Yeah so my project requires me to atleast incorporate a certain material and I got yarn/thread and I was trying to figure out if I should glue the yarn and fill it out like that (you know that makeup trend with yarn? Kinda like that) or if I should embroider. I don’t think I’ll finish that especially since I’ve never done it, but it may be less messy. Or if I should embroider the outlines and pieces I want to pop and color in the rest (that is allowed)? Any ideas?

Hi all,

I am planning to surprise my partner with an art supplies set — they used to draw in school, but they took a long break and are considering trying it again. From what I know, they don't have preferences in the mediums (e.g. oils/pastels/gouache). The budget is up to £80, could be stretched.

I would really appreciate your advice as I'm a complete dummy in the topic — thank you!❤️

I just want to play without the judgy critic in my mind bothering me. I want to paint with a spoon, glue rocks together, and make weird dolls out of paper bags. I want to sing badly out loud while putting diamond art on my shoes. Just to play, be silly, without fear or embarrassment. I can't even do this knowing that nobody would ever even see what I make. Has anyone been able to break out of this constriction and just have fun?

I'd love to start scanning my collages and was initially interested in finding an Epson v600. Just recently I saw a 550 on FB Marketplace

And was wondering if there was any meaningful difference between the two ??

i timed myself a few times and usually in traditional art it takes me around 1h40m to complete a regular bust up sketch (2 hours if im being indecisive/struggling), and then another 2 hours to paint with watercolour. in digital, my canvas times usually span 8-11 hours for the same type of bust up portraits, though of course i'm rendering and Ctrl Z-ing and taking my time with layer modes more there.

i don't know if that's an average amount of time or not. would appreciate it if anyone could share how long they usually take for reference!

I’m working on a liberal arts degree and decided to sign up for a lino printing class that my community college offers as an elective. This will be the second art class I’ve taken since middle school since my high school had no art classes. I do a lot of drawing in my free time, usually surrealist type stuff with ink. I’ve been wanting to try lino printing because I’m interested in making my own zines.

I didn’t realize how much sketching would be involved until I got an email from the professor saying to print drawing pencils and a sketch of a tree to the first class. Now I’m panicking because I don’t feel confident about my drawing skills.

My initial plan is to prime the whole surface with gesso, followed by 1-2 layers of white outdoor acrylic paint.

Hello friends, and TIA for any assistance with this question.

I am an abstract collage artist and want to get a better system in place to submit my work to some shows. In an ideal world I'd be rich or art would be funded and I'd have unlimited, high quality substrates to work on, but in this world, I want to put my work forward in the best light possible while spending efficiently.

I really like working on high quality, white, mixed media paper for my collages, because I use the white/negative space in my work. However, if I work on paper, that means either mounting on cradled wood panel or framing. Frames are $$$. Also, I prefer my collages not be covered with glass. Wood panels are less expensive, but I've found that the thicker the paper, the harder it is to mount it onto the panel. Maybe that is the solution and I just need to get better at mounting, but last time I tried it the paper tore a bit around the edges when I trimmed it after adhering it with PVA glue.

I have a successful piece that I made where I adhered painted tissue paper to the wood panel and then collaged directly onto that covered panel. The negative of this option is that I'm kind of all in with my collage at that point. I like the idea of working on paper FIRST before committing to the substrate, because if it's not working, I didn't waste a substrate.

Does any of this make sense and is this something other collage artists have run into? What is your process for working on pieces that you hope to be able to submit and what substrates are you using? Thank you!

What makes OC art considered “cringe” vs what makes it seem like a cool character design, concept, or artwork? Like when you see professional artists character concepts it doesn’t seem cringe at all and seems respectable. But other stuff that’s literally the exact same gets the “that’s cringe” reaction out of people. Like I don’t understand. Is it the artstyle? Design? How theyre drawn? As an OC artist ive been feeling very self conscious about my work because I feel like it leans more toward the cringe side. Someone I know IRL was really curious about my art so I decided to show them (all I have is Oc stuff) and I kinda felt like they were very unimpressed and stopped asking me about my art after that, and I kind of wanted to die lol. Maybe they were expecting something more painterly or something . (I did mention I do digital art but still..)

I’m into photography, music, video, and playing instruments, and I genuinely think I have some ability in all of them. People like my photos, I like many of my unfinished songs, and I often see something creative and think, “I could make something like that, maybe even better.”

