it. Furthermore, it still took me a bit longer to know that I had to get movement working in my lines, yet all that changed when I'd websurfed on some online drawing tools on this Internet.

Sorry if I'd gotten a bit all over the map on my explanation, so to make a long story short, I'd truly gotten better at my loosest and lightest touch with my sketches and drawings, especally for my art, cartoons, and animations. But that's not all, I've gotten a link of some samples for my Drive, if you don't mind. HERE!

To answer your question, to start with, in order to maintain your guts, you'd have to start with the guts of your drawings, in other words, gestures, forces, or whatever you wanna call them. To further illustrate this communication, here's a link to John Kricfalusi's(Spumco, Ren and Stimpy) older blog with a tag on here, here, aaand here! Though whether or not he knows it, but the only great way to push your guts in your sketches or pictures, is that you should use the reference, not copy it in fear of loosing the sparks of life and vitality. Please don't read too much into his attitude on gesture drawing, but it's OK if you can just bookmark, add to reading list, download and study and warm up the videos and images on John's oldest, greatest blog. Please take what I've suggested and these things with the really smallest grain of salt.