Pro Artist Critiques Beginner Drawing tutorials

Hi, my name is Antonio. I'm a professional concept artist. You may remember me from such videos as how to draw with form, six steps to drawing anything. Yeah, that's me. So my team thought it would be a good idea to let me critique some tutorials on social media on how to get good for beginners, knowing perfectly well that it will annoy me. So this is for your entertainment. Let's go. The first one is how to draw a perfect eye for beginners. We all know the best MC, it's M to the B, it's M to the B, it's M, M, M, M, M to the B, it's M to the B, it's M to the B, bam. Love the music. Problem with it though is that both of the eyes still suck. We're basically shading a pupil. There's nothing wrong with shading a pupil. But if you title it, how to draw a perfect eye for beginners and you're starting with shading, bit of an issue. All right, when we want to draw, what we want to do is we want to be able to illustrate form and proportions. That's what we do. That's why we use the lines to draw. Shading comes afterwards. And we need to understand the forms in essence in order to be able to shade. We see in the don't versus do, in the do version, they're drawing a highlight for the pupil. But why is that highlight there? If you don't know that the pupil has a concave and a convex form, you don't really know why that highlight is here or you won't even know how to draw different highlights. We need to understand the basic structure of the eye. We need to understand that the eye is basically a sphere and on top of that sphere, in its very three-dimensional structural form, sits these hinges that make up the eye. When we already understand that, we get a better understanding of why the eye has that certain shape. Any more complex version of these shapes gets us to a closer, realistic version of an eye because everything in drawing is illusions. But if we understand the forms, we can make that illusion much more convincing. So focus on the structure of the eyes at first. Everything else, shading and everything, will come later because ultimately what we call in Artwatch shading can start by just indicating form. All right, next up, how to draw hand. Need a hand drawing hands? Start with a square. Draw a triangle. Now make another triangle, cutting off the top right corner. One more, cutting off the bottom left corner. Draw these two lines for the arm. Okay, let's put some rectangles in now. The index and the middle finger go next. The ring finger and the pinky finger go on the diagonal line. The next set of rectangles is smaller than the first. Now a quarter circle for the thumb and half circles for the fingers. Outline the whole thing now. This line is a little bumpier. Erase your guidelines and you can put in some basic shading with a smudge stick. If you got value from this content, please do follow, like, comment, and share for more art tips and tutorials. There's nothing wrong with this tutorial. It's like you just won't learn anything really. What you're doing is you're learning to draw a sequence of shapes. You're not really learning how to draw a hand, especially from imagination. You're just learning how to draw one hand in one particular angle. And it's not even a pretty hand because when you talk about rectangle and then triangle and then rectangles on top of rectangles, it's not that you're actually, for the fingers, you're not actually drawing rectangles, by the way. These rectangles are the profile view of cylinders. That's the thing. And fingers are a sequence of cylinders connected to each other in a manipulated fashion. And from that, we can add the knuckles and turn that into fingers. But this is a very advanced way of looking at things. If you want to have a faster, more easier way to just start with hands and start learning how to at least understand hands from different angles, just use what we call the mitten principle. Draw a box, attach a triangulated box to that, basically represents the gesture of the fingers, and then just a thumb, which is a cylinder. I would always start with understanding simple form first before trying to make it or trying to learn things graphically. Because graphically, yes, you'll get an easier outcome faster because you're just drawing shapes, but you're not really learning anything. And when I see tutorials that is about how to draw, it is to learn. It's not to get a certain specific outcome. If that is the case, then change the title to how to get this specific hand in this specific angle and not learn anything else, just this. Then it's a valid tutorial. But other than that, if you want to learn how to draw hands, make sure that you understand the structure underneath and start simple. All right, next up, how to draw lips tutorial. ♪ I can't find your silver lining ♪ ♪ I don't mean to judge ♪ ♪ But when you read your speech it's tiring ♪ ♪ Enough is enough ♪ ♪ I'm covering my ears like a kid ♪ I like the speed up for the actual rendering of the lips. All in all, I'm not against this tutorial. It's actually, I like the fact that we're using reference to understand form, to understand how we can pull from real life and understand the basic forms and sort of rhythm lines that make up the lips. That is actually a very valid way. We're not being explained why we're doing it, which is why we're not learning that much. But I'm not against it because all in all, the lips, they do have this sort of rhythm to them that she is doing in the tutorial. So this makes it a fairly valid way to learn lips. Now I would take this a step further because what we ultimately want to do again is understand the structure underneath. So for instance, when she's drawing the lower lips and she has this sort of curve and then these two circles, now this is sort of, again, doing a sequence of shapes but not really understanding why. Now this comes from Lumis directly is that we can actually divide the lips into five, almost like elongated spheres. And what that