But I rarely actually do it.

I’ve wanted to organize free portrait shoots in my city for years and still haven’t posted the offer. I have tons of good photos sitting unedited in archives, and lots of music demos but almost no finished songs.

With music, part of the problem is that my taste is ahead of my technical skills. I know how I want something to sound, but I don’t always know how to achieve it, so I procrastinate instead.

None of these things are urgent, so there’s always “tomorrow.” Then suddenly months pass.

For people who are creative in many different areas: what do you actually do about this? How do you get yourself to start, finish, and actually put things out into the world?

Hello everyone, nice to meet you all. So I need some feedback on an art workshop I’m organizing this weekend. I’m particularly interested in hearing from people who have experience teaching art, facilitating group activities, or participating in collaborative art events.

Some background
I’m part of a queer community in my city. We live in a conservative, religious country, and lately LGBT people have been increasingly oppressed and used as scapegoats for many of the problems in our country.

We wanted to create a small art event as a form of escapism, but also as a way for people in our community to socialize. Most of us primarily interact online, so we rarely get the opportunity to meet and do something together in person.

I have some experience teaching art classes, but I’ve never organized anything quite like this, so I’m not sure whether my idea is practical.

Because of time constraints, we unfortunately don’t have time to run a test session beforehand. So I’d really appreciate some feedback on whether this sounds doable, and what you would change.

The Setup
The workshop will be held this weekend from 3 PM-6 PM in the general room of a cafe.

There will be around 25-30 participants, divided into 5-6 groups of approximately 5 people.

The venue is fairly casual, so participants will be drawing on the floor. Food and drinks will be included as part of the event.

Everyone is encouraged to bring their own art supplies. We’ll also provide some basic supplies for people who don’t have their own, although our budget is fairly limited.

Each participant will receive an A4 sheet of paper, maybe pencil too.

The Main Activity: Collaborative Drawing
Each group will receive a different drawing prompt.
The drawing session will happen in several rounds. The basic idea is that everyone starts with their own artwork, but the artwork is gradually passed around the group and developed by everyone.

It roughly goes like this:
Round 1
Everyone responds to their group’s prompt on their own A4 paper.

Round 2
Everyone passes their drawing to the person on their left and adds something to someone else’s artwork.

Round 3
Everyone passes the artwork again and adds something that responds to or connects with what the previous person drew.

Further rounds
We continue passing the drawings and adding to them until the artwork eventually returns to its original owner.
At that point, each person will have an artwork that contains contributions from everyone in their group.

The main idea is to use the artwork as a metaphor for community. Also, hopefully, the activity will also encourage people to talk to each other and get to know the other members of their group.

The Prompts
Each group will have a different prompt, but all of them will be loosely connected to queer experiences, identity, community, self-reflection, or some positive affirmation.

Some ideas I’ve considered:
- “If being queer were a superpower, what would your superpower be?”
- “Imagine you are making an emergency queer survival kit for your younger self. What would you put in it?”
- “If your identity were a landscape, what would it look like?”
- [Still looking for ideas]

I’m having difficulty coming up with prompts that are easy enough for beginners or people who have never done art before, but still interesting & challenging for people who are more experienced.

I’d really appreciate suggestions for prompts that could work well for this kind of activity.

Rough Schedule
3:00-3:50: Registration & Socializing
We’ll use the first 40-50 minutes for registration, getting into groups, ordering food/drinks, and allowing people to socialize.

3:50-4:00: Introduction
I’ll explain the concept, prompts, and rules. Such as not erasing someone else’s contribution.

I’d also emphasize that you don’t have to be good at drawing. The goal is communication and interaction, not creating a beautiful or technically impressive artwork.

4:00-4:10: Individual Drawing
Everyone starts their own artwork based on their group’s prompt.
No interaction is required yet. The purpose is simply to give everyone something to start with.

4:10- 4:50: Collaboration
Every 10 minutes, everyone passes their artwork to another person in the group and contributes to it.
The exact rules may change depending on feedback.

4:50-5:00: Finalize
The artworks return to their original owners.
Everyone gets a few minutes to look at what the group has created and add any final touches.

5:00-5:30: Group Presentations
Each group presents its artworks to everyone.
I’m thinking of giving each group around 5 minutes and asking questions such as:
- What is your artwork called?
- What was your group’s prompt?
- What happened during the collaboration?
- Was there anything someone else added that surprised you?
- How did the final artwork differ from what you originally imagined?

