The two hardest things you can do as an artists are 1) draw the same character from multiple positions, and 2) draw natural skin color (especially black). The latter problem has been solved by Photoshop, at least when drawing digitally. Just pull up a picture of a black person and extract the color. Puertorican skin tends to halve multiple tones.
But what about the former? Well, you're going to have to learn how to draw now. That is, if you ever want to animate your characters or create a comic book series. You have to be able to draw your character in all of his or her attendant moods, expressions, and states. You also have to be able to draw your character in all of the character-specific states of action. Think Heisman Trophy pose.
So how do I learn how to draw, you ask? There are three main ways to learn how to draw. There is tracing, the easiest and fastest way; reference drawing, which seems challenging at first, but can get frustrating; and my favorite method, freestyle, which is like trying to change the tracks on an Abrams tank during a three-way tank battle. You can use the first two "quick and dirty" methods if you wish, but you will soon discover that they don't make you better at drawing. That is, your images will only look good while you are actively using reference or tracing. As soon as the training wheels come off, so does your artistic ability. If you can't draw what you want to see with just a pencil, paper, sharpener and eraser, you're not an artist.
Since I was in the first grade, I have been obsessed with the concept of brain efficiency. That is, the optimum use of brain cells to achieve a certain goal. Using the least amount of hard drive space and processing power in your brain to do the most work. Naturally, this belief is anathema to universal educational concept of learning through repetition. It's probably no coincidence that I started using computers at the age of 4, in Rockwell Gardens.
The theory of learning through repetition, while novel, is extremely wasteful, wasting both time and brain cells that could be used for other things, or better yet, just conserved, like a protected wildlife habitat. Imagine if you wanted to play Star Wars Battlefront on your 5.0 GHz PC. Now imagine that you had to double-click the icon on your desktop 10,000 times to get it to load the program. Does that seem extreme? Imagine that you had to double-click the icon two times to get it to load. That would start one hell of a flame war in the forums.
Imagine that you had to buy thirty bananas a day to find three that were edible. Now imagine having to buy fifty bananas a day, for an entire month, just to find one that was edible. This type of waste is unprecedented, especially since knowledge has a shelf life, a scope and a category. What I mean by scope is that it takes a different set of skills to produce a retention arm for a CPU than it does to produce a RAM slot, or indeed the overall motherboard. The point is that we need a way for everyone to draw like Leonardo Da Vinci by downloading a program directly into their brains in five minutes.
Until then, we have repetition. Repetition is, regrettably, the only way to know how to draw. But there is hope. Since I was in the first grade, I could write better than Michael Jordan can write now. That was twenty-three years ago. When you're repeating every day, it might seem like it's taking forever, but just a few years of concentration can bring you decades of accomplishment. In other words, the wasteful practice of repetition does not pay for itself, but it gives you a sense of accomplishment, sort of like the U.S. economy.
But like the U.S. economy, learning to draw through repetition is extremely wasteful and must be done away with, or reduced. I have discovered my own way of learning to draw, called Hemistheory. It states that if you trace half of an image and draw the other half with no help at all, you will become more accurate and balanced in drawing more quickly than with any of the other three theories alone or in combination. Also, if you draw skewed like me, you will be able to see the skewed nature of your drawing if you practice by drawing half of your image with a home-made stencil (or tracing paper) and completing the rest in the Hemistheory style, which combines tracing, reference, freestyle drawing and deductive reasoning.
This theory is still in the early testing phases, but it's showing some promising initial results. We will probably never be able to download directly into our brains (legally), but I will look to reduce the amount of repetition necessary to learn the skills of an artist. What that means is that I will make many breakthroughs in the future, which should lead me to being a great artist. I do lift heavy weights during the week, and that sometimes decreases my artistic ability, so my results might be tainted by that fact. Some of the things that I've drawn look just phenomenal to me, but they come along once in a full moon. I need a bankable artistic skill set that will see me through.
My advice: let go of the training wheels of tracing and reference drawing and do more freestyle. My belief is that the human mind is precious, not a machine, and that hard drive space in the brain has to be preserved. Whenever you repeat something for memorization purposes, your brain tries to write in multiple places at once, but nothing sticks. 100 million brain cells hold a total of one tenth of the knowledge required to do work. It's like fishing with a nuke. Sooner or later you'll catch a fish, but also quite a few buffalo. I want to find a method so that all of the learned knowledge goes directly to the part of the brain that holds that information, and that the information is written to the brain with the most optimum amount of repetition, if any.
