For a Quackcast recording in two weeks I want to record a comedy thing where Banes and I are professors giving bad art advice.
Any Ideas on some bad advice for people learning to draw? :D

Example:
If your drawing doesn't turn out as a masterpiece first try then you should give up right away. Burn your pencils. Break your drawing board. Tear up your paper (all over it), soak it liberally in vodka and set it on fire. As it burns you should drink the rest of the vodka while crying and reflecting on your failure.

Might be too aggressive a root to take UB. That's my fault for setting the wrong tone. We should steer towards bad advice that's just plain bad, sprinkled with ridiculousness…

Bad advice:
Draw very, very slowly. On a typical day you should never fill more than 1/16th of a page. Press as hard as possible when you do! There needs to be dents in your drawing board.
It really helps to liberally wet your paper first! Especially when using hard pencils.

Ridiculous advice:
When figure drawing it helps if you do it naked, especially when everyone else in the group is clothed- it will help to make the model feel more at ease. In general you should always draw naked- the drawing “chi” flows out of you more easily that way.

On the subject of figure drawing, it's important not to draw people from life, because they are all different shapes and sizes hardly any of them conform to the artistic ideal. It's art we're making here folks, so cut out the middle man and woman, by only drawing from other artists, especially popular comic book artists. These people have spent years learning what people are supposed to look like and by following their example, you will soon master the intricacies of anatomical drawing.

Also, do not take advice from so called experts, who may not have your best interests at heart. Ignore these people and listen only to what your close friends and family say about your art - they are the ones you can trust. If your best buddy says you are an awesome drawer and some jumped up expert says you're a rubbish drawer, tell him to put a sock in it.

If you have difficulty drawing hands, try hiding them in pockets or behind well-placed furniture. For recurring characters you may want to replace their hands entirely with other easier-to-draw objects so that you can avoid this problem in the future. This is the little-known origin of Edward Scissorhands, as well as the popular superhero Vases-For-Hands Boy.

When you finish a piece of art that you are especially proud of, you may want to singe the edges of it to give it that “aged” look. To do this, sprinkle the edges of the paper with gasoline or another volatile liquid and set fire to it. Once you have achieved the desired effect, gently use the nearest fire extinguisher to put out the flames, being careful to avoid the centre of the piece.

Too ridiculous? The second one falls into that category of instructions you see all the time on pinterest etc. that are just BOUND to fail.

Hahahaha! Beillaint! Perfect tone!
UB deleted her post…?

Teeth:
Drawing teeth is hard. Mouths are full of them and nobody knows how many there are so to play it safe you should just draw as many as possible. If they won't all fit in there you should make the mouth bigger or just draw some teeth outside if it.

Do NOT begin with lines of action, stick figures or anatomical breakdowns of characters. Keep it totally unplanned, with no erasing required. Things will go much faster this way!

If you're drawing comics, never draw legs unless you absolutely can't avoid it. There are two reasons for this: Firstly, if you draw people all the way down to the ground, you won't have enough space to fit the words balloons at the top of the panel. Nothing looks more amateurish, so always draw people from the waist up or higher.

Secondly, have you actually ever really looked at people? They look as if they're about to fall flat on their backs most of the time. You can get away with that in a photo because it's real, but in a drawing, it's just going to look like you don't know what you're doing and some smartarse will probably start going on about centres of gravity and all kinds of other new age claptrap. Less is more - leave out those legs and skip the background too while you're at it.

A lot of people don't realise how large the human brain perceives the human eye to be. Eyes are the windows of the soul, or so they say and that's where we tend to focus our eyes when we look. This makes a persons eyes appear to be much larger than you would think when their vortices are reflected on our retinal cortexes.
If you foolishly tried to draw the eyes at their scientifically ‘correct’ proportions they would seem far too small. Notice how the best artists achieve greater realism by always drawing huge eyes.

Boobs.
No one really knows how big they are, so to play it safe you should draw them as big and as perfectly roud as possible. If you find you don't have enough room on the page, this is a good sign!

ozoneocean wrote:
Boobs.
No one really knows how big they are, so to play it safe you should draw them as big and as perfectly roud as possible. If you find you don't have enough room on the page, this is a good sign!

