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1. Read lots of tutorials and play around with many techniques as you learn and improve. Check out AL's favs for a huge selection of tutorials.
2. As the Romans would say, everything is based off the human form. Yes, even anime. That means no matter what style you are drawing, if you are drawing humanoid figures you should ALWAYS study the actual human form. Proportion and anatomy can drastically help even the most simplistic or abstract styles. In fact, abstract art in itself is extremely difficult to create without first studying other forms of art to get a feel for design techniques. Anime artists, don't feel that if you draw a real person it will ruin your style. You can always go back and give it a pointy chin and distorted features, but first you must understand how the body works to capture its essence.
3. Anatomy is awesome. In art school you are required to learn the skeletal structure entirely as well as all aspects of technical design, and most artists also have to learn muscle structures, joints, ligaments, tendons, how fat builds and falls on the body, the nude figure, and facial expressions. Even if you never draw a naked person or a skeleton again, it helps drastically.
4. A great artist never settles for what he/she can already do.
5. Pricing can be guess and check sometimes. For a cool little pricing equation, check out AL's Price Master. Also, note that any art valued at 100k or more by your peers can be elevated to double the original price or even millions of gold if you get very popular. Brand naming does work with art.
6. The customer is always right. xD If you are making commissions, try to capture what the customer wants most of all. Some artists hate working with constraints, but if you do commissions you must either submit to the customer's wishes or get so popular people are willing to let you do whatever you want.
7. Obey the copyright laws. If you use any texture, brush, image, reference, base, pattern, etc. that another person has made, you must put a written reference to the artist IN THE PICTURE unless they give you permission otherwise. Make sure first that the artist has already offered permission to use their work and whether or not it is a strictly non-commercial tool. Failing to give another artist credit and/or using their work and pretending it is your own is ILLEGAL, even if it's just on gaia. That means you could be ARRESTED and FINED for BREAKING A LAW. Don't do it.
8. Practicing drawing from life is the most rewarding thing you can do as an artist! If possible draw people, places and objects when you get the chance. If actual people won't stay still or you're being lazy *cough* get some magazines and photographs and draw from them! Take a towel or cloth and drape it over a chair and just draw it at least 3-5 times, then again from another angle. Make observations of life and try to capture what's really there, instead of what you think you see. And when you go to draw a pose you're not completely familiar with, find a photograph of it and/or look at yourself in the mirror, or you can even force your family and friends to pose for you. Just don't draw from other art!! No matter how skillful the artist is, and no matter how good their anatomy seems, you should draw either from life or as a backup from photographs.
9. Having trouble drawing couples, foreshortening, or rounded looking figures? Think of two-dimensional art as a 2d mean to reach a 3d end. If you use skeletons, or rough marks for where the character anatomy will be (which you should), try making skeletons out of 3-d shapes like spheres and rectangular prisms, instead of 2-d shapes, and you can even scribble inside a skeleton to give it a sense of depth or mark depth with hatching as you go.
What Makes Good/Popular Art?
~ Mastery of anatomy!!! Understanding the human form and how it moves and reacts to environment always improves the value of art. Stylization can never make up for a knowledge of the human form, and no matter how stylized, anatomy knowledge is key.
~ Consistent and desirable style. Especially when cartooning, style is important. Most people enjoy original styles, though the most popular style on gaia by far is anime. Whatever your style, make sure it is consistent and that people enjoy it.
~ Attention to detail. Detail always brings up the price of artwork, whether it's a nice background, deeper shading, or simply more detail in the appearance of clothing and features.
~ Bold, aesthetic and finished. There are many popular styles with a faded look, but fading your artwork too much can be detrimental to a piece. Make sure artwork is bold enough to pop out at people. Also, aesthetics and unfinished looks can be a real issue; when you draw someone with an arm or leg randomly chopped off at a corner of the picture, it looks messy and unintentional. When leaving out parts of the body such as in half body pieces or busts, try to make it part of the picture, like by putting an object surrounding the top section of their body or have the bottom of the hips fading off artistically or chopped off in a neat circle, anything to keep it from looking like some sort of corpse or like you ran off the page.
~ Clarity and high quality rendering. What makes so much art look "high quality" and professional? Most professional artists work in a very large screen size (or in traditional larger canvas sizes and/or smaller/more expensive tools). In digital art, a good finished size is at least 2,000x2,000 pixels, and high quality images are often worked on in at least 5,000x5,000 pixel formats so that they can later be resized. Working in such large formats allows artists to make their images appear crisp, clean and detailed without having to be immaculate in the actual finished size. When changing an image, it's always easier to make an image smaller than larger.
What Makes Bad/Unpopular Art?
~ Bad scanning/rendering. One of the biggest issues with traditional art is scanning, and many people pinpoint bad art purely by how badly it's scanned. Avoid taking a photograph (especially a bad quality one) of your art at all costs. Use a real scanner and edit it in a photoshop or arcsoft program to make sure the lines are all bold and the background isn't blurry or half gray.
~ Bad anatomy. Though there are some people who price art by technique instead of proportion, most will pay much less for a piece with bad anatomy. Bad anatomy is never stylization, and trust me, we can tell the difference.
~ Awkward, "timid" line art. Many new artists start off making line art with a shaky hand, not adjusted yet to the muscle memory involved in inking. This can also translate into shaky coloring and shading. Shaky lines are normal in the beginning, but it is important to work past that stage and develop more confident lines. Sketchy art is not a problem, as long as the lines are still confident and do not waver. Ideally, if you want to make clean line art you should make a rough sketch of the art and then ink over it in another layer, either using a curved line tool and/or with the screen zoomed in (or for traditional artists, ink over a pencil drawing and erase the pencil.)
~ Poor coloring/shading quality. While expensive art does not always have a very detailed coloring quality, it usually is still very clean, precise and intentional, and fits with the piece. Poor coloring and shading, such as using pastel colors and a tint of black to shade (unless completely relevant to the style) can be very harmful to a piece. Other big issues include using the fill tool to color line art (never ever use the fill tool by itself), poor understanding of shading/lighting (people who shade/light inconsistently and/or in a non-linear fashion), and abusing the sparkle shape. While in some cartoon styles it can be fun to use a little sparkle shape (*) every now and then, covering a person in either sparkles, unconventional white dots and/or big red/pink spots is not a very useful way to express lighting, nor is covering an image in small white lines.
~ Awkward/impossible posture or lack of a pose. While not all good art is full of dramatic poses, bad art tends to incorporate people in unrealistic positions, such as sitting on the edge of a rounded surface with no grip, looking over their shoulder with the head turned way too far back, legs twisted at uncomfortable angles, and the most common: people floating aimlessly in a white space with no sense of weight shift and their limbs floating in random directions. Perhaps equally awkward is artists who try to imply foreshortening (the way the body appears to shrink/grow when positioned at various angles) and fail to make it look natural. If you are bold enough to attempt foreshortening, there are a few tutorials on it listed under Links - AL's favorites. That aside, all artists should consider learning about Contrapposto(warning: wikipedia article contains nudity), and studying basic weight shift principles.
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