Ask HN: How to learn new things better?
With any new skill you need to be willing to sink a lot of time into it. And you need to be fine with being <i>absolutely terrible</i> at it in the beginning.<p>I usually tell people who want to learn to draw to go to <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;johnkcurriculum.blogspot.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;12&#x2F;preston-blair-lessons-fundamentals-of.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;johnkcurriculum.blogspot.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;12&#x2F;preston-blair-le...</a>, get the Preston Blair book, and start doing these exercises by master animator John K (creator of &#x27;Ren &amp; Stimpy&#x27;). You will get a lot better, a lot faster. These exercises focus on simple cartoon characters who wear a lot of their construction on the outside; once you can draw cartoon characters, you can keep drawing more of them if that&#x27;s your thing, or you can build on top of that and start learning anatomy and drawing more complicated characters. (Or do both.)<p>There&#x27;s other well-regarded drawing courses on the internet and someday I should probably pick a new one to send noobs to, what with John K kind of being an asshole - but I learnt a hell of a lot when I worked under him, and he is really good at teaching this stuff.<p>Most of what I know about drawing more complicated figures came from a combination of Bridgeman&#x27;s &quot;Constructive Anatomy&quot; and Loomis&#x27; &quot;Figure Drawing for All It&#x27;s Worth&quot;, and a life drawing teacher who hewed very closely to Glen Vilppu&#x27;s drawing manual. If you can fit some life drawing classes into your life then TAKE them, you will learn a ton.<p>Also: Make a space in your life to do this. I ride the bus a lot, and before the advent of smartphones, I&#x27;d have little to do to amuse myself besides stare out of the window, read a book, or pull my sketchbook out and draw. Maybe draw some idea floating around my head, maybe draw something I glimpsed out the bus window, maybe something based on my fellow passengers, maybe just some cubes, or the hand I wasn&#x27;t drawing with. I got a lot of practice in without feeling like I was making myself &quot;practice&quot;. Whatever you may be learning, if you regularly drop yourself into a time and place with nothing much to do besides the thing you wanna learn, then you&#x27;ll do it more often.<p>Don&#x27;t blow several hundred bucks on a ton of paints, or on pro software and a Wacom tablet. Just start with a few hardback sketchbooks and some pens and pencils. Oh, and not mechanical pencils. Just grab like a pack of Ticonderoga 2.5Bs, they&#x27;re cheap and pretty good. And try holding them so that the <i>side</i> of the point addresses the paper for a lot of the beginning of your drawing; this will do several things for you:<p>* it will train you to keep your wrist fairly steady, and to draw more with your entire arm; keeping your wrist straight and steady will help keep the Carpal Tunnel Fairy away.
* it will make your initial lines light, and prone to fade away as your hand brushes the paper; this keeps you from bearing down to gouge an impossible-to-erase line in the paper, and gives you more room to make mistakes before having a dark, illegible mess of lines you can&#x27;t draw over.<p>Don&#x27;t get lost in trying to save a drawing, either. Paper&#x27;s cheap, turn the page and try the same subject again, or a new one.<p>When you make a picture you like, hang it over your drawing board, turn it into your computer&#x27;s backdrop, and keep trying to draw something better than it. You may find yourself hating it because you start seeing all the mistakes. That&#x27;s great - go draw something new that doesn&#x27;t make those! (This may take many tries, some mistakes are harder to stop making than others.)<p>Don&#x27;t worry about &quot;your style&quot;. If someone points out a mistake in your drawing and you find yourself wanting to say &quot;but that&#x27;s my style!&quot;, then you are just covering up your weaknesses unless you can actually sit down and bust out a version of the drawing that Does It Right. When you can do that you can legitimately say &quot;dis mah style&quot;. Steal stylizations from artists you love (you&#x27;re looking at other people&#x27;s art, right? A lot?), make your own based on reality.<p>You will find a lot of people declaring &quot;rules&quot; of drawing. Always do this, never do that. The truth of the matter (IMHO) is that <i>all rules of art are actually just warnings:</i> &quot;never do this&quot; really means &quot;if you do this without thinking about what you&#x27;re doing it&#x27;ll probably turn out badly&quot;. Know the rules, know which ones you&#x27;re breaking, and break the <i>fuck</i> out of them while staying well within the boundaries of the other rules you know.<p>(I spent a decade in the LA animation scene, then burnt out and draw comics now. If you wanna look at my work to decide if I&#x27;m someone who you should listen to in this, it&#x27;s all at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;egypt.urnash.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;egypt.urnash.com</a>)