Also note that breasts are comprised mostly of helium, and should always be drawn so that they are buoyant and pointed ever so slightly in the direction of the ceiling.

Edit: On a serious note, I saw a hilarious example of badly-drawn boobs on Mary Jane (from Spiderman) recently. But I'm not sure how to google that without just getting pages upon pages of poorly-drawn amateur MJ boobs.

Double edit! Here it is.

Wait for inspiration. I can't stress how important this is. You won't get anywhere drawing all the time even when you don't feel like it. Read a book. Read a series of books. Watch a TV program. Watch a TV season. Watch some films. Go outside a lot and stare directly into the sun. Go to cafes and sit with your head in your hands just thinking about things. Play video games obsessively. Go to parties. Have a rich and rewarding life. It may take weeks, month or years. Decades, even. But only then will you get the inspiration you need to begin drawing that special something. You've only got one good picture in you. Wait for the right time to draw it.

Fingers:
Fingers are hard to draw, nobody knows how many joints they have, so to play it safe you should just draw them as bendy sausages. Everybody loves bendy sausages!

Also, nobody really knows how many fingers are on a hand, so to play it safe you should draw at least 7 bendy sauasges on each.

Gender:
Men and women are really hard to tell apart in art work so you have to make gender differences SUPER obvious.
Don't bother trying to draw a male figure, that's just too hard, I've been trying for years and still have never successfully managed it. So instead you should just draw a square or maybe a rectangle (if you have the advanced skills to do that). Everybody knows that shapes with right angles are male.
Women should be drawn as triangles or circles, because circles look exactly like boobs and the triangle is the internationally recognised shape of the lady area.

If you want to get crazy and actually draw your people as figures, then the men should all be bulky, squarish shapes, with short hair and trousers. The women should all be thin with pointy bossoms, long hair and skirts. If you draw them with long trousers instead of a skirt then you have to give them a crop top that shows their sexy tummies and highlights their bossoms or people will be confused and think they're men.
This is why I dress Pinky the way that I do- because you just wouldnt know what sex she was otherwise and neither would I!

HippieVan wrote:

On a serious note, I saw a hilarious example of badly-drawn boobs on Mary Jane (from Spiderman) recently. But I'm not sure how to google that without just getting pages upon pages of poorly-drawn amateur MJ boobs.

Double edit! Here it is.

Hahaha! Those are the new strap-on-strap-down metal boobs made of peach coloured anodized aluminium: they hold the same shap no mater WHAT position you're in! They're fully recyclable and come with a gift card for 50,000 songs from iTunes.

I always wear three. They really help me draw gooder.

Being the best, the very best, the best there ever was:
To be the best you of course have to spend lots and lots of money.

Drawing on paper is OK for poor neophytes, but if you want to do the very best comics then you MUST spend, spend, spend!

Digital art is where it's at, no exceptions. That means you have to buy the most expensive digital art tools. If you do then they will quite literally do all the work FOR you and MAKE you good. You could be a shitty, terrible artist in reality, but if you spend enough money your tools will mask that and make you bad art skills look like good ones because digital art us easy!!!

That means you have to buy the fastest computer, the most expensive tablet screen that Wacom make, and the most expensive art program available. Only then can you be as good as the greats.

To demonstrate some of the things I was going on about, here's my interpretation of Hippie Van's ever popular Vases For Hands Boy. It might look quite good on the surface but that's because as Banes advises, I only cared about how the surface looks and so should you.



I've left out the legs to make room for the words and so his pose looks right. I also gave him the big eyes to make him seem more real. Notice too how I've been able to cleverly suggest a previously undiscovered mezoamerican civilisation by using words. This would not have looked so good if I'd tried to draw it in the background - less is more.

Also notice how I've used Vases For Hands Boys cape to cover up the legs of the large breasted girl. This way she has the large brests as suggested by ozoneocean, no legs and because you known there's a mighty pyramid somewhere around, you know it's not just a really small girl with relatively large breasts tied to his shoulder. If this all seems like a lot to remember don't worry, you'll soon master it with lack of practise.

