Someone once posted an ai picture in response to a comment someone left. I commented on it that it was a funny idea, but it would have been so much better if they had just drawn it themselves. The ai poster said “why would I spend hours making a picture just for a Reddit post?” I responded “that’s the thing: you don’t have to. A jenky sketch would have been way funnier, and it would have been yours.” Generative ai not only robs our ability to make choices, but also the simple joy of making dumb art.
As for your actual art: I love him. I’m going out to get more tires
I drew this at work when I had nothing to do and I was bored. Took me 45 mins. Probably the first time I have tried to draw something in nearly 20 years lol.
Haha, yeah that's just work information. Some of the information could be used to track down where I live/work. Not likely to happen, but there are some crazy people out there who just want to try to ruin a person's life for no reason.
And thanks, I really did put in my best effort. Had 3 hours of downtime and we get fired if we go on our phones so it was a good way to spend some time.
its still not appropriate to project your gender ideas onto someone else either way. so just keep that in mind, like you can have all the fun of "haha woman shen" but you need to seperate that idea from "oh shen draws himself as a woman so he must be a woman"
and, even if it has happened before, doesnt mean the same behavior is still appropriate
As a fellow fat person who has also fought much fatter people doing Kung Fu, you are more than correct. Really tricky to knock big people off their center if they know what they're doing...
If you never have before, then my two pieces of advice are to understand the rules, and practice improv.
You don't need to have an encyclopedic knowledge of whatever game system you're using, but you should understand how things work. When there are cases where you're not sure, either know where to look it up quickly or be comfortable making an off the cuff ruling. Nothing kills a game worse than half an hour looking up and debating rules. I recommend a more rules-light system than D&D for a first attempt, just because D&D can get pretty complex.
Rolling with whatever happens is also important. There are written adventures and modules, and they can be a great resource for beginner GMs. But at some point, I guarantee your players will come up with something that you haven't planned and isn't n the module, and you will have to come up with it on the fly. Some of my most fun sessions were me starting with just a goal for the characters to accomplish, a couple of NPCs, all written in under a paragraph, and everything else came up with mid session.
I drew my hand every day for like a month. At first it was blocky and rigid. By day 30 I was drawing curves and adding details with the eraser. Looked better then what I started with even if it wast great. Helped me draw little figures better for notes
One of my absolute favorite quotes (from ZeFrank) puts this another beautiful way..
"There's no need to sharpen my pencils anymore, even the dull ones will leave a mark".
Ok, before I begin, I want to make it clear that I don't use generative AI, I don't condone the use of generative AI, and I never will.
Now, I'm sorry that I hate how bad I am at drawing. I'm sorry that whenever I attempt to draw, I'm always disappointed with how it comes out. I know that I need to practice and learn, but it would possibly take years before I'm at a state where I would actually be satisfied with what I make, and I can never hold the motivation to actually push through it.
Now, before anyone comes at me, I'm not completely giving up on art. Art comes in many forms, and there are certain mediums where I do feel far more confident in and actually enjoy, I just need to actually put it online and share it.
I gave up on drawing consistently from 2020 to around 2024. I'm telling you I didn't draw ANYTHING except like 3 drawings that I hated and a bunch of doodles. I hated drawing. I thought I was a talentless hack and nobody would ever like my art. The feelings were so strong that I even dreaded to grab a pencil.
Then I found the old comic books I used to draw in middle school. The plot was inconsistent, the art was equally terrible... But I remember vividly how happy I was when I made them. At the same time I was kinda developing class consciousness so I was actively trying to separate my being from any capital valuation.
I found out the real reasons I hated to draw were: I was treating my drawings as products and not a part of my being. The worth I would assign them would be based on how others would value it. Because of this, I spent too much time drawings things I didn't want to "get better" instead of actually enjoying the process.
I discovered that my way to enjoy art is to simply not attempt to get better. I don't practice at all. I just draw what I want to draw at the moment. If it's something I don't know how to draw, I either do it from memory or do some research but without seeking improvement, just to adapt. I have an imperious need to get things out of my system and "getting better" just creates a bottleneck that destroys my spirit. My art is not a product for others to validate. It's my screams to the void.
