I’m pretty much self-taught. I, especially when I started out, watched a lot of art streams and read and watched a lot of tutorials. I tried to copy things other artists do and slowly adapted those methods into my own work flow. I used brush settings I saw online, but found out they don’t work that well for me, so I played around and switched things around until I was happy. I still change my brush settings and methods today on a regular basis. It’s always about adapting and finding new things that work better and that are more comfortable.

I also look at a lot of pictures in an active way, meaning when I see a picture (or even a photograph) I always identify what exactly I like about it, I look at shadows and shapes and try to recreate certain things in my mind. “How would I do this shading? How would I do this pose? How would I create this feeling? What colors do I like and what colors work here?” are things that go through my head. And if I really like something specific, like the way the head is done or the way they did the shading or something, I’ll try to incorporate that into my drawings and kinda put my own spin on it? A lot in art is about inspiration and finding your own style, find what you like and get inspiration from that, try to incorporate things you like into your art, sooner or later you’ll figure out what works for you and what doesn’t.

And most importantly: Draw. Draw a shit ton of stuff. It’s easy to read tutorials, watch some livestream and research things. But those things alone don’t make you a better artist. A lot of drawing will make you a better artist. I think it was Lauren Faust who said that everybody has 1,000 bad drawings in them, and they need to get them out before the good stuff starts to slowly emerge. Doodle whenever you can, draw whenever you have free time. And if you have some artist friends, ask them to redline and critique some of your drawings. That’s what helped me most out of all the things. Friends being honest and critiquing my stuff when I asked them and good artist friends redlining my sketches so I had a visual aid to what I could do better.

I want to take some art classes sooner or later, and I’m sure having some educational background about art is helpful, but no matter if you’re self-taught or not, you’ll always have to do your own research and figure some things out yourself, I think. But there definitely have been times where I wished that I was taught stuff like color theory or proper technique by someone without having to figure out things slowly by myself.