Legos How-tos

[Suuper-san]

Woah don't go jumping the gun with imagining 30% haha that's a huge amount lol
I would say my plan itself is maybe 10% complete, with less than 0.1% executed. I don't even have a way to measure completion or progress at all yet. I don't even actually have a planned output for the masterplan, like illustrations or manga or what, it's just a super method at this point.

I'll have to get back to you on a prediction for the millennial regime, but I'm imagining if you funneled your time 100% into regime work then you'd probably do more than 1 a month. I'm aiming at a 100 hour a month routine (I can dream can't I?), which means 6 minutes per sketch if you're doing 1 regime a month. Now most regimes possibly don't take that long per sketch, so basically whatever your individual sketch time is compared to your daily output will affect the rate. So maybe 3 a month is possible at a breakneck pace, for 20+ years lol. Man let that sink in.

For starters can you even imagine 1000 regime themes? You can break down a concept like 1000 animals and make it 1000 cats, 1000 dogs, 1000 hamsters etc but I don't quite feel that's how it's meant to work. It'll work of course, but strangely. Like, there ought to be shading regimes and perspective regimes, every sort of skill that there is in art, as a regime.

Don't forget writing regimes too. They'll be longer, possibly. Unless it's like 1000 prompts haha

I get the feeling we're vaguely walking on the edge of brilliance and stupidity at the same time.

[legomaestro]

It took me ages to even approach this, because it's one of the greatest questions ever - except I am still trying to answer it.

Regimens fail exactly because of that 'cats, dogs, hamsters' aspect: Inevetibly one will zoom in on something that doesn't cover 'Everything.'

I think that's why people push for anatomy. If you seriously legitimately learnt every human bone, blood vessel and cell and learnt to draw and illustrate all of them, then that alone is a regimen of a lifetime.

That is where I find hope in the random selection of 1,000 regimens. You'll totally ignore the ability to draw other things, but I think it's impossible to learn and draw one thing many times without learning other things along the way. With my 10,000 Cubes regimen I learnt a little bit of dedication. With my hands regimen I got into a lot of interesting conversations with a lot of interesting people and even got a VIP dinner for all the trouble haha. My goal was to learn to draw hands, but I learnt and experienced much more than the regimen itself.

Going back to our goal to 'git gud' at art though, regimens have a huge flaw for sure. They're not even studies in the real sense of the word. At the very least every 1,000 should be divided into 10s or 100s and what-not.

I have absolutely no idea how that could look, but I'm going to do a couple more of them and then share my results. I hope I fail miserably, because then I'll have more to report on what NOT to do, and that is oh so useful in learning how actually to do stuff haha.



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How To Draw With Scribbles: A Tutorial for when you have no motivation

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I did it with my left hand to emulate chaos, but truly when I'm in a truly 'I don't want to draw' mood I channel emotions basically. The scribbles are much wilder and crazier - and that is fodder for a potential future drawing

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I am a total hyprocrite on this front, but basically the thing about having no motivation and scribbling is this: You can still physically, mechanically draw. Scribbles are a compromise because you don't have to think about planning a great drawing or a great thing, you just scribble. When you are at zero motivation your problem is not that you don't want to draw - it's that you have a much higher standard than the thing that you want to draw. But if you're drawing nothing, then there's nothing to stress about, is there? And if it's nothing, then there's no need to delete it, is there?

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As humans we all enjoy drawings of humans or portraits. You can use scribbles as an excercise in gravity and space. Turn the scribble into a head with legs landing on the ground. Don't think 3d, just make that stickman jump or land on the ground properly! That's all!

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Basically reiterating the point: Even when you don't feel like drawing and everything sucks, just scribble. Also, digital drawing has one huge negative: You sit in front of a screen and feel pressured to do something serious.

Scrap paper, cartons are your friends. Collect a couple of ballpoint pens and pencils that you have in your pockets, find some sticky notes, some crappy paper that is always ready to work with and SCRIBBLE. Don't draw, scribble. Save the paper for later. Draw stickmen on the paper later when you feel like it. Ignore it, but never throw it away or burn it.


