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Please be patient with me, I have an extremely hard time with self expression agony-wholesome

I am not good at like, observing a thing and putting my interpretation onto paper. I try a lot, but it never meets my (probably impossible) standards. This really started to frustrate me recently, so instead I started just drawing interesting shapes and filling them with patterns. The image attached to this post is an example of one.

But now I have these little sketches that look cool to me but feel unfinished. I don't know how to develop them any further. If I try, I feel like I ruin them.

And then it dawned on me: I don't have a fucking clue what I'm doing. I've been trying out art as a fun hobby for the past 2 years. I read a couple of textbooks and took notes, I've filled a few sketchbooks, painted a little, and had a great time. But I can tell I'm still shit and I want to be good. How do I do that? I guess I have a few main questions:

-What should I spend my extremely limited practice time on?

-How can I incorporate the things I like about others' art into my own? Do I just straight up try to copy them?

-Some people I've asked irl have said it's just a matter of time. I haven't been creating long enough to be good yet. Is there any truth to this? Am I just impatient?

Here's some more of those weird sketches if you're interested. I can also post some more uh... grounded? art for comparison?

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[-] Le_Wokisme@hexbear.net 3 points 2 days ago

adding onto that person's 3rd thing

It may be worth trying a workflow where you do the initial sketch in a very light pencil to explore and find your forms, and then confidently ink in the final lines, scribbles, crosshatching, etc. This would probably help give you better composition too, while also helping with the previous improvements.

i heard about some shit called non-photo blue and at least for anything you're digitally processing you can do the initial sketching in a color so you can key it out in the scan.

this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2026
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