results in, if we actually understand form is that we have these shapes sort of sit on top of each other in space like this, right? And these forms, when we then go to connect them and understand their placement in space, we can see that the reason why the lips have the form that they have because it is these sort of spherical shapes connected together. And because of that, we can now draw the lips in any angle that we want. And this is essentially why in our beginner portrait road, we teach you these basic building blocks to understand that you're not just trying to memorize graphic form, you really understand the structure underneath so that you can draw it in whatever angle you want. All right, next up. Face tutorial. Right, okay. So face tutorial and you don't draw any faces. You're basically describing the head of allegedly what is a boy and what is a girl. okay so you basically learned nothing right okay so yes the faces of men can be all in all they can be longer and they can have wider cheekbones giving them a more masculine look as well as a thicker neck and then female or women when we exaggerate them you can have smaller chins a bit softer as well like this and you can give them a smaller neck and that will give more femininity all in all but it's not a guarantee right depending on what facial features what you're trying to imply your face with facial features if I change the facial features I can have big nose small lips masculine eyes that if I if I were to do this like let's say we take your feminine your girl tutorial kind of shapes right this triangle small thing right like this like there are many anime manga examples where this would be a boy because we can we can we can make very masculine features in this like smaller eyes focused on rectangles not on round curvy big eyelashes sort of way and let's draw anime in this case and and let's say we do something like this real quick I've used your proportions for females but I'm ending up with a fairly masculine looking face and that is because of the way that I'm adding the features to it so it's always like femininity versus masculinity is a combination of features and if you don't understand the combination of features it's not this shorthand isn't gonna help you so no just no to this tutorial okay magic drawing tutorial easy peasy what what it keeps going okay so we went from we went from this to this okay I'm not saying it's not impressive what you end up with but I want to give a bit of a caveat here is it looks noisy as I mean there's such a thing in drawing that we emphasize on which is visual clarity and what I see you end up with is might be impressively rendered but it doesn't read at all like I like from a distance I wouldn't even be able to make out what it is whereas the first one it clearly is fire there's nothing wrong sometimes with having a very graphic representation of things and in this case it was very 2d now the 2d version actually wasn't bad it's just like it was it was the the sort of flames going in a certain direction and there's actually not a lot wrong with that now you could three dimensionalize that by instead of instead of having it 2d you could still have like some sort of a graphic silhouette like this but then understand that you're also drawing across the form with your flames but still focus on the like the visual clarity of your fire and you could have some effects and you can have some shading and you can have like a center for it if you want to you can add some three dimensionality but the graphic readability is the important part what we ended up with here was noise and we want to avoid noise in drawing as much as we can now I draw bodies here we go oh the chicken scratching oh please stop the stick oh please stop please stop the chicken scratching sticks now should it cover tracks because it says how I draw bodies not how to draw bodies luckily there's nothing wrong with starting this way but I would definitely recommend not focusing on chicken scratching the reason we want to avoid chicken scratching is let's say this is a great example right when I draw this head like if I do it like like this I mean it's just it creates so much again noise that we want to avoid and it also is an apparent lack of understanding of what you're actually drawing so when you want to draw bodies or heads or whatever you want to draw make sure that you understand the thing that you are drawing so especially when it comes to the body even if you want to do it in a in a in let's say a 2d straight on graphic way you still want to understand that first to some degree for the body if even if we do it very very structurally we we draw sort of a boxy shape that represents the ribcage that goes into a cylindrical shape for the abdomen like this that then goes into the pelvic area which is which is sort of an underwear type of shape that then goes into like cylindrical shapes for the legs and you can see that I'm not chicken scratching I'm not trying to scratch my way through this I'm just understanding the forms that I'm drawing because by understanding these I also understand that these look a certain way in 3d and I have no problem drawing them in 3d because I understand their form and that's ultimately what you want to understand you want to understand the form so that you can draw it with confidence not what this is that will just make your drawings look horrible okay glad we got through that anyway make sure that if you want to learn how to draw and you're looking up tutorials if you just want to copy something because you want an end result fine but if you want to end up drawing your own cool characters if you want to make up your own comics if you want to design your own anime character whatever it is that you would like to draw and you want to be able to do that yourself focus on understanding focus on understanding the basic building blocks that make up drawing okay with that said as always stay creative happy drawing and see you in the next one