Current mood:	curious
Entry tags:	drawing, drawing: meta, navel-gazing, poll, questions

still thinking about how to practice drawing...
...which of course conveniently procrastinates any actual drawing practice. *g*

Anyway, after my last post I thought a bit more about getting back into the habit of drawing regularly, and I don't think just looking for a random list of prompts somewhere is going to work for me. When talking about this in the comments of my previous post I realized that I'm kind of looking for the online equivalent of an informal drawing group.

I mean, if it was just about prompts I could take the fanart100 table or any other prompt list out there and simply try to do a drawing a day. The problem is that I don't really want to do a drawing prompted by "brown" or "middle" or whatever. And it's not that I don't have any ideas for art either, in fact I have a file with a whole list of fanart ideas I want to do eventually. The real problem is that I'm not practiced enough to make drawing my ideas effortless fun, so any elaborate thing, i.e. basically anything more challenging than a cartoon monster doodle, goes like this:

I have a cool idea, do some thumbnail doodling, realize that I have no idea how to draw that movement or expression or perspective etc, and I get stuck with the half-finished stick figure that pointed out to me that I fail at drawing a foreshortened hand or whatever else I'd need to make that drawing work. Then I get frustrated and get back to reading some fanfic instead. Some time later I gather my resolve and browse through drawing books to get a clue how to fix my problem or do a bunch of google image searches and browsing through books in the hope of finding some reference I could use, try again, fail again, get discouraged, do something else, rinse and repeat. Which kind of explains why I only post fanart every couple of months I guess.

I think to get back into drawing maybe something that would work somewhat like a classroom setting with drawing exercises might help, though not necessarily as formal. IIRC, the last time I managed to practice regularly was when I met weekly with a group of other people who also liked to draw for fun without being art students, and we just drew and practiced together. I'm guess I'm looking for the online equivalent. We'd meet, and posed for each other in different positions (with he clothes on though, heh *g*) or pick some chapter from a drawing book that explained something and practiced that, that kind of thing. There was no formal commitment or anything making drawing stressful homework because it wasn't an art class, and you theoretically you could just not draw or skip coming, but it still really worked as incentive. And this kind of "practice drawing" had a lower threshold for just sticking with a drawing than when I try to realize some idea and get frustrated and abandon it.

Obviously the practice posing part wouldn't work out so well online, but maybe the practicing together part could. Maybe if a few others are interested as well, a community like that could be feasible. I mean, I have a bunch of drawing books with exercise suggestions, and also some idea of things I just want to practice, but I rarely stick with doing any exercises alone, and I bet other artists also have a pile of both, so what if we collected these for the community?

Then once a week there'd be a mod post with say five drawing exercise suggestions for different "craft aspects" and artists could pick and choose one or more to do over the week (or don't do anything, it's not a challenge after all), and over time this way there would also accumulate a backlog of drawing exercises by topic as a resource. The themes could be things like anatomy, portraits, making humans look diverse (you know, not just drawing anatomy mannequin bodies when you draw from imagination rather than life), perspective, drawing emotions, different media, animals, landscapes, light and shadow, whatever, but a mix of topics each week and not too constraining. Maybe some of the prompts could come with links to online tutorials and stuff on specific topics, or page scans from the drawing books an exercise came from. And the community would be open to both fandom and original stuff, and to any level of elaborateness and skill or style, that is you could do just a quick doodle, or "real" drawings, whatever you feel like and fits the exercise.

It would be a bit of work initially to collect practice suggestions and put them online, but otoh it could work as incentive and be fun for people who'd like to practice but don't have the opportunity (or means or inclination) to be in actual RL drawing classes or take courses or meet with other hobby artists in RL or something like that to practice.

So I thought I could do a poll to gauge the interest in such a community (btw, if I were to create such a comm it would be most likely on IJ because of 6A/LJ's recent polices wrt artwork, that make me uncomfortable with the idea of creating a drawing community on LJ).

Poll #1049048
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Would you be interested in a community to practice drawing together?

Only answer this next poll if you answered "yes" or "maybe" in the previous one, since it's questions about how you'd like such a community set up if you were interested at all.

Poll #1049049
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Should the community just offer exercise prompts and leave it at that, or also some kind of option for group concrit of the results to better learn together?

Would you prefer such a community to be public or f-locked to members?

And should the membership be open (i.e. just a click to join, which of course makes any f-lock less useful against trolls and such) or only with mod approval?

Would you help coming up with topic/exercise suggestions?

And this may be premature, but in case that there's some interest, do you have any suggestions for a good community name?