What you DON'T see ate her big steel nipple rings that are tastefully covered, yet are being irresistibly drawn to the giant electro magnet hanging from the evil blimp just out of frame.

A wonderfully Liebfieldian composition professor Scarf!

Which reminds me: Guns.
No one really knows how they work or what they're for, but they make character look powerful so it's best to give them one or two or three to carry about their person.
Guns can either be vaugely rectangular if they're based on the famous Browning 1911 style of automatic pistol, or made of a bunch of tubes like every other type of gun.

You should draw as many pipe shapes as possible and strap them all together. The lengths can be random, and they can either be hollow or have pretty coloured lenses to mimic sights or laser barrels. It doesn't matter how they're meant to work as long as they're HUGE and impressive! So cover them in lots of things that guns have and many cylinders, like big curved magazines, chains of giant bullets that're too big to go through the barrels, rocket launchers, sights, grenade tubes, multiple bayonets, airhorns, rolled up posters, packing tubes, rolls of tinfoil, water pipes, binoculars…
Lastly, it doesn't matter if the gun is a bit bendy, no one really cares if they're straight or not. Just like with real guns.

You haven't spent enough time on your drawing until you've skipped ten meals, your eyes are literally on fire from staring, and you have full-blown carpal tunnel syndrome even in your non-drawing hand. Toughen up!

If you can't draw people, draw your characters as animals. The internet loves cats. Make sure to give them boobs.

It is SO important to channel the energy of the universe when you are drawing.
I recomend at least an hour of Tai-Chi, followed by up to tow hours of yoga.
You will then have to make DAMMED sure that all your drawing tools are aligned according to the principal os Feng-Shui! You'll need your pens pointing east-west, put your eraser in a cup of fire and construct a tasteful water feature on your drawing board. This will bring you many goodlucks and monies!!!!!!!! 88888!!!

If your drawings STILL turn out badly after this (and I don't know why they would, but whatever…), you will need a course on Reiki from a master. This will release your trapped energy centres and allow the creativity and luck to flow.
If after this treatment things are still not going right you will need an emergency course of accupuncture. I'm sorry, but there it is. Make sure they insert the needles deep and then twist them. Lemon juice should then be applied to the insertion points so that you learn to stop being such a non-creative lump!

At the end of all that you should be drawing like a god, feeling the spirit of Leonardo diVinci directly reborn inside of your body. Litterally you will!
BUT, if that is not the case then there is something wrong with you… You should maybe travel naked in Tibet or Nepal for a while, the universe clearly doesn't love you.

As the author most liked* Stick Figure comic to up date this month I feel that I need to way into this.
So you start by drawing a stickman.

Then draw some circles on your stickman!

Then join the circles together.

Now the easy part! Put clothes on your skickman!

When it comes to drawing faceis don't bother with eyes or noses there hard just draw teeth! Teeth are easy to draw!

Now I'm sorry but there's no way were going to have to draw hair on our stickman! But it's not all doom and gloom hair is a realy usefull way to cover up stuff like ears!

And your done!

*turns out that I'm the only person on the duck still doing stickman comics, how weard is that?

Tom, that is Awesome!!!
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My advice… Hmmm…
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If your art isn't getting noticed, try making it more more pornographic! Everybody really only loves sex in art, the more perverted the better, and quality really doesn't matter. If they claim to like stuff like conflict and plot they're lying in an attempt to appear wholesome and chaste. If you introduce pornographic scenes into your work, watch as your viewership increases exponentially, and then once you have the numbers you desire you can start working in your own ideas, increase your art quality, maybe introduce a little bit of drama and tension… just intersperse it amongst the sex scenes. Just remember, though, this extra stuff is really only for your own satisfaction. Nobody really wants to see it - they're just there for the porn. Don't lose sight of that - make sure you don't put too much of your ‘novel ideas’ in there.
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If you feel doing this is beneath you, thats fine but dont get upset by fewer likes and comments. You have only yourself to blame by not doing everything you could!