Hey guys, it's Celestia, and I'm really excited for today's video. I've got a lot of awesome
announcements for you all, which I'll save for the end of the video, and a fun, lighthearted topic
that I've wanted to make for a while now, which is how I improved my art more than ever before in one
year. So, in total, I've been drawing relatively seriously for about 10 years now, and I've been
pursuing it seriously as a career for about 6. But throughout all of that time, I devoted very little
of it to actively, consistently trying to improve my art. It's not like I didn't WANT to improve,
but there was always something holding me back from committing to putting the time and effort
into making it happen. In the beginning, I was trying to finish high school remotely
and get out of a dangerous living situation, and there was so much else going on in my life that
I ended up taking really long, sporadic breaks from art that really hindered any significant
improvement or growth. And then as time passed and I started trying to make art into my job,
I made the mistake of focusing on quantity over quality, which resulted in me drawing
tons and tons of mediocre art rather than trying to make fewer - but higher quality - pieces,
because I wanted to have enough prints and buttons and other stuff to actually have stock to sell. I
talked more about this in my video about the mistakes I made when starting my art career,
linked in the card above, but suffice it to say that it resulted in some very long-term stagnation
when it came to my growth as an artist. But when quarantine hit, I started playing a lot of League
of Legends, which sounded like a better segue in my head, but bear with me. Basically, I hate
League. Truly, the game is a dumpster fire that I made the mistake of selling my soul to years ago,
and now I can't get it back. But one of the few things I DO genuinely and wholeheartedly love
about it is the art. And spending all that time in quarantine, staring at the gorgeous splash art
of all the champions while loading into my ninth consecutive game at four in the morning eventually
resulted in me getting really, really jealous, because I really, really wished I could draw
like that. It actually made me SO jealous that I almost gave up on my own art, because I felt like
I would just never ever be on that level, so there was no point in trying. I started hating drawing,
because nothing came out looking anywhere near as good as the professionals that I wanted to
be like, and it made me pretty goddamn miserable for a long ass time. And eventually, I came to
realize that I only had two choices if I wanted to stop being miserable: quit art, or throw myself
into getting better at it. So around mid-to-late 2020, I threw myself into getting better at it,
and while I'm still not as good as League splash artists or anywhere near as good as I want to be,
I have improved a hell of a lot since then, and I'm really, really proud of that. So with that in
mind, let me tell you guys the biggest things that I've learned after a year of studying, practicing,
and actively working to grow as an artist. And let me start with that by thanking today's sponsor,
Wingfox, because learning platforms like theirs that are dedicated to helping artists learn and
improve are some of the biggest things that helped me. For a long time, I was under the
antiquated impression that the only real option artists have for education is art school,
largely because that's what most of my generation was raised to believe, at least as kids and young
adults. And obviously, I mean -- we've all heard of Skillshare at this point in the year 2022,
so everyone these days knows that's no longer the case, and you don't need me to tell you that. You
can learn anything through online classes now, and it's completely transformed the way that people
approach education for the better. But what sets Wingfox apart from your average online learning
platform is that it is 100% dedicated to art. Their whole platform is exclusively for artists,
offering courses from leading industry professionals all around the world,
covering pretty much any type or genre of visual art that you can imagine. I'm currently working
on the "Level Up Your Digital Painting Skills" course, and let me tell you, I was not in any
way prepared for how thorough it is. I've taken a million online art classes at this point, and none
of them have come close to the level of detail that this course provides. I'm still nowhere
near finished this course alone because of just how much is actually included in it, but damn!
The brushes that are provided with the course are incredible on their own, but the fact that there's
a whole section dedicated to explaining how to use each one to achieve specific looks and effects
really impressed me. I've already learned so many new techniques, some of which I've
used to make the art in this video, and I'm not even halfway done. I would highly recommend both
this course and Wingfox as a whole, because the quality and versatility that they offer is so,
so valuable when it comes to improving your art quickly. I'd personally recommend the digital
painting course that I'm currently working on, linked in the description, but I've also
heard very good things about their Live2D Vtuber model course, and it's next on my list when I'm
done this one. Honestly, Wingfox's courses are already pretty affordable considering just how
thorough and extensively detailed they are, but on top of that, you can get 15% off any of their
courses with coupon code WFF15. Online education has been hands-down the biggest and most helpful
tool I've used in the past year of working to improve my art, and I cannot recommend it enough.
