HOME | DD
Learning-please-help — self portrait.
#selfportrait
Published: 2018-08-16 22:23:08 +0000 UTC; Views: 246; Favourites: 26; Downloads: 0
Redirect to original
Description
Practice and shit, no one cares, no one helps...Related content
Comments: 8
You really don't want my help man, you're way above my drawing skills. All I can sey that it's excellently draw.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
But you are LIGHT YEARS away more creative and funnier that I could ever be you even found your own style and as my profile says I'm a total noob beginning from zero and I could use some tips to be creative because, well I don't want to draw still life all the time, whatever help is more than welcome. I hope you don't mind but I downloaded your dobson drawing where he is naked thinking that the blue bear is suffering too, it's just too damn funny. Sorry about my english; not native speaker.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Aw, you're too kind! While I wouldn't call myself an expert when it comes to humor or creativity, I'll try to think of some good advice that has helped me out in the past. Of course I don't mind you downloading my stuff, and don't sweat your English, I'm a non-native speaker as well and leave make PLENTY typose and grammar mistakes, so we're in it together! Not to mention how there are native English speakers online that have a far worse grasp on the language than you do; compared to them I'd say you're really good.
As for advice abbout coming up with jokes: one thing that helps out a lot is watching\reading lots humorous stuff. This might seem obvious, but reading as much material you find funny as possible can rub off on you. If you try to consciously analyze what makes something funny to you, you can also come to better understand what makes humor work. Of course everyone has a different sense of humor (hell, the same jokes often don't even work across various cultures), but there are some general ideas you can base humor on, like spontaneity, the unexpected, shared experience, anomalies, contrast, irony, suverting expectations, schadenfreude, absurdity and so on. The world is also bafflingly weird around us, expecially in politics sometimes you just hear someting so illogical, hypocritical or outlandish you can't help but make fun of it. Of course pacing, delivery and developing a suitable style is also important, but I'll give my two cents about that a little later.
Exaggeration and caricatures are of course an essential tool of parody and satire, though the more political you're trying to get the more you have to watch out so you don't result to creating strawmen (purposefully misinterpreting someone's argument to make them seem dumber and their arguments easier to refute). Of one can't get rid of one's personal biases completely, it helps to base your political stuff at least at some level of objectivity. I find a good tool to avoid strawmanning in political humor is though looking at specific instances you find are contradictory or weird. No need to dumb their point down further when it's already pretty dumb!
At the risk of sounding like a self promoting shill, let's use this American liberal doodle of mine as an example:
Not because I think it's so good or anything, just because I have more insight to how it was conceived, since it's my very own shitty attempt at political humor.
Here I was poking fun an the hypocricy of how ironically similar the current (progressively more left leaning) liberals are adopting the sort of We're-the-good-guys, either-with-us-or-against-us mentality where everyone disagreeing with them is somehow a nazi, even though they were scoffing at the same mentality when it was utilized by their political opponents during the Bush administration of the 2000s. While probably not my funniest doodle, I think I did a decent job and presenting a contradiction, and avoided turning comedic exaggeration into strawmanning simply by sticking to what many social media virtue signallers (as well as a large chunk of mainstream television) are perpetuating. All I did was to sum up their talking points to stress the asurdity of it that they're trying to hide between lofty rhetorics and appealing to emotion. There's also a little inocography here and there as icing on the cake, though admittedly it's not necessarily very subtle. I guess part of the doodle's relative popularity comes with how it hits the mark of many people who might've experienced a similar problems (being called nazis for valuing civil discourse and not intantly bowing to their marxist overlords), though I like to think some of them have also found my comic funny, and don't just like it because they agree with me on this topic.
Using references can also be great tools to create a context to add extra layers to your humor, though it's a double-edged sword. References are great for those who are in it, but those who aren't familiar with that you're quoting can often find themselves in the dark. I'd say this is somewhat of a weakness of my more lolcow oriented stuff. Just to further shill a bit, there's another doodle of Andrew Dobson I did years ago:
In order to appreciate this doodle, you at least have to have some surface knowledge of both One Punch Man (Japanese show\comic about superhero in a yellow jump suit) and Dobson himself (whiny web cartoonist with a blue bear self-insert who cries about women being objectified in media while jacking it to them dying thought inflation). At best they might still find the weird imagery amusing, but at worst they might think it is unironic fetish fuel. Now imagine if I was actually doing intellectual stuff! That would be even more confusing.
