I Tried To Learn How To Draw

The images linked here are a bit NSFW. I promise the reason for this is not trash and I will not show NSFW images here directly.

I suck at drawing.

I suck at drawing for the longest time. Growing up, art lessons have always been a pain - things I've put down with my pencil always looked like they're done by kids of single-digit age, which amounts to absolute trash when high school comes around. I bought a drawing tablet before back in uni, but I have only used it once or twice - the feeling of failing at something in the past has developed into the utter shame I now have whenever I try to draw something and it didn't come out the way I wish it to be.

And three days ago YouTube's algorithm decided that it's a good time to show me this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeeOqBmwvuY

You know what? Teaching myself Japanese has proved itself to be a worthy investment again and again throughout my life… from the video I've received probably some of the most important revelations to date on this topic:

  • Do not attempt (too hard) to draw the final lines in one go. Balance of the whole illustration is more important instead of the quality of lines.
  • Do not attempt to completely draw out of your imagination, especially for people who just started learning.
    • Don't be afraid of using references. Professionals use references too.
    • You think you can imagine how things look like, but you actually don't, because -
  • Sometimes when you go and draw what you've imagined in your head, you imagined them as symbols instead of actual images, thus you draw things as symbols instead of actual images, which more than often does not corresponds to how things actually look like in real life. Do not draw things as symbols, for you're not drawing symbols now - drawing is very much not-symbolic.

But how should I approach real-life images? The way I can imagine is to:

  • Pick two nearby points and draw the line between them.
  • Pick a third nearby point and estimate its relationship with the points and the line you've just drawn, mainly distance and angle.
  • Draw whatever lines you need to draw for that third point.
  • Pick another nearby point and repeat this process until you have a full image.

I happen to have a stash of human body images collected exactly as drawing references in the past; with this in mind, I picked a photo from the stash and produced this image. It's not without problems: I don't like how I did the right arm, the right shoulder and the hip, but this is leagues better than whatever I could draw before. If you brought this picture to 2024 me and told me that this is what I would've made within the first hour of starting to learn from a random YouTube video, I would not believe you one bit.

I then did a few more with different reference pictures:

  • a02.png
  • a03.png
    • (Possibly one of the best among these. The part above neck is actually slightly longer - this picture was taken using a phone instead of scanned, so the angle has slightly distorted things.)
  • b01.png
    • (I was quite happy with the right half of this one. The sukumizu turned out to be way better than I expected.)
  • c01.png
    • (I also tried to do a bit of shadowing. )
  • c02.png
    • (I tried to draw the left hand joints first and wrongly estimated the ratio.)

This, of course, is not the best way of doing things: if you can't find a good reference point within an area near enough, you'll have to regress into making estimations about long lines which I find to be much more error-prone. For example, I'm not quite happy with this one due to the points listed below:

  • Upper arm length;
  • Head size (and the neck);
  • Basically no solid structure starting from hip due to not having a reference point and having to freestyle it.

I'm also glad that my estimation is not that far from established canon in this sketch even if I'm doing it with a weird base: in the sketch I used the horizontal distance between the edge of left-side shoulder to the edge of left-side neck as the basic unit, because that's one of the easiest starting point of my process; with this the whole body works out to be roughly around 11 units, which roughly translates to 7.5 heads. (I would be learning this again properly in the future; I doubt my unit would be as solid and/or universal.)

You might have noticed that almost none of the images I've included here has a head with a properly-drawn face. One of the reasons why is that nearly all of my reference images are cropped at the head or have the faces blurred out; another reason is that I'm still very afraid of drawing faces: it's one of the areas where mistakes can have the most catastrophic effect on the overall look of the image, it's arguably more complex than the rough shape of bodies, and how you do things (e.g. ratios and things) can be vastly different between drawing real people and anime characters. Unfortunately the learning of this part would have to wait - I've got other unrelated things going on…

The most important part of all this is that I regained the previously non-existent confidence I should've had, even if just a little bit. I've always been bad at pushing through the shame of not doing a good-enough job…

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Last update: 2025.11.05