Moving on from education, though, another thing that I found really integral to my growth has been
setting reasonable expectations for that growth. Wanting to go from amateurish, mediocre art to
League splash art overnight was absolutely demolishing my self-esteem and motivation,
and I would absolutely have given up if I'd kept up that mentality. It's one thing to
have something like that as a long-term goal, and that's a good thing, because that goal has helped
push me to work harder, but to expect yourself to reach that goal without having to reach the
million other smaller goals between now and then is just setting yourself up for failure. You won't
be able to meet your own impossible expectations, and every time you make a piece that doesn't,
you're gonna hate it, and your self-esteem and motivation will suffer as a result.
Because if you're looking at your work through the lens of "is it as good as this person's?" or
"is it as good as I want it to be?" all you'll see is that it's not, and then you won't see all of
the small improvements that you HAVE made, because they'll be overshadowed by the ones that you
haven't. It's something that I actually learned in training for the organization I work with,
but it's very applicable here, too, and it's that you should always strive for excellence, not
perfection. Striving for perfection will always leave you disappointed and unable to achieve it,
and that'll feel like a personal failure. Striving for excellence instead encourages you to always do
your best, while also maintaining reasonable and achievable expectations, and when you
end up meeting those expectations, that positive reinforcement will feel so validating that it'll
encourage you to keep working and moving forward. What I've found very helpful, specifically,
is starting every new art piece with one goal: try to make this one better than the last one.
It doesn't have to be perfect, it doesn't have to be as good as I want my art to eventually be,
it just has to be a little bit better. I've also found it helpful to set specific goals for each
piece, like, individual areas that you want to work on improving: anatomy, shading, hair,
eyes, whatever. That way, you'll be consciously working on and paying attention to those aspects
throughout the drawing process, and then you can look at those aspects of the finished piece and
feel some kind of tangible, visible reassurance that you've improved, even if only slightly,
or in one way. Improvement is such a slow, gradual process, and while I understand the urge to do it
as quickly as possible as much as any other artist does, it's immensely important to acknowledge the
small victories along the way, too. Another thing that's helped me a lot is a practice
that I've briefly discussed before, and it's to analyze the art that you like, or art that you
want yours to look like, and break it down into components. First of all, it makes that art less
unattainable. I'm sure a lot of you have looked at a piece of art and thought "holy sh*t,
there's no f**king way I'll ever be able to make something like that". I know I have. I still do,
often. Too often. But taking that art apart through analysis allows you to see it less as
this perfect masterpiece that you don't know how to make, and more as the culmination of a bunch of
different skills and techniques, all of which you could learn and use to make your own masterpiece.
Not only that, but being able to see those aspects and techniques as individual areas to
learn and practice allows you to be cognizant of those areas every time you work on your own art.
It's so much easier to improve when you have a list of things that you want to change or refine,
rather than just a nebulous "I want my art to be better or like this other art" without any
real plan or way to make that happen. I've also found that it's handy when it comes to
developing your art style, because being able to look at a bunch of different artists' work and say
not just "I like this, I want to draw like this", but "I love the use of bright, contrasting color",
or "I love the thickness of the lineart", or "I love the way they stylize the eyes". It helps you
incorporate those aspects into your own art, so eventually, with enough time and practice,
you kind of end up developing a style full of all the things that you loved and envied from
other artists. At least that's what happened for me. I started the year trying to just simulate
the League art style with no goals beyond "make it look like that", and ended up not only failing to,
but erasing my own style in the process. I still did learn a lot from trying to emulate that style,
because doing that is a very valid and helpful form of art study in and of itself,
so long as you do so as an exercise, and not a long-term solution. But when I started looking
at it more objectively, and analyzing and setting goals, it stopped being "I want my art to be just
like this art", and started being "how can I incorporate these aspects and techniques into
my own art style?", and I grew so much more with that attitude instead. The next thing I learned
over the past year was the importance of studies. I used to only draw when the goal was to make
a finished piece out of whatever I was working on: every sketch had to turn into a fully rendered
piece of art to be shared - if not SOLD. I felt like just sketching or drawing for the sake of a
study and not posting or selling the finished art somehow - all of that was just a waste of time,
if nothing could be gained from it, which was partially because I was just exceptionally