Sometimes the jokes I make are born at the whim of a moment (like when joshing around with friends), sometimes they come after thinking about an issue and fidnign something off about it Sometimes they come in those pseudo-meditative moments in your life when you're just mind storming, like when you're half asleep, travel or go for a walk. Af for the latter drawing, you can bet your ass the first thing I had come up with the "One Pump Bear" pun first, and everything fell in place afterwards. Also, try to come up with stuff you find amusing. Some of my favorite stuff are doodles I had found myself giggling while thinking them up, and those tend to do relatively well if you give your all to presenting it.
In short, consume media and literature that makes you laugh and try to look at what makes them funny for you, and try to look at similar things in your lived experience and the world around you. Just like in art, practive makes master, don't be afraid of making a few shitty jokes before you start making the really good ones. Sometimes a joke can be incredibly funny simply on the basis of how bad it is. Basing it one lived experience, or on stuff that personally affects you, is always helpful as well. For almost half my life I had a horrible sense of humor, and it took me till I was 13 to finally start and develop jokes beyond crappy kiddy stuff.
As for art styles, I my advice is similar: look at artists, be they cartoonists or just people with a more stylized approach, and try to identify what you like about their art. Try emulating the parts of their style you like the most. Personally, I can tell you that my biggest infuences were Tom Bunk, Basil Wolverton, Todd McFarlane, Garisa Zsolt and Pierre Gilhodes as far as my more cartoonish art style goes. Your skill at drawing still life is great, can I assume that your knowledge on anatomy is also solid? That's a pretty strong advantage, since many noob artists think that the simplicity of a cartoonish approach means they can skip on learning anatomy or realism, even though all the really good cartoonists have a fundamental knowledge on anatomical correctness, so that they can deviate from realism more effectively. You might be able to produce cartoon art that looks good on the surface without knowing how to do realistic art, but a your art will be full of inconsistencies and mistakes if you don't have the fundamentals to build on. This is something I had to learn at my own expense as a teenager.
One could say that trying to find your own style is simply how yuo stylize realism, adn deviated from trying to represent stuff as literally as possible. Try to practife just drawing people. They don't have to be super detailed, but try to give them distinct shapes and make them look good at a glance. The more you draw the more you'll find little idiosyncracies that you enjoy recreating. You don't have to completely abandon realism, but a looser style will help you find what is unique about your art. If a more detailed approach is part of who you are as an artist, that's great. Also, don't be afraid to make mistakes. Mistakes are great because you can learn from them. Just look at some of my early drawings here at DA: they're embarassingly bad, but I needed those steps to become better, and while I still have many artistic shortcomings I'm also getting a little better step by step.
Sorry for the huge text, hope you can gets soething useful out of my ramblings. If you have any more specific questions I'll try to asnwer them to the best of my knowledge, though I'm sure you can find some good tutorials if you google some of the points from my rambling.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
I appreciate the help, this is gold TBH, every suggestion you gave me I will surely use it, right now I'm gathering material to keep practicing (oils, pastels, acrylics...) and in the meanwhile between practices I will be also reading and watching some cartoons (political satire, animated series, sketches...), I promise to upload every little thing, good or bad. Again thank you for all the tips you gave me!.
Edit: I don't think I'm good at anatomy but let's see what I can do.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Good luck with your artistic endeavor, looking forward to seeing your progress.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Your work is of a very excellent standard, but fine art is not what DA is about.
Perhaps go on a campaign of watching people on DA. They usually watch back.
This site works in a way where you must build your own base of viewers. People
who do not know you will not come running. You must make yourself known.
That is what I have found. Hope my advice helps.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Helps a lot indeed, thank you very much for the advice I'll keep drawing (not fine art, several other things of course).
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
My pleasure. You are a tremendous talent, and with the right amount of self-promotion...Your work will take off.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0