All this will do is lead me to spend a butt ton of time looking up reference.... I would like to just be able to open my sketchbook and draw. That's why my sketchbooks have one drawing per page and it's something I copied. Because I rarely have ideas and when I do, I don't know how to draw them.

amazing. i would like to record my own process in the same way that you did here but its hard when you want to put the project down and continue. Can I ask how you did a multi session recording and made it all look as one session? Thanks

If you generate an idea that makes no sense and is an integral of purely unrelated entities, will it be possible to make a drawing out of, less difficult, and how would you be able to connect such entities by the smaller questions within those entities ? For example; what if cell phones could be charged by maize grains?

What is the name of that "implied detail artist." Can you please mention it

This curriculum tends to be floated around a lot, and Proko and Marshall brought it up in one of the draftsmen episodes a while back. I feel I should clarify something- The curriculum shouldn't be ascribed to Moderndayjames - it was put together by Alex Honeycutt (Radiorunner), and features a quote from Moderndayjames, though it's easy to understand why people think it was made by MDJ or involved his input in some way. As far as the curriculum itself goes, the only recommendation I have here is that if you're following it, it's best that you not apply its 4-weeks-per-unit pacing to the sections that have you following along with Drawabox. Drawabox *really* isn't meant to be shoehorned into a specific preconceived timeline, and when students try to do so, they end up rushing and missing big chunks of the material. When working through any Drawabox content, just focus on giving it as much time as it requires for you to complete the assigned work to the best of your current ability. Setting deadlines/timelines/etc can be very useful further into one's learning process, but I think that the foundation one builds up at the beginning of their journey is so critical that it should absolutely not be rushed.

Once you get to a point where you have a question, how do you actually go about getting ideas down? Let's say my what-if was "what if dinosaurs were still alive and got domesticated?" what ideas would i generate first? and how would i go about doing research? I surely know nothing about modern-day or old technologies, or even invented technologies to resist stretches I'm unsure what questions to ask myself to come up with a good design for a t-rex saddle, for example, and looking at real life saddles would just lead me to copy-paste the saddle onto the t-rex. Is it just an issue of asking more questions, am i worrying too much, or something else entirely?

"if someone shared them with you [tips and tricks] you'd make it into the big leagues in no time." Kinda wanted to react and say i agree, this is somewhat of a silly thought, but at the same time... What are beginners supposed to think when they browse through youtube and 90% of advice are about tips and tricks? especially when these come from youtubers who are former pros in big AAA companies and like to brag about it so they can hook you on their content? I like to think it's not my case, but i'd be lying if i said my brain doesn't want to believe there are certain "shortcuts" to success. It's a tough subject since it basically means you gotta believe these guys have no idea what they are talking about and at the same time were able to force their way into the industry.

I ended up opting for the non-art related career myself, many years ago, having majored in Interactive Multimedia, and getting hired after graduation as a game programmer at a studio that made educational software for toddlers. It was around the same time I got hired, or even a little before, that I firmly decided I wanted to pursue a career in art (which had been a hobby of mine for the previous decade). It's not that I don't enjoy programming - it's just that I figured I'd rather do game development for my own projects, for fun, and I'd be happier doing concept art and illustration for clients. I worked full-time - so 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. I would definitely consider it to be cognitively taxing, but I did find that if I pushed myself, I had different pools of energy to draw from. After work, I sure as hell wouldn't want to push myself to do more programming at home, but while it felt difficult at first, I was able to coax myself into putting time into my art. Granted, it helped that I didn't have any other responsibilities - I lived with my parents, so while I helped them with chores in the weekends, I didn't have to cook dinner each night and had a fair bit of free time. I started making a habit of spending at least 3 hours each night on taking my art more seriously. First, I set a challenge for myself, where every night I'd do a photo study - a minimum of 3 hours had to be invested, and a minimum of 1 study. So if I happened to be satisfied with a study before that time was up, I would start another. If I got into the groove and wanted to go loner than 3 hours, I could, but of course I still had work the next day. I did this for 31 days straight, including weekends. Setting that end date helped, because I could see the finish line. It wasn't an arbitrary endeavor, so even if it was tough, I was able to push my limits knowing that it wouldn't be forever. I feel this had a pretty significant impact on me - it showed me I had it in me to pull from this separate well of energy, and that a lot of the time it could even help me unwind after work, even though I was trying to learn and train. After that, it was easier to invest that time in a wider array of exercises, in tackling illustrations that would be spread across several days and weeks, and to generally push beyond the limitations of a salary man. After about 15 months of this, I quit my job, took my savings and funded a 6 month trip to LA to study at Concept Design Academy. The rest is, as they say, history.