busy. Which-- that part hasn't really changed, it's just that now at least once a week, I try
to put a couple of hours aside in my schedule to just draw for study. I don't post those studies,
I even delete most of them, but it's been so valuable in my growth to keep doing them. I
learned that not only was not studying hindering my growth because, I mean, studying is important,
but because I was only ever drawing things that I would turn into finished works,
I was also inherently limiting the kinds of things that I was drawing. I was drawing a very specific,
small number of poses, body types, and perspectives, because the finished product
had to meet certain criteria to be marketable. But in doing studies that I never sell or even post,
I don't need to worry about whether or not someone will want to buy what I'm working on. I can draw a
geriatric old man doing aggressive cartwheels to improve my understanding of the human body, and
there's no concern that that subject matter won't be appealing to audiences or buyers. It really
helped me start diversifying the kinds of things that I draw in that regard, and I feel like those
studies were where my anatomy finally started improving. Art studies are also particularly
valuable, because if you're not worried about anyone seeing them, you don't have to worry about
them being good. You can take risks, draw things you've never drawn or aren't good at drawing, and
in doing so, get better at drawing them, because they're allowed to be bad. No one can judge the
quality of your art if no one sees it. At least for me, for that reason, it's been as therapeutic
as it has been helpful. As a small follow-up tip for that, I've recommended pose packs in the past,
but they're particularly relevant here: pose packs like Rachel Bradley's, which I'll never stop
promoting because they're awesome, are collections of photos of real people in a variety of different
poses intended to provide reference to artists of all kinds. Some are free and some aren't,
but the bottom line is that when it comes to studies, it's really handy to take a small pack
of these poses and just sit down and draw them all, or at least a few of them. It teaches you
proper anatomy by nature of it being based on a photo of a real person, it forces you to draw a
person in poses you might not otherwise have been inclined to draw or even think of, and it prompts
more diversity in the work that you're able to do. Personally, the ones that have been most helpful
for me have been those with really dramatic perspectives that I'd never worked with before,
and those with very extreme poses that don't really occur normally outside of, like, gymnastics
or cinematic levels of action, because they push me out of my comfort zone, which has a lot of
value, at least to me. Following up on that, the use of reference as a whole is something that I've
learned to value and take a lot more seriously. There's actually a whole section on reference
compilation in the Wingfox course I mentioned earlier, which is not uncommon. I've taken quite a
few courses that emphasize the importance of good references for your work, and it's because having
a comprehensive collection of reference images for every aspect of the piece you're working on makes
all the difference when it comes to the quality of the finished art. Before this year, I would use
one reference or maybe two, at most, per piece, and only for the aspect of the piece that I really
struggled with, or design reference in the case of fanart. Now, I have like three references ready
for a f**king sleeve alone, and it's not because I don't know how to draw that sleeve without them,
it's because with reference, I can draw it better. And the more I draw something correctly because I
drew it while looking at a reference, the better I'll be able to draw it without that reference in
time. I would really, really recommend learning more about proper reference collection, because
before I started studying this past year, I was always under the impression that using a reference
really just meant looking at a picture of a pose or occasionally a piece of clothing or hair.
I was incredibly surprised to learn that for a lot of industry professionals, they have pages upon
pages of reference all for one piece: lighting reference, pose reference, hair reference,
clothing reference, design reference, composition reference, the list goes on,
and the more I've implemented this practice in my own work, the better that work has come out.
So, the bigger practices aside, here are some more general tips that I've learned over the last year
that might be helpful for you guys. First, layers are an excellent asset for digital art, and their
usefulness cannot be understated, but there is such a thing - at least in my experience - as
using too many, and not just because I've hit the layer limit on every drawing program I've
ever used after losing every individual detail to the growing, overwhelming sea of unnamed layers
with three lines on each. I've also found that the more layers I use, the more separate I keep each
different aspect of my art, and subsequently, the more disconnected and detached from each
other those aspects end up turning out in the end. I still struggle a lot with light and reflection,
but even if I can't always implement it well, I HAVE learned that technically speaking,
based on how light reflects, colours are not, in reality, fully bracketed out from each other just
because they're separate. For example, if you hold up, like, a bright pink sweatshirt sleeve next to
your cheek, that pink doesn't end where the sleeve does, light reflects some of it onto your cheek.
