art advice from aunty canis

there are many artists out there who use mouses (mice?), but you definitely should not practice your drawing with it. instead, start off traditionally, as a pencil and notebook are way more mobile, and it allows you to learn important concepts such as line weight, proper wrist motion and the importance of flow in your works. also, i haven't worked with that app you mentioned, but i'm not sure how easy it is to toggle layers (if such a feature exists in it), and you need the option to draw more roughly and lightly to sketch first.

now onto the art.

absolutely the most important thing is to sketch first. a lot of newcomers tend to just start drawing the lineart right off the bat, and because there's no structure to follow, the result becomes very wonky. learn to first sketch out the figure roughly and lightly, putting in a simplified wireframe for the skeleton, make sure you have the proportions right, and then start linearting. and when i say make the sketch rough, do make it rough. that's what sketches are for. for example, don't try to draw a perfect circle when the drawing guides tell you to draw a circle. draw a quick, rough estimate of the circle. your mind can fill in the rest.

that said: i know i just spoke about drawing guides, but as an artist i can tell you that only learning from step-by-step guides will not get you very far. usually, they tend to only teach you to draw a certain collection of lines which represent a character or object from one angle and in only one style. to actually evolve with art, you have to look at photographic reference. and i stress: PHOTOGRAPHIC, NOT OTHER ART! inexperienced beginners can't always tell when another artist makes a mistake - which they do more often than you think - and end up copying that same mistake without realizing it. you might be thinking "but furry characters aren't real, i cant look up photographs of them" but that's where the creativity comes in. and you CAN look at other artists' works - it's a good way of learning about different styles, techniques, simplification tricks and, in this case, how animals are anthropomorphized and how the human and animal elements are combined, but my point is that you should not reference them blindly.

back to photographic reference - it doesn't have to be anything great and grand. it can literally just be the results you get from google images (that's how i get my references). it can be literal stock photos. it doesn't matter, since they have real life animals and humans in them, and real life (provided it isn't photoshopped) doesn't make drawing mistakes. and when you do reference, remember this: art is about drawing what an object looks like, not what you think the object looks like. so toss aside what you think you know, it's likely to be wrong. the human brain simplifies lots of things in ways you don't realize, and when you have to bring it out, it tends to look different from what it is in real life. one way to test this is to draw a face from memory, then draw a face from reference - upside-down reference - trying to replicate the figure as accurately as you can, proportions and distances intact.

that's really what drawing/painting/illustrating at its core is all about. learning to bypass your brain's misconceptions so that you can create the original which your eyes see, and not the distorted version your brain sees.

there are many more pieces of advice i could give, but i should keep this at a reasonable(ish) length, so here's the last one: always think 3D. even if you're doing a cartoony style, you need to think 3D. cylinders, boxes, spheres, cones, so on. it's the only way you'll get the shading right.