Feedback is useful at a number of stages - not just when you're done. Once a piece is done, it's done. Any feedback you receive on it can be used on the next piece, but this one's over. Lots of people seek feedback when they're at a crossroads and aren't sure which direction to take. Plenty of people post WIPs (works in progress) when they aren't sure about something specific. I think when posting unfinished work for feedback, the best things to consider are what specific issue would you like the feedback to address, and simply whether you yourself put a good deal of time into working through your issue on your own first. For the first one, "I don't know where to take this piece" is vague, but certainly still an issue worthy of feedback. If you can offer people something specific to focus on however, that is certainly going to make things easier on the one offering their time. That last one is subjective, but some people have a habit of valuing their time in this context a little too highly, and actively seek feedback early and often as a way to minimize their own time investment. As long as you feel you've made an attempt to think through whatever it is you want help with, then there is nothing wrong with asking for help. Worst case scenario, let's say you post something for feedback and you receive none - that doesn't mean posting your work was somehow wrong, a mistake, or inappropriate. It simply means no one had the time to offer in that instance. No harm done. Ultimately just remember that posting your work for feedback is not a performance. No one is looking for you to meet some standard or to please their sensibilities. They're giving feedback ideally because they want to help people grow. That's all. It's easy to forget that sometimes amidst the eternal pursuit of validation social media engagement.

I've got a bit of a spiel about style, and how it relates to the "fundamentals" - which is, in a lot of ways, what you're asking about in regards to style vs. realism. You'll find it in its original context here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals/comments/gpxkca/the_battle_with_style_vs_fundamentals/frpzxn1 but I'll paste it below as well. --- There's no battle between style and fundamentals. It's not an uncommon way people look at things, but it's not accurate. Instead, it's better to look at the concept of style as being a filter or a coloured lens through which one is looking at the world. The fundamentals are the world itself, specifically taking things that are three dimensional and capturing them - not hyper-accurately, but at least in a believable, tangible way - on the page. The fundamentals are about selling the illusion that what you're looking at in a drawing is real. Style is a series of choices an artist applies to their work. You can think of it as a recipe, or an algorithm. In that sense, it's not unlike how an instagram filter works. You've got an input (the actual thing being depicted), it goes through a series of choices, and out comes the final, stylized work. So when it comes to creating a style of your own, what you're doing is developing your own recipe, your own clear set of rules and choices that will govern the works you wish to produce in this style. The first thing you need to learn, therefore, is what are the recipes that others use? And really, what is a recipe? How do I apply it? You can do this by doing master studies - that is, studies that involve looking at another artist's work, and attempting to reproduce it specifically focusing on the stylistic choices they've made. You know how one might go about capturing something real at its most basic and most un-stylized (assuming you've got pretty solid fundamentals, which you should if you're worrying about style), and so you need to analyze how the artist got from that point to their end result, and decompile their algorithm. Find out what choices and rules they followed to achieve that cohesive look. Do this a lot. Do master studies of works you admire, do master studies of works that are in the totally opposite direction you'd like to go yourself. As you do so, you'll find little pieces, individual rules that will appeal to you, and as you gather these pieces, you'll be able to start experimenting on how those rules and choices can fit together into their own styles. These things will develop slowly - just like a chef testing out a new dish, they'll try things out, make tweaks, let things sit, scrap them entirely, and try again. And gradually you'll come to a style that has been tailored and engineered to suit what you want now. And you'll probably keep working on it even beyond that, eventually your tastes will change, and you'll find yourself desiring a new style altogether. And this is how you'll go about it again. But if you don't feel like you have a solid grasp on your fundamentals, on capturing things as they are (again, not hyper-realistic which is a style in and of itself), then you may want to strengthen those building blocks. That isn't to say you can't do master studies now, but that it helps a great deal when analyzing another artist's choices to have a good grasp on the raw material. --- So in this sense, understanding, say, how human faces are actually structured in 3D space will help immensely when it comes to understanding *why* other artists - say, manga, or cartoonists - choose to represent their faces in a particular fashion. It helps us understand why they're making the choices they are, and so in turn it allows us to better understand the choices we make. When we just attempt to create style without this bedrock, our choices become more arbitrary and less grounded. That said, if your art teacher is suggesting that you stop drawing whatever stylistic stuff you're drawing now - ungrounded and arbitrary as it may be - I staunchly disagree with that. I think there is a lot of benefit in balancing both areas, to draw the things you love most on one side, just for its own sake without stressing over whether or not it comes out well, or as you intend, and studying the fundamentals, reality, whatever you want to call it on the other side. Setting out separate periods of time for each will help you maintain balance. It's very easy to just delve completely into studies, and to lose one's sense of direction as a result.