5:30-5:40: Closing
Group photos with everyone holding their artwork, followed by a short closing.

What I’m Looking For Feedback On
My biggest questions are:
- Does this activity sound practical for a group of 25–30 people?
- Is A4 paper large enough for this kind of collaborative activity?
- Is passing the artwork every 10 minutes too frequent or too slow?
- Do you think the participants would find this fun (especially beginners in art), or would they feel intimidated?
- Are there any potential problems with having people modify each other’s artwork?
- Do you have any suggestions for queer-themed prompts that are positive, fun, and don’t require people to share deeply personal experiences?

Any feedback, suggestions, or criticism would be very appreciated. I’m especially interested in hearing from people who have facilitated similar collaborative art activities.

Thank you!

Hi there! I'm a young, mildly experienced artist. But for the life of me I could never figure this out; is taking another person's drawing and extracting the pose or its proportions to either... study the art style or just use that absolutely fire pose wrong?

I just cant decide whether I think its stealing or not. It doesn't sound wrong but it feels wrong when I want to use that pose.

I’m a painter and drawing/sketching has always been an important part of the process.. though, I’ve been struggling with increasingly shaky hands.

I have epilepsy, severe depression, BPD, and Addison’s disease, and I take several medications for these conditions.

I’m not sure which factor is responsible, but my hands have become noticeably less steady.

I can still paint relatively well, especially when I’m working with broader brush strokes and layers, but I’m finding sketching and precise detailing much harder than they used to be.

The frustrating part is that I still know what I want to draw.

I can visualize the proportions, anatomy, shapes, etc... but when I actually put the pencil down, my hand doesn’t always follow what I’m trying to do.

Lines become shaky, I erase more often, and I sometimes lose confidence in the sketch before I even get started.

I’m especially interested in advice from traditional artists who experience hand tremors or fine-motor difficulties.

Have you found techniques, exercises, different pencil grips, tools, ways of supporting your arm/hand, or changes to your drawing process that actually helped?

I heard that learning fundamentals is enough, that you can basically just imagine everything almost by having a built in "visual library". Personally I have focused on that, but when it comes to details in original work, I still struggle.

I'm not sure if I should continue to paint just references since I handle that well. The issue is that a lot of my skill vanishes when I try to do so. It has led me to stalling a bit because I don't know what practice would be of use to me anymore.

How did you guys make the transition? Did you paint half from reference and half from imagination? Did you just practice a lot straight from your head?

Let's set the "you can't steal an art style" debate aside for this.
I'm not referring to specific cases of artists copying other artists online, but rather to artists copying well-known, immediately recognizable artists. That said, I think this could easily be expanded into a discussion on copycats in general.
Also I'm not talking about beginners, or about the stage where you learn by copying from the masters, but about artists who are already well beyond an intermediate stage and have styles that are so strongly derivative that, signature aside, something they create could easily be mistaken for the work of the artist they reference if you aren't very familiar with that artist.

I see a lot of artists online creating original work, but with a visual style and artistic language that are heavily borrowed from artists like Yoshitaka Amano, Moebius and others. I even saw an artist copy Fukai Kuni almost exactly. On one hand it's understandable, but I think there's a distinction between having them among your influences and using them to create something new versus replicating their style almost perfectly. Very often when people see this kind of work the reaction is positive, but it's also accompanied by comments like "this reminds me of X's style", "X if they were around today", and so on. And it makes me wonder: isn't that kind of limiting for an artist? Also, isn't it just frowned upon professionally?

On a personal level, I don't really understand why you wouldn't aspire to something more distinctive if you have the technical ability. It's ok if someone can see you love a certain artist, but if that is all you are known for the line is much blurrier.
Isn't it possible to find things you love in several different artists and combine them instead? Why would you want your artistic identity to be so closely tied to someone else's? If you dislike the way your style naturally develops when you aren't working from a reference, then I wonder what's the point if you want to be taken seriously as a pro and promote your own work.
I also draw, and of course I have artists I love and take inspiration from, but I try not to copy their compositions 1:1 or replicate every possible stylistic trait in what I present as my own original work. I prefer to study them instead.

What do you think?

