God I Wish That Was Me

God I wish that was me

-Michael (he/him)

@dimiclaudeblaigan asked for a tutorial on how to begin drawing. Good news! If you can draw a funky looking stick man, you have already started!

I think that stick people are a great starting point for artists because of the things you can learn from them that will be important later on.

If you are able to draw a circle and a couple of lines, you can easily put together a stick person.

Congratulations! You have started to draw. :)

A stick person is a very minimal artistic representation of a real life person. It is simple yet recognizable, and is widely used in art, media, and signage.

But what can a stick person teach us about drawing people that look more like… well, people? Lets have a look!

By simply adding a few more lines, we can add a pair of eyes and a mouth. Maybe even a little triangle nose! Or half circles for ears. We can now draw a face, which provides a basis for all sorts of expressions.

These simple additions can allow us to explore the wide range of human emotion and individuality.

This may seem like the basics of the basics. But that is what we want! In order to get to the point where we are able to draw complex, elaborate representations of humans and objects, we will need to start with simple shapes like lines and circles and build our understanding from there.

For instance, lets give our stick person some cool new features, such as hands and feet. I chose little squiggly circles to represent hands, and triangles to represent feet.

We can go a step further and modify the body of the stick person to include shoulders, hips, elbows and knees. These parts of the human body are quite complex in real life But here, all we need to do is add a few simple lines and dots to our stick person.

The lines provide some additional structural elements to our stick person's body, which are the shoulders and the hips. The dots indicate the points of articulation - elbows and knees, the places where the arms and legs bend!

Now we can use our stick person to show us an even wider range of human movement, action, and expression.

Our little drawing of a human being is evolving! All it took was adding a few more lines and shapes here and there.

By elongating some of the existing lines and making the head an oval instead of a circle, we can give our stick person proportions that resemble that of a real life human.

By this point, we have managed to add more complexity to our stick person simply by using our ability to draw lines, circles, and other basic shapes!

These basic ideas are the building blocks that will enable us to create more complex shapes.

The next part may be a considerable step up if you are absolutely new to drawing, but I have decided to include it in order to show you how complex objects like the human body can be built from shapes that are a bit more complex than circles and lines.

For example. Two ovals and a rectangle can be combined to create a cylinder.

Six squares can be combined to create a cube, or a box. Here, each square is distorted slightly depending on which way the cube is facing.

Note that the back faces of the cube and the bottom of the cylinder are hidden. These shapes allow us to visualize that which should not normally visible.

A sphere from all perspectives can be represented by a circle. But we can make it more like a sphere by adding lighting and shadow if we so desire.

Cubes, cylinders, and spheres are examples of 'solid shapes' because they consist of 3 dimensions.

Lets see how these solid shapes can be used to compose the human body.

By stacking three cylindrical objects, we can create a torso. Two spheres have been added to form shoulders, while a smaller cylinder forms the neck.

An arm is an alternating sequence of spheres and cylinders connected together. Note that the hand has been simplified for this example.

We can apply these solid shapes to the rest of the body to give us a more recognizable representation of the human form. It doesn't even have to be perfect. And just like that, our stick figure now has a silhouette that is unmistakably a person!

In the above examples, notice that we kept the stick person at the beginning while building up the shapes and solids around it. This is because the stick person serves as a guide for positioning the body and its various parts -> also known as posing.

You can do the same thing to everyday objects! Here, I drew a wine glass by stacking these three dimensional solid shapes.

The cup and its contents are two ovoid shapes that were cut in half. The stem is a very thin cylinder shape. The base is a cylinder with a slightly wider bottom.

Solid shapes help inform us how objects and parts of the human body may appear from different perspectives.

For example, a sphere can be used to demonstrate how the human head appears when looking up or down, turned to the side, or tilted at an angle.

With these examples, I hope I have managed to convinced you that if you can draw a circle and a couple of lines, you can draw a person! You just have to train your eye to recognize the simple shapes within complex objects. Try it with everyday objects as well! Or even your favourite media! A drawing subject can be as simple or as complex as you envision it to be.

Once you have mastered that, there are many aspects of drawing you can explore from here that may require you to seek additional resources or a fellow artist's advice.

Last of all, remember that drawing is an iterative process. Even if you draw something correct the first time, you will need to draw it again and again to get it right all times! And by making small changes like the ones we explored in this tutorial, your drawings will gradually transform!

I hope what I've demonstrated here are enough to provide the basics of how to get started with drawing objects and people, and also to help refresh more experienced artists. :) Hopefully I didn't go too off topic with what was requested, and let me know if there are any more questions I can answer.

Cheers :3

I love being plural. I love all the quiet moments on the bus, or in the kitchen while my roommate’s home, where one of my headmates will whisper something funny to me and I’ll laugh even though I don’t mean to. I’ll hope that no one heard, but maybe they did, and for a moment I’ll think that that’s alright. My experience of being plural is all soft and warm and comforting and it’s not my problem if someone else sees me talking to myself and thinks it’s scary or strange. I don’t deserve to be ashamed of myself just because other people would be ashamed to be me. For a moment, being plural is something I’m proud of in the same way that I’m proud to be trans.

But eventually, reality will set in. I don’t feel comfortable being openly neurodivergent in public, in fact, I think it’s a very narrow slice of neurodivergent people who have the privilege of choosing not to mask. I still try my best not to laugh on the bus, and I only tell people I’m plural if I’m absolutely sure I can trust them.

But it’s hard not to feel ashamed of yourself, living like that, where basic facts about your existence are tightly guarded secrets. If there’s nothing wrong with me for being like this, why do I live in fear of anyone finding out? I wish I could come out as plural like I came out as trans. Maybe one day, people will be able to be out as plural like that. Some people already can, and do, but I’m not one of them. Maybe someday I will be, when I’m in a better situation, but not today.

Being plural is something to be proud of. Being plural is not inherently disordered or bad or wrong or unhealthy or shameful, and even if you do experience plurality in a disordered way it’s still not wrong and it’s still not something to be ashamed of. My headmates have saved my life a hundred times over. They fill even the worst parts of my life with joy because they love me and I love them and nothing can take that away from us. To me, being plural is a beautiful, radical thing, and it’s okay if you don’t experience it that way, but you have to respect that this is how it is for me, and I’m never going to stop being proud about it. I’m never going to stop being proud about it even if I go my whole life keeping it a secret, even if I can never express it in public. I wouldn’t trade this way of existing for the world.

“Sounds fun,” he says, proceeding to make it depressing. But we can’t really remember most of it. It’s mostly just the bad stuff that sticks.

I thought about giving our adult self purple eyes since I’ve been considering contacts to look less human, but I haven’t gotten around to it and I don’t even know if I’d be able to wear them without getting squeamish so eh.

-Emyr (he/it)

New picrew chain idea: yourself vs what you looked like as a kid

Free for anyone to join in

Link

booooo tomato tomato tomato

Thanks for the free tomatos, I'll be sure to make a nice fruit salad with them

-Michael (he/him)

This is just like our host, Emyr. He’s a big cranky dragon who needs to go outside more. So we make him go outside as much as we can. Preferably every day but that’s not always doable.

He used to be scared of bees but now he loves watching them. He’s always respected them (it was never the “kill it!” Kind of fear, just the “eeeugh stay away” kind), he just didn’t like them near him because he was afraid of being stung- but now that he understands how calm bees are, he sits really close and looks at how they work and pollinate flowers.

-Michael (he/him)

are evil dragons really evil, or are they just vitamin D deficient?