I'm Sorry If None Of This Makes Sense I Can Try To Explain With Pictures If Need Be? - Tumblr Posts

Hi! How do you feel about having line art in finished pieces? If it's bad, how do I manage to get away from that? When I ask for critiques people say "stop w the line art/you're too dependent on lines" but I never realized that was a problem??

Frankly, I think it’s amazing. If you can own something in art?  Do it. 

There are trends, esp among the GIT GUD crowd, that lend towards the sort of lineless vaguely-real painting style - if that’s what you want to do, I can lend some help on painting over your lines until they disappear. But it’s important, I think, to throw back at folks that those are industry/internet trends, and may not be a real thing in terms of quality. Do what you want, and if you want to do right now is lineart? Do that!

That said, what they might mean is that there is a tendency within younger/less-developed artists to rely on the lines to indicate where to shade (in a pillow-shading/coloring book fashion), which is an actual easily-corrected error. Basically, that error stems from “lines are the darkest shadow, I will use them as the darkest shadow for all shading.” The issue with this is that lines are stylistic - their placement draws really absurd levels of eye-attention to themselves. So any shadow you want to place identical to where the line is a shadow? Take a break on it. The line will do half the work on it’s own. Consider any and all shading as divorced from the line work.

It’s a weird leap of thought, but it helps to try the following exercise - draw a picture in lines, as you imagine it. Now that you have it, try to shade it with the lighting coming from a shittily-different direction from the lines. Not exactly opposite how they fall, but close to it. Obviously, the indirect effect of this is that half your lines now suck - they indicate shadows where light should hit - but they transfer their existence (when painted right) to indicating a shape rather than a shadow. It’s a weird exercise, but I find it helps to understand using linework as just one way to define edges on a finished work. There’s a lot of ways to do it - lines are the most straightforward, and honestly one of the hardest in their own way.

With time, you can start working on moving linework to mirror shading so that they act as a single unit, in league with and complimenting each other. But at first, it will honestly feel a lot like they fight each other for dominance. Whichever you feel is less in charge of the raw 3-d shapes you’re trying to depict - that’s the one you’ll need to work with to bring up to match the other.