So long as stylus/pencil is hitting a surface, you are drawing and working at it.


Hope this helps!

[Suuper-san]

Yeah regime content has been a worry of mine for a while. Generally I group large categories together and only break them apart once I have sufficiently gained the skill where I can see the differences. Like vehicles will be grouped together until I start to focus on getting motorbikes really good, then I will study that separately.

I use Google a lot to get the reference images I need, and I try and get an even amount of all different types so that I have a broad input of information. Often I google "Types of vehicle", or "types of flower" instead of trying to get each type individually and I'll find a collage image with 20 or 50 different labelled types. So that makes for a good study page.

I can say from experience that skills definitely overflow from one thing to the next, and to that extent, you probably don't need to study every single thing to the same level, because a lot of the information overlaps. Like after drawing 1000 dogs, the chances are you have learnt to draw fur better, and then when drawing 1000 cats you already have a decent way of drawing fur so you can focus on other smaller details. Same with buildings etc, and pretty much everything.

I would love to hear your feedback on your idea there, it sounds like it could be quite successful.


And that's an absolutely fantastic suggestion for dealing with no motivation!

I would say I'm adding it to my to-do list, but it's actually one of the things I'm doing already! It's a different style to your method but the intention is the same, to get started, and in any form.

Here's how mine looks. The conditions are that I have to draw as fast as I can (at least, not carefully), and as big as I can, so I'm normally zoomed in quite far into the page. Typically circles, triangles and squares are the go-to shapes, although I occasionally draw something 3d. I'm planning on using quite a bit of these as inspiration for my in-universe logos for companies and brands and stuff.
Also the really pointy star pom-pom shapes are a calibration exercise, I draw 4 lines from the center, and then I try and draw lines in between those, and then lines in between those, etc. So it gets harder and harder to keep inside the lines.


I find I very rarely lack motivation to draw, but often I lack the mental energy to deal with creating new sketches, or working to a high skill level like linearts. I've found though, that the feeling is very similar to waking up in the morning - you know that once you get up, in 5 minutes you'll be functioning and doing stuff, but it totally doesnt feel like that's the case when you're wrapped up half asleep in bed. Once I get started on ony of my sketch or WIP pages, even higher level pages like linearts, within 5 minutes my focus picks up and my skill picks up to the required level. But making that jump when you can't imagine having the energy is a huge leap of faith.

It's among the reasons that we can always wake up to go to work no matter how tired we are, because it has to be done. Generating that level of mentality for a personal project that has no consequences if you don't work on it that one time, is very difficult. Even as high powered as I am, I'm still only 50% efficient with my time at the absolute best of times, and within that 50%, I'm only 50% maximum productive. So in a full 16 hour day, at my very best, I'll produce 4 hours of work, in 8 hours of actual work. Makes me angry lol.

For me, I need more structure when I sketch, so I find it quite difficult to take a random scribble and turn it into a character. (That's probably a skill I need to learn). But precisely because I need more structure, I need to have a structured method in place that I can use when I don't feel motivation. Which is exactly what I have. My default go-to half-finished GIMP page is always there for me to open and just draw anything. And I have my first version of my drawing prompt program pop up automatically by the side, to give me a theme or idea.
I also have a WIP page of just headshots that I have drawn previously which helps to give me a starting point for a new sketch. I usually start every day by drawing a couple more characters in that page too.

Working in your absolute comfort zone is a really good piece of advice. Often artists are recommended to work outside of their comfort zone to gain experience and skill, but on days when you're low on energy and motivation, that's not what you need to get started, you want to work with what comes most easily, and like a warmup, you'll get into it and then you can work on being outside of your comfort zone. I have a comfort zone page for sketching, because then I dont feel the pressure to draw things unique or special like in my normal page. But ironically I often end up drawing very similar things. It's the tiny action of moving from not-drawing, to drawing, that makes the huge difference.

So long as stylus/pencil is hitting a surface, you are drawing and working at it.

I cannot agree enough, this is the one piece of advice that must be given to beginner artists. JUST DRAW.

I always remember this comic when I think of "just draw"


Sorry for the wall of text haha