Maybe this works for you. If not don't worry, there are other art forms out there. The important thing is to get ideas out of your system.
Now I honestly tell people that in order to get to a level I find acceptable in drawing, it would require me to basically drop all of my other hobbies for a few months in order to do nothing else. I don't have the discipline.
i dunno, i've made huge improvements doing like 20 minutes per day of gesture drawing on the website line-of-action. even if you have a high standard of what you find acceptable, you'd be surprised how far you get with just a little time every single day
Reminds me of the Finnster. Didnt fully get their journey so I might be mistaken. Regardless, Shen can do whatever Shen whants. Him, her, them, whatever, be happy.
I was expecting the muscles to stay for a while after the Dark Wizard arc, but I was not expecting genderswapped Shen to stick around. I'm clearly terrible at guessing what is and isn't canon.
Drawing is an intense exercise in misery pain and frustration, and the only fruit of said labour us a disgraceful mockery of my artistic intents, and a profoundly disgusting insult to all that is beautiful
One of the great things about being a millennial was watching the birth of webcomics as a medium. So many people were just throwing whatever up on a cheap little website. A lot of them died but along the way it was very cool to see the art and the writing improve over time. We had that great aggregator website to find new stuff. The one where you voted every week for your favorite comics, and some artists put secret bonus panels in the link to vote.
Nowadays it feels like there's a minimum of polish required to even get started, and aggregators all feel like parasites preying on the artists whose work they don't just link to, but now host.
Yeah, it doesn't help that newer websites like TikTok are completely toxic towards newbie artists and people in the comments will tell them to end themselves because they made a bad picture. The older Internet seemed a bit more chill towards less polished content in general (though the trolls still existed).
This is why I stopped drawing. I realised I just wanted something cool looking to show off and that I hated the process itself. I like art. I do not like drawing.
I can't draw and because of that my brain just won't let me give it a proper try. I have started multiple times but I can't force it or I'll just get angry over nothing.
For the majority of human history, people communicated without written language! In fact, so much of artistic communication is about avoiding using words. In cinema, an important part is implying a story through montage. Shot composition and lighting communicate so much, as well.
And then, on the opposite end, Dinosaur Comics, aka Quantz, is approaching its 4,500th strip, updating 3 times a week since 2003, with the same drawn images and different dialogue, since that's what the author was comfortable with and wanted to do.
And one last encouragement, isn't the most beautiful music often without words, just vocalizations?
"WhO tHe HeLl CaReS iF iT's BaD" Me. I care. I am already dissapointed in myself every time i do anything. I don't need to add a new dissapointment to the pile.
The worst feeling, and I mean the WORST, is when you have something to say to the world and you do your absolute best to convey it in a piece of art and nobody notices. Just nothing. Insignificance.
It's not lack of art skills stopping me (and I suspect others), it's fear of being ignored.
It takes more or less 5 minutes to write a comment on reddit just so that everybody ignores it/misunderstands it/or simply replies to it with the most garbage take you've ever seen, and sometimes I feel like I wish I could get that time back. I can only imagine what it feels like to spend 6 hours drawing something just to get the same reaction.
I mean, nothing against it, I admire the people who do that shit. But I'm just not built for that I guess.
(I'll never use AI to do either of those things or me though. That's just pathetic).
This hits because I’ve finally actually started writing comics after years of Wanting To. I’m planning to start posting a bunch of stuff in August. It’s not Van Gogh but it’s stuff I have to show and say.
I used to draw creatures by just making them out of circle scribbles. Like the kind you do when your pen runs low on ink. I had whole ecosystems and evolutionary branches of these weird circle scribbled worm things
Ngl, this motivated the hell out of me even though I haven't tried doing art ever... It totally has nothing to do with the fact a cute FShen is yelling at me... At all...
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u/Majestic-Iron7046 1d ago
I made this two years ago, it's my peak art, you can have it.