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Should I go digital or traditional

Okay let me be 100% clear before I say this, learning to draw digitally or traditionally largely doesn't matter which one you choose. With that said, you should learn to draw traditional up until the first time that you don't see flaws in your art anymore. The reason for this is digitally the way you make art could fundamentally change within five years, however traditionally we have thousands of years of research already put into drawing, painting, putting the medium onto whatever the fuck you want to put the medium onto. What I'm saying is in five years digitally you might not use a pen, making all of the strides you gone through to learn digital art useless and possibly nontransferable, however learning traditionally you can transfer your knowledge to digital fairly easily.

The only downside learning traditionally is cost if you want to learn color, mass if you start using charcoal or graphite, and again cost for the paper you use.

With that said I suggest using vine charcoal and it compressed charcoal sticks both Blick brand, along with Prisma color ebony pencils. The charcoal is fairly cheap and gets you a very dark non-glossy finish, and the pencils are easily sharpened into a taper point for the overhand grip. I also suggest newsprint as you have no delusions of making a masterpiece, making it easier for you put medium onto paper. I would also use a different type of paper if you want to do inking but when it comes to that I got really no opinion because I've never inked anything that I gave a damn about so I just use printer paper. On that note I also suggest picking up a Pentel pocket brush, very fun and easy to use able to get you very thin lines potentially thinner than a metal nib will get you and will destroy the paper or where out anywhere near as fast as the metal nib will, at least if you want to get varied lines.

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how big of a file should I use

9 to 16 times bigger than the finished product, as in a 1000 x 1000 finished product should be created at 3000 x 3000 or 4000 x 4000

If you are printing out your piece you want to created at 600 dpi to 1200 dpi. And just so we're clear on this 1" x 1" would come out to 600 x 600 or 1200 x 1200. Another common printing dpi is 300 dpi, and when I say printing dpi I mean for pictures if you're just talking about letters generally though use a lower dpi to save cost but were making art not fucking making a book and 300 dpi would be 300 x 300 per inch squared

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stabilizers

Okay my opinion on stabilizers is this, due to the way digitizers input data they're going to be inaccurate, usually what they do is depending on how many hertz it pulls at pull in four different points on the tablet 252 1000 times a second to determine where the pen is on the tablet, the problem with this is every now and then it glitches a little bit where it will say one point is a lot further away than it should be a kind of averages out but it doesn't make it very stable.

The bigger your tablet the less of an issue this is, also the faster you draw the less of an issue this is.

I personally can't draw on a tablet as a base sketch, I've never been able make the transition to digital with the tablet only I can paint but I can't draw and this is something that I've tried to do for upwards 10 years, so just keep that in mind when I say this.

Use the stabilizer but have it set to the bare minimum, this gets rid of almost any noise that could possibly come from the tablet. It's not cheating and it's also not a case of "you just have to draw better and everything will work out for you" you see this all the time with people who stream their drawings where they'll make the same line 20 to 30 fucking times, do you want to do that or do you want to use the stabilizer and get the right line the first at second time each pull it? I'd personally rather be able to draw a bit slower and have a stable line the need to draw fast and go all shit and redo the line 20 or 30 fucking times. Also if you doing very fine and intricate work where you just doing a bunch of curves, don't be an idiot use the tool that you have turned to stabilizer up so everything is smooth and you don't need to pull the line multiple times save yourself the headache.

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tablets

wacom sat on their dick four years after they got several patents which put them ahead of all their competition, this made them a lot better than a lot of their competition was 10 years ago maybe 15, but right now uc logic based tablets are as good as intous pro, they just lack the ability to tilt sensor or orientation sense, and a lot of time people don't use these features anyway.

The only place that wacom has a clear advantage over its competition is in the penable displays, Adobe RGB in those displays is almost 100%, something that the alternative monitors don't have. A lot of the alternative monitors are also analog input instead of digital, however when you're doing art it isn't that much to ask that you have a very good secondary display. And if you use a secondary display you can have a 100% Adobe RGB and penable display right in front of you. wacom monitors also used to get very hot required fans, I'm not sure what they currently use because I don't really pay attention to them but that's something to keep in mind because I assume a lot of you would probably be buying used just for the sake of it being cheaper than 2000 fucking dollars.

