If you want to disagree with someone it helps to find a statement that someone has actually said first?
Literally nobody has said that you should repeatedly draw the same thing and ignore criticism, what people have said is don't say you can't draw when you give up every time you try.

Everyone is basically saying 'keep doing art continuously', even your images pretty much say this, they do not allude at all to any form of learning or feedback to get better. I guarantee you will hardly improve if you (for example) just keep doing the same anime ♥♥♥♥ all the time. (well you might get better at drawing anime)

Fair enough, nobody actually said that you should blindly keep doing the same thing and I'm not really disagreeing with anyone here in particular; perhaps it should say "Well I agree that you should keep producing art but I do not think you should blindly keep pumping out work".

It really just feels like you are being pedantic just for the sake of picking a fight?
I mean in context we were all obviously telling people that they shouldn't just say "I can't art" and then give up. There were no other implications!

It seems sort of silly to start adding all this other stuff on top as if anyone has been misinforming anyone else!

Picking a fight? What? I was just offering extra advice, I even agreed with your point that perhaps it was worded incorrectly. I wasn't disagreeing with you, I was just saying that you should also strive to learn as much as possible as well because with only practice you will not really become a master.

I think there's a difference between doing something scientifically and doing it artisticly. What robolee is encouraging is for people to try and approach drawing scientifically and logically, which is probably most appropriate for people who find themselves unable to achieve it naturally. No matter what anyone says, there really are some people who can just do art, and they don't know how.

It doesn't just apply to drawing either. I've only been a musician for the past three years, and the only way I achieved it was by learning the rules and using them as a framework, whereas I see people achieve far better results without learning the rules in the first place.

Of course something made artisticly will still conform at least in part to the rules, and something made scientifically can still be art. The two sometimes aren't even distinguishable.

Actually what I would say is that people can only get better by approaching their drawings scientifically/logically, even if it seems like an artist is developing "naturally" they are still going through the same process of reviewing their art and comparing it to others, the difference is that they may not know the reasons that something looks better.

Imagine you are in the 10th century, you could make the best painting in the world but it may still not look believably realistic (for the sake of argument I'm assuming that a decent amount of realism is intended). Perspective and the way light interacted with people was just not understood and you wouldn't have that "better" painting to compare your work to either. Just look at some of these very early masterpieces: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... fixion.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... e_Magi.jpg Now tell me how the perspective seems to you. It's not right, nobody would say it's close to being right.

Describing modern art as objectively better than classical art is not going to earn you a lot of fans

If all you draw is anime stuff, then what's the problem?
And even if you don't "think" about how you're drawing your art, if you continue to do it you'll gradually see that one thing works better than another, doing a certain line in this way is better than that way, you can't shade something in a certain manner, etc.
Even if you don't break down and analyse your work, you get better just by doing it.

Just doing anime for 5 years will get you no closer being good.

"good" being what? It will get you no better at drawing realistic characters, but maybe you don't care about realistic characters. If all you cared about was drawing really damn good anime characters, then practicing anime for five years would be a good way to accomplish that.

Now, if you want to be a better artist overall, knowing many different styles, then yes sticking with one style forever will not accomplish that. That is a different goal, though.

yup ... fixed slightly would change the left foot but cba

Personally I view anime, cartoon and comic-book style art as either a simple technique to quickly show characters for short stories (manga, comics and comic strips) or a stepping stone phase towards better art. I think Arne even had an anime phase. But that's my personal opinion, the sheer influx of anime styled deviations submitted every month clearly shows that other people disagree. However you will never get into the top art colleges/universities with just anime work, it's simple and easy to learn after all like I said many people usually start learning to draw though one of the aforementioned styled, even the top concept artists probably went through either a cartoon or anime phase, I was drawing it what I was 12. That's why many people hate anime, it doesn't really require that much skill and there's just so much of it posted that you just start to hate it after a while.


I think that it may feel like you're "just doing it" but you are actually analysing it every time you experiment with/alter your process even if you aren't consciously thinking about how to improve. Also in your head you will constantly comparing it to others work and pulling up memories which you can work with when you are working on a piece. Trust me if you suddenly lived in total isolation (an empty void) you would not be able to significantly improve your art. You need to keep expanding your visual library and analysing objects and your own art if you want to improve, understanding the world around you helps you to better capture it in your art.

Hehe, I do love that nazi skeleton drawing

That's not really analyzing though, that's just a subconscious process of bettering. When I hear analyzing I think stopping, looking hard at what you've done, and trying to figure out how to do it better.
And just because anime style is simplistic doesn't mean it can't be damn good. Yes we're talking art, so personal taste and opinions become a factor, but that also means you can't just dismiss it as an inferior form of art just because it's easier.

Robolee that's an awesome drawing but the nose is weird compared to a normal human skull(It's looks like he had one nostril).

Remembered this on my USB drive.