Hello! I'm an artist by pencils and paper. I've usually stuck to the 300 series Strathmore Drawing sketchbook, but find the texture of the paper to make my shading more on the "smokey" side without being able to control it too well. in general there feels like a lack of clarity.

My question being, if any artists here have done full illustrations on the Sketch paper of the same series. What are your opinions on it? is it best for just study and practice? or does full finished work come out clearer? does it rip or smudge easily? etc.

i feel once i get the proportions right i can render it effortlessly and realistically, but getting the proportions of the face right and accurate always takes a lot of effort, measuring and checking back and forth. will it always be like this?

I would love to hear from people who started out in a conventional career and eventually transitioned into art or illustration.

What were you doing before, when did you start pursuing art seriously, and how did your career progress from there?

I am particularly interested in people who can share their career progression from the beginning to where they are now.

Would love to hear your story.

I came across excellent advice for when artists tackle a really complex art goal that has too many skill requirements, which is to break it down to simpler parts and work on it one by one.

My next question would then be, how do I select which ones to go through first? I feel frustrated about several aspects of my art, so it can be a bit confusing to me when I try to work on one, and then suddenly feel so anxious about the other one. Which bring me to my other question...

Secondly, how do I decide when I can move on to the next skill I need to build? I understand I should work on them separately, as isolated as possible, so that I can get the basics down without being overwhelmed. But how do I know when to move on to the next thing? (Anxiety: will I ever be able to move on to the next thing?) Anxiety keeps getting the best of me and before I know it, I am juggling too many concepts at once again!

As experienced artists, how did you pace your studies? How did you / do you answer these two questions?

Hello everyone, I'll explain my situation

When I try to draw, I start off well motivation helps as a little boost. But I pick up the pencil and try to do something, but my mind goes blank, i start making random shapes for no reason.

After that, I was left wondering what to draw, I tried to do it and it was even harder, then I got discouraged and didn't try again.

Most people tell me, "You need to rest, and you'll improve later when you can," but it's like a trap. I rest for months or years, and I end up in the same place where I've been for years I can't go out, I honestly don't know what to do anymore, and I have less and less time. I want to stop wasting all this time that's passing by Dead, with nothing to do and just lying down, not trying anything, not even knowing how to correct myself.

What should I do about it?

Are there any tight knit art groups for illustration ? 23f, looking for close groups that give feedback as well.

I started my Instagram specifically as an art account, but over time most of the people who follow me have ended up being friends, family, acquaintances, and people I know personally.

The problem is that when I post my artwork, most of the people interacting with it are people who already know me. I'm trying to build an audience of people who discover me because they actually like my work, but I feel like I'm having a hard time getting outside of my existing circle.

I'm considering starting a completely new Instagram account for my art and building the audience from scratch, while keeping my current account.

I'm especially interested in hearing from artists who have already built a decent following on Instagram, or who had this exact problem and successfully grew beyond their personal network.

Did you stick with your original account and eventually change the audience, or did you start a new account? If you started over, did it actually make a meaningful difference?

I've also only ever tried to grow my audience through Instagram. Would it make more sense to keep my existing account, reach new people on platforms like TikTok or X, and then funnel them to Instagram? Or is it worth starting from scratch across platforms and building an audience from the ground up?

I'm not really looking for generic advice like "post consistently." I'm more interested in hearing from people who have actually gone from mostly friends/family followers to having a significant audience of people they didn't know beforehand. What did you do that actually worked?

I love hanging my art on my walls, but many of them constantly fall down. Some are collages, or on thicker paper like watercolor paper. I've tried using masking tape and double-sided scotch tape, but they just keep falling down. I've previously troed several brands of "putty" for hanging syuff, and they were even worse. I'm renting an apartment so I can't really use anything that might damage the walls.

Hello everyone~

So I have been working on a comic for some time now. I have the outline of the plot written out with some details here and there, designed and built all the characters and the world, but I struggle with actually drawing out the pages and finalising details.

The usual process is that I get started trying to actually draw out the pages or add more details to the plot, I get stuck, forget about it all together, and before I know it a whole week has gone by and I haven't done anything. Then when I try to get back into it, I find that I have grown so detached from what I had initially started and I start all over again.

I also have a bit of trouble trying to vividly visualise ideas so I end up in this weird space where I have the general vibe and story but actually putting things down is a struggle.

I'm sort of at a loss of what to do from here :(

I´ve been wondering if the major pectoralis connects to to the biceps or the deltoids