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perspective

Okay here comes the fun one, as I see a perspective is something you do not grind. Outside of architectural work mechanical drawings or the instances where you make the perspective the focal point of the drawing, as in you choose a weird angle to draw it, you do not need 100% perfect perspective.

With that said you should know how to put down an object in one point, two point, and three point perspective, while understanding how to make play something and four point, five point, and six point perspective.

Once you're able to do this you should stop grinding it, and just move on to eyeballing the perspective. Getting perfect perspective is fairly easy to do however it is a lot of artistic bitch work that no one wants to fucking do it will slow down your progress so goddamn much if you try and make the perspective perfect and everything especially when you're still beginning and you are polishing shit.

Now ask yourself will 100% perfect perspective make your piece of art better, and are you willing to take the time to actually lay in all the perspective lines, or would it be better to get it 95% perfect and not have to lay in any of those lines and just go straight into drawing?

That is your end goal not needing the goddamn lines, every now and then check your perspective make sure that it's somewhat works make sure that you're doing it right but don't lay in the fucking lines for everything you draw especially when you're still beginning because you are polishing shit
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I want to draw a (blank) style

Awesome you want to actually drawn a style, don't fucking draw in a style and expect anyone here to criticize you on it, it is not worth our fucking time.

You see right here's the thing, you learn to draw traditionally and you learn to draw from realism first, then you learn how to abstract and that's where your style will come from. If you want to skip learning to draw properly first you're gonna suck, there are some cases where the style is so shit that it doesn't matter if you learn traditionally are not but that's beyond the point.

We are unable to critique a style because we don't know what you know and what you don't know and what you just abstracted to make the style simpler, so any time we'd say a flaw in your work you could just come back at us with "my style" and at that point it's definitely worth talking to anymore about critiquing your work and we've had to do this so fucking often that you cannot critique a fuckin style.

There is an exception to that where you can ask us if this style is working does this style work for this material would this work here and we could probably give you overview of what we think but we can't actively tell you what's wrong with your style because it is a style.

What I'm saying is learn traditionally then go for style don't just go for style, and then don't ask us to critique your work in your style because you can just defend with "my style"

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photo or real people

Here's where another controversial opinion comes from, I personally have never found any difference of drawing from a real person or drawing from a photo. Anyone who says they can tell you is drawn from a photo or from a real person is fucking lying, or at best is taking a 50-50 guess.

That isn't to say there isn't a drawback and drawing from a photo, a photo allows you to going to autopilot a lot easier than drawing from a live model would, personally I have piss poor depth perception, no one believes me when I say it but I don't see depth and less it's something like 3-D glasses of VR headset, or something like that. So it could just be that I'm weird.

People will tell you that it's easier to see 3-D form in 3-D that is to see it from a photo, and that could well be true if you have correct lighting, but I'm ago on a limb and say most of us can hire a live model and don't have an art studio that has a hard white that'll come down on them to accurately show you their form, so at best you're looking at diffused light for almost everything, and in that regard it's far easier to find a high contrast photo than it is to find a high contrast point in real life where he can draw people from. You also like we don't have a model that will sit there for a few minutes while you just sketch them so the best you probably do is find a food court in a mall or in a store and just look at people at checkout. This will help you a lot in just learning what you have to put down to the get the character of the person, but just drawing from real people I don't think is going to help a lot if you get good.

However what I'm saying is kind and null and void if you have a local area by you that'll hire a live model and has a lot of people coming so the cost is distributed, if you have something like that fucking go to it that will help you a lot, but for most of us here where can be drawn from photos just realize you do not want to fucking going to autopilot.

Learn construction and construct the model outside of the photo if you're able to do that at all, use the photo as more or less a guide to what your drawing. Hope that made sense probably not but whatever.

