Moho Forum

Well, I've been drawing almost all my life. I'm no expert but with the proper resources I can easily become an expert. The question is, how should I approach my artistic unskillfulness in order to be a good cartoon (anime) artist? When I say anime artist, I don't mean that I want to work in the anime industry; I mean that I want to learn the style so that I can incorporate it in my future animations. In other words, I don't want to draw the traditional, American, cartoony style. By the way, landscapes are also my weakness.

Additionally, I'm no good at drawing from my mind. I have to look at something to render a sketch that resembles the thing I'm drawing. I also don't have much practice. The next question, should I first practice drawing real-life things before I can advance to drawing with my imagination?

One last thing, when applying colors to my drawings, I can't just go crazy and select any color. I have to set up a color scheme to color my drawings with?

Regarding colors - you can use any color you wish - just click the Fill color swatch (it starts out as white when you first start up Moho) and pick whatever color you want.

rock - practice is your friend. more practice is even a better friend. i'm surely not the best drawer around, but what i know is that watching, sketching and trying are important. don't stick to a specific style - it will come. get some art drawing books, start learning how to draw the human body and keep watching and sketching. tracing might help, but it won't really make you the uber-artist. the sooner you learn how to bring the things you imagine down to paper (and then to moho or whatever program), the better.

I agree with solmax. Draw, draw, then draw some more. In addition if you want to do anime (or any even reasonbly "realistic" style, as far as movement goes), study some anatomy. And going back to the source, Eadweard Muybridges studies of the human form in motion will be a standard probably forever.

If you want to learn how to draw people, draw them, a lot. Sketch out of your head, and then compare to real life. Sit in a park and try to capture quick gesture drawings of the kids, thats always good for cartoons. Bust out a little notebook and draw people on the subway on the way to work. But draw. Innate talent is great, but you have to train it, a proper sense of form and design isn't recieved knowledge. It's work.

A bit of advice that I had pretty early (along with most of the people I know who are at least somewhat - maybe wildly - successful at art in any form), If you're not willing to work, really work, your ass off ...and love it while you do... it's a hobby. Which is great. But don't think you're going to make a mark if you don't put in some (thousands of) hours. Unless you're one of those one in a random multiple of millions who's a natural born genius, in which case I step off.

And even if it's really trad, look around and see if there any lifedrawing classes around. Or sessions. I've sat in on a bunch that were run by more established artists than I who would just hire a model and spend the evening drawing. They're everywhere if you look, and it's an invaluable experience.

Okay, that'd be my take.

One great tip given to me by an experienced animator - always rough out with a blue pencil - you can go over the same point several times and "find" the rightr line. If you do the same with a black pencil, you end up with an ugly mess. Later you can ink in a clean black line over the blue with a graphite pencil ... somehow, you can see where the right line really is.

When you scan this into a computer, photoshop allows you to discard the blue inforamtion, leaving the clean black line.

There is some good tutorial about drawing human cartoon figures over at http://www.jabcomix.com/ ... but be warned, some of his illustrations are somewhat sexy ... your mother might not like it. Jab goes into detail about rough drawing with a blue line. His tutorials also talk about deriving poses from actual photographs. Some useful stuff to be found there.

Rhoel