Post your writing/drawing tips here!
All of us here either are or have the potential to be good artists or authors, and pooling our knowledge and helping each other can only improve our work. Share the secrets of your success with us!
Drawing tips:
Don't be afraid to use an existing picture as a model or a base. But never blatantly rip off someone else's pic.
Black and white can be more effective than colour.
Keep more than one pencil, and keep at least one sharp and at least one blunt. Use the sharp one for fine detail and narrow lines, and use the blunt one for shading; you'll automatically press less hard and you'll get a softer texture.
Erasers: have two. Keep one in an old film canister (or its own plastic holder if you have one of those funky ones), to keep it clean and fresh. Use it when you want to totally obliterate something. Keep another one in a case full of pencils that you use a lot, and in a few weeks it'll become nice and grubby with pencil graphite. Use it when you want to smooth out scribbly lines or blocks of shading. It'll smooth out the graphite on the paper without erasing it.
Draw a basic outline and decide where all the body parts and props are going to go before adding detail.
Think about lighting, and where all the shadows will be. If you're good at sculpting, you could make a basic clay model, and position it in various light sources to see where the light hits it and where the shadows go.
For highlights, or to show that something is wet, try shading the whole area, and then rubbing out where the highlights will go with your clean rubber.
For fur, once I've drawn the outline, I go over it, but with a slightly jagged/wavy line, then put in individual fur strands along the outline with short, sweeping pencil strokes.
Make sure you've got something to lean on and are comfy. I do my best drawings sat on my bed with the warm sunshine pouring softly through my window and a friendly cat nearby.
Writing Tips:
Make sure it's still good even without the adjectives.
Be creative but not pretentious with vocabulary.
Chek you spelin. If you make a lot of typos, people may think that you can't spell, are inattentive to detail or don't check your work. Same goes for grammar.
It's often easier to think of a plot, and then think of what the characters are like.
Begin writing a little of the story before writing a character profile, so you can see how the character actually works in action.
Ideally, stories should be most enjoyable when read in sequence, but the key to a good sequel is creating a good story, with the same characters as the previous one, that stands up on its own and does not lean to heavily on its precursors. Always assume that the readers will not have read any of the previous stuff.
Tips in general:
Keep practicing. Compare my first picture topic with my third, and even though there's only a few months' difference, there's a huge improvement. I love drawing, and I didn't stop.
Everyone has their own style. Keep trying until you find yours (it's ok to borrow bits of other peoples' until you get there).
Draw/write what YOU want. It is better to write/draw for yourself and have no public, than to write/draw for the public and have no self. I have plenty of pictures and pieces of writing that I made purely for my own enjoyment.
Do it again until you're happy with it. If you call it 'finished' even though you don't like it, that's wrong. If you really can't be bothered to work on it any more, discard it or come back to it another day.
Don't compare yourself to others. You'll only make yourself sad if you find someone's work that you think is 'better' than yours. This is not a competition. This is ART. There is no right or wrong way.
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Hand me my flamethrower... it's the one that says 'Bad Motherfucker'.
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