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how should I hold my pencil

I personally say sharpen it to a tapering use an overhand grip, this forces you to use your elbow on your shoulder to draw instead of your wrist.

However nothing is wrong there's just ways that are better than others.

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how should I sharpen my pencil

Personally I sharpen all my drawing pencils to a taper, I have about 2 inches of wood exposed then I sharpen it down to so there's 1 inch of light exposed and 1 inch of wood exposed, then I sharpen it again so there's about a half inch of led that's tapered. I modified it a little for normal to be pencil that you'd find in any fucking Walmart, and here's a fun note any pencil can be sharpen this way so long as the lead inside is in cracked. Up above I mentioned it Prisma color ebony the reason I did that is the lead inside of these things is about 4 mm thick, it's very hard for to be cracked all the way through because it is a very soft lead it that. I also have some Prisma colored jet black colored pencils, these ones I also sharpen the same way as the ebony, the difference is one of them is a far blacker pencil I believe it's also a wax based colored pencil, it's also a slightly thinner lead but it's also again harder for the whole thing to be cracked.

If you want to sharpen something smaller, like let's say a normal to be pencil you're gonna want to modify how eyes told you to sharpen it a bit but the ratio should still be one part taper one part exposed lead two part wood.

But at the same time there's no wrong way to sharpen a pencil this is just how I do it.

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how long does it take to get good

This one is wholly dependent on what you consider good to be.

I personally consider getting good to be not hating what you draw, and this would typically be about one month to three months of working every day, again depending on how much you work a day.

Low-level employable is about a year to year and a half of work depending on how much you work a day and how well you study.

From there time is really hard to tell how long it would take you to get better, once you reach low-level employable a lot of people tend to stagnate because of the demands of the job. A lot of drawing jobs don't require you to get better they require you to get faster, and the way to get faster is by sacrificing some of the fine detail that would make you better. You also have some laughing stocks that actually were grass in their work because their job is less demanding than where they are at.


As long as you're working to improve, you're always going to get better, and to that note I'd probably save 4 to 5 years before someone on 4chan would be asking others how long would it take to get this good.
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should I gesture

Yes you should, the problem is gesture is one of those things that you don't understand until you understand it and is not a fucking way anyone can explain it to you to make you understand it. What I tell people to do is look at proko for his explanation and then stop, then look up vilppu for how he does gesture. There is an hour and a half long video floating around the Internet that shows him just going off and doing a bunch of different gestures with different mediums and with different techniques for doing the gesture, this is probably your best bet at understanding what the fuck gesture is so long as you going to with knowing what proko said because vilppu tells you to feel the form, and his ability to tell you how to draw gesture generally comes from you already knowing how to draw gesture because then you understand what he's saying. It's like he's speaking a different language and the only way to understand what he's saying is to understand that language but you don't understand language yet and you're trying to learn how to speak the language from him who can't tell you how to speak.

I hope this makes sense
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rendering

Okay, do not fucking render. It's a waste of time when you're still shit, because all you do is polish it. We can all find those artists online who are really good at rendering that they can't draw for shit, and syllable rendering is the better you get at it the better you become at hiding parts of where your drawing is bad.

What you should do is this, draw until you are no longer able to see any flaws in your drawing, if you need to add shadows just map them don't actually draw the shadows that's a waste of time just map where the hard line between this is an shadow in this is shadow would go. Then once you no longer see the flaws in your work start rendering.

The reason I say until you no longer see flaws is because your ability to see flaws and your ability to draw don't increase in tandem with each other. Your ability to see flaws will plateau in your ability to draw will plateau and the only thing that'll kick your ass and to actually drawing better will be one your ability to see goes beyond your ability to draw. Your ability to see will go up on its own as you start to notice more more little things.

So the point where you no longer see flaws there's no point in just grinding drawings, however you shouldn't be good at rendering yet so you start rendering your drawings and then your ability to see will go up and then at that point there isn't as big a gap as there was before between your ability to see and your ability to draw so you may never not have to stop rendering the keep in mind he you could probably improve your drawings go faster if you stop rendering.