Reality is that CableBox's are does suck. So had mine. And so does every beginner's art. I used to have a Digital Design teacher who would tell that everyone's art was gonna suck beginning the school year. It wasn't because he was trying to be high and mighty and he looked down upon us, he was trying to give us the harsh reality that our art was terrible. Lucky for us, he taught us to be better at our art. Now some students did not get it right the first time. Some students were slower than others, but you can guarantee that those students gain something from their experience. Some figured out how to use a line of action. Others found some tools were much more useful than others. Some had discovered that this wasn't the profession that they were hoping for, and that's okay. Because if this person wants to survive in this unforgiving world, they have to improve their skills.
I gave some advice to CableBox to draw from "real" things. I wanted them to draw people, animals, places, and things, and not from something that doesn't exist. I appreciated the effort they made when they started to practice using stick figures and "skeletons" to improve their proportions. However, I was disappointed that they still were using their characters and style to draw, when they shouldn't be using them to begin with. No artists start off drawing cartoons or simple shapes and chibis. They start with nature. Nature is important to understanding the physical world an how it functions. If an artist can understand the functionality of nature, then they're gonna see some improvement in their drawings. In my Life drawing class, we usually drew real people. The were models (ugly ah), people that we could reference in our drawings. We used graphite pencil, charcoal, and other sketch material to capture the fluidity and motion of those people, who were kind enough to pose in such a way that it provided a challenge for the students. We never painted or colored these people in the way that artists in the renaissance era had done. All we drew was the form of the person, and that was it. The shading and the details came later, when we had finally gotten the form down. That art teacher made it important for his students to capture that movement and proportions down rather than detailing the entire body, because any detail added to an unfinished or poor form will result in a catastrophic piece.
Look at this picture for example. The drawing is obviously not finished, but do you see how the artist here started with simple lines, as it is apparent by the top of the head? The details were added much later, but you can see the roughness of the shirt and the perimeters of the entire head. Despite this, why do these two drawing look so despite being unfinished and a little sketchy? That is because Da Vinci put his focus on capturing the form of the head and the wrinkles and how they moved along the body first rather than trying to detail everything down in one take. If he had not started taking a look at these movements and the flow of the person's action, then his art would look stale and laughable. I greatly advise CableBox to start doing this rather than continue on with drawing more characters because if they don't want people to point out that their art is bad, then they should start practicing. And don't think that you will get it right the first time, because you won't. That's okay. Nobody gets it right the first time.