By separating layers so rigidly, at least in my experience, I've struggled to capture that,
because it forces those colours not to blend into each other. I'm sure others are perfectly capable
of portraying this effect even with their layers being separate, but in my personal experience,
it's at least easier if you use less layers and let those colours and aspects of your art blend
together more. Another colour-related tip is one that I actually learned from a Lavendertowne
video, linked in the card above, and it's about colour palettes. Prior to this year, I would
always either just use the exact designated colours of a character's palette in my work
for accuracy's sake, or I would use a dramatized colour palette and change the character's colours
to fit into it, and disregard accuracy. The former led to a lot of colours clashing,
and the latter led to me struggling to maintain the bright and bold colouring style that I favour
when I had to conform to any kind of colour scheme that didn't fit the palette I already made. But
with this trick, you can make any group of colours go together, avoiding either scenario. Basically,
you take the colours you want to use, and you overlay one background colour of your choice on
top of that layer, then you adjust the opacity of that layer as needed to suit how vibrant you want
your palette to be, and you've got a brand new set of colours that works much better together.
It's super simple, but I found it really helpful, and I've used it a ton over the past couple
months. The last colour-related note I want to mention is also simple, but I always used to
do my shading and highlights in only one colour, and then I would use that same colour to airbrush
wider, softer shadows or lights. It left the whole piece ending up looking pretty flat,
and it also made the detail of the shading a lot harder to see. Making a conscious effort
to use multiple shades and hues during this process has made a big difference for me,
and I would really recommend experimenting with it if you don't already. Okay, one more thing
that helped me improve my art was focusing more on lineart. I used to use really thick lineart that
was pretty uniform in weight throughout the piece, and the more I studied this past year, the more I
learned that unless that's purely out of stylistic preference, that's really not the way to go.
I found that my lineart really improved when I started using thicker lineart for areas that are
closer to the foreground and thinner lineart for areas that are farther away, or for small details,
as well as thickening the lineart in areas of shadow or where lines touch or intersect. Playing
around with brush settings, stabilizers, and pen sensitivity was also really helpful when it came
to that. And that about covers the most helpful things that I've learned this past year; all of
these methods and tips were integral in my growth, and while I still have a very, very long way to go
in terms of improving my art, I'm genuinely so proud of how far I've come with it after
dedicating my time and energy to actively try to learn over the years. I've been amazed to see
how much can be achieved when you really try to be conscious of the way that you're drawing, and then
the way that you want to be drawing. I've grown more this year than I did in the entire 10 years
before it, and I think that says a lot about how the way you approach art can impact its quality. I
hope at least some of this advice was helpful, and I'd love to hear about your guys's journeys with
art and improvement in the comments, especially the simple things that you tried out that ended
up helping you a lot in the long run, because I found that everyone has a handful of those things
that are unique to them and their experiences, and I love hearing them. I also love stealing
them from my own art improvement. Anyway, before I end the video, the announcements. First of all,
hold on... look at me! After months of work and waiting, Vtuber Celestia is finally here! I'm so
excited to start using this model for streaming, and based on the votes I received on my last poll
as well as my own schedule, I've decided that my weekly stream day will be Wednesdays at 6 pm MDT.
I haven't decided on a debut date for my first one yet, because this month has been a hectic disaster
of medical tests and crises, but hopefully in April, my schedule will be clearer, and I'll
be able to get this sh*t started. And when I do, I'm so excited to start chatting and drawing with
you guys! I've got a handful of art-based games to play lined up, I'll be doodling a bunch of memes,
and I'll be jumping on another bandwagon to smash and pass Pokemon and celebrate the debut stream.
I'm really looking forward to getting started with this, so I hope to see some of you guys
there! That aside, I've also released a bunch of new merch, shown on screen here, and I've also
launched a brand new Patreon! You can find all of that linked in the description, and my Patreon
tiers offer a bunch of new content and perks, so I'd really appreciate it if you checked it out.
Finally, in my next video, I'll be announcing the first of many future art contests with some very
cool prizes, so stay tuned for that as well! Okay, all right, I'm done rambling now, I'm sorry. Thank
you guys for watching - special thanks as always to channel members Cafe Soleil, Lotus Dreams Art,
Joseph Solomon, Adel Juarez, Fionapollo, and Oco Nova for their support. I hope you enjoyed
the video, please leave a like and subscribe if you did, and I'll see you in my next one!