JOSEPHSERAPH'S PROFILE

KrimsonKatt
1: But I'm broke and lazy.

Case closed.

Laziness is perfectly moral and correct. Absolutely nothing wrong with being lazy. Or with being depressed, anxious, having to grapple with a difficult daily life. But AI isn't your saviour, El*n M*sk and OpenAI won't fix your bank account or your lack of bandwidth to allocate to art.

KrimsonKatt
I had natural talent though?

Subjective. What we call "natural talent" is merely interest, hyperfocus, etc. And improvement is not linear. But, as a person that has art teaching skills, I can objectively assess which areas are lacking in your art skills and could give you directions as to how to improve them.

Because art is mostly comprised of a set of objective tools used to birth subjective ideas. And I'm going to tell you -- if you're "lazy", you're not going to sketch and re-sketch to improve your composition. You're not going to bother spending countless hours drawing from reference to build a mental library, or following many of the amazing exercises very competent artists have crafted to help improve spatial awareness, for instance. And that's alright, art can be good without these fundamentals as well, since the subjective part is what it's all about. But...

KrimsonKatt

This level of anatomic concistency is that of a professional artist. Professional artists have invested not only countless hours into their careers, but also money in tutoring. You can't expect to shortcut your way into it if you're "lazy" -- especially if you don't have the money for proper tutoring, which is immensely helpful in actually telling you where it would be more efficient for you to spend your time improving in.

KrimsonKatt
Guess I have to work 10x as hard for inferior work done all by myself without help from AI then...

Or you can work 10x as easy for... Unsuperior work, all while NOT learning the anatomy you clearly are avoiding by tracing outlines, ultimately stagnating in your ability to express yourself. (Not to mention there are other better shortcuts to anatomy which can actually help you improve your art like posing dolls, even if you trace over them, ESPECIALLY if they're not anime)

Also, wanna get better at anime? Study art that's not anime.

I understand AI is a tempting alternative to practicing, but you're building on a foundation that you don't have, which means your house isn't as sturdy. There's obviously the moral side to it all but I really don't wanna get in there in this post.

Seriously, you remind me a little bit of how angry my sister gets whenever I tell her that "to be decent at something, you need to have 1000h of experience doing that thing" -- I don't mean her ill, but she's the kind to start drawing, hate the results then just quit for days. She's been getting better at it, though. But still got very, very low tolerance for frustration.



EDIT: The thing that I wanted to get to: Just like you're broke, most of us are. Art is expensive because it's time consuming. For example, $100 for a full body portrait is the type of pricing you can expect from me. But I will often spend DAYS, plural, on that portrait, while working from my home office (meaning consuming my own electricity, water, food, EQUIPMENT which is very expensive ESPECIALLY here in Brazil, etc.)

When you sum that all up, $100 a day's worth of work, considering all the related expenses as well as the years and dollars upon dollars artists like me have spent on art tutoring, supplies, drawing tablets, PCs, etc, isn't really expensive at all -- it's cheap.

But if you invest that in yourself, train and practice, you'll get better.


By the way, I totally recommend something like MakeHuman for you to practice drawing your characters -- DO NOT TRACE AT ALL not even outlines if you wanna improve, just try to copy the proportins, but these sorts of character creators can be a great starting point.

And my personal recommendation for you would be to practice copying without tracing WHILE changing the view. So do an exact copy of a character, then do it seen from the side, from a little up, from a little down. Do that enough and you'll develop that spatial and anatomic awareness to be able to craft your poses and characters with relative ease!

I'm ambivalent as well, but I think it's cool RMN as a website has the ability to take a stance towards this

On one hand, I think situations like this:

Liberty
- Is it an edit of AI-generated art/etc that you're claiming? No.

Are a bit tricky because sometimes it's the other way around - it's an AI edit of your own created art - For instance I've played around with AI to "teach it" my art style, and I often like the result: Feels like looking at yourself in the strangest of mirrors.

On the other hand trying to draw a line too fine will inevitably lead to exploitation and headache for the staff

In the end, though, RMN's nature as a community with shared morals and values (a collective conscious, so to speak), and not just a generic hosting platform, means taking a stance when it comes to important and current topics like this an important thing to do.

not only there's a point IT'S THE ENTIRE POINT OF THE EVENT do it >:-(
(lookin' rad!!!)

Tysmmmmmmm <3 <3 <3 <3 i frigging love node-based maps <3

No ur