Oooooof...
What is up, everyone?
It's Ergo mustache.
Yeah, I got rid of the beard, I had to.
It was just taken up too much of my life.
There were hairs falling on my iPad.
While I be recording it, it just it just wasn't working.
Sorry, TMI, but it's gone.
I decided to keep a little bit of hair
on my face, and so I'm digging this mustache.
All right. Don't hate if you miss the beard.
I'm sorry, but it's just this is me now, but let's
go ahead and get right into the topic today.
We're going to talk about why I feel like I know because it's happened to me.
Half of your brain is not being used because you're not doing this.
one thing that they don't want you to know about doing this one thing
will double your your growth at art.
Just this one thing.
Stay tuned to the end until I tell you what it is.
Just get it.
It's imagination drawing from imagination to be exact.
So what most people do is they draw from reference, which is absolutely great.
A ton of artists will tell you including me to draw from reference.
It's basically how you learn how to draw anything.
If you haven't seen it, then you can't really draw it.
That really does apply.
And so drawing from reference is absolutely
what any beginner, any intermediate, any advanced artist should be doing
because there's always things that you can pick up
and add to your mental library, as we always call it, so that you can use
it in your creations and concept art whenever you want to along the way.
However, what I don't want you to do is confuse drawing
from my imagination, withdrawing from memory, right?
Because those are two very different things.
When we usually think of imagination, a lot of people say, Oh, that's not true.
There's no such thing as drawing from imagination, but there is right.
Memory is simply putting something in your brain that you have seen before
and keeping it there so that you can use it later.
That's why we call it memorizing.
And when you draw from memory, you're just spinning that information
right back out onto the sheet of paper or the digital canvas.
Imagination, however, is something a little bit different.
It's really the assembly.
I like to use that word of the things that we have in our memory
to create something new that we haven't seen before.
So I'll give you an example.
I guarantee you you probably haven't seen.
I know I haven't seen a mouse mermaid
with a party hat on holding a trident, riding an elephant.
Right?
You could probably draw that if you have drawn any of those components
before, right?
We've I've drawn I've drawn an elephant before.
I've drawn a mouse before I've drawn a mermaid,
before I've drawn a trade in before and I've drawn a party out before.
But I've never drawn all of those together in the way I said that is imagination.
And that's the really cool thing, because that is exactly what gives art its value.
So let's take Kim Jong-Il, for example.
He draws incredibly well. It is insane.
He just starts drawing.
He can start drawing
a building from someone who's standing in front of the building.
And he will start with their ear and he will get the rest of it done.
That's how crazy his skills are.
But the great thing is, those crazy skills are only part of the story.
They are used to make the crazy ideas that he has shined
even better, and those ideas are what really draw people to it.
So if you can have those ideas, then they really only complements
your art even more.
And it makes people who aren't interested in art actually interested in art
because you're showing them something that they haven't seen before.
And that's really cool.
So there's a few benefits
to drawing from imagination that I want to let you know in.
The first one is that you're basically building neural pathways now.
I don't have the research papers to prove this,
but I'm pretty sure you've heard this throughout your entire educational career
when you're, you know, you're being taught memoir next or learning techniques
to help you memorize things for your tests and essays and all that.
But basically, it's a commonly held understanding that
when you learn something, your memory of it, your
your understanding of it gets stronger and stronger every time you test it.
Right?
So if you memorize a fact, every time you have that flash card
and you have to recall and remember what it is on the back of the flash
card, your memory of it gets stronger and stronger.
It's like a chain link that gets
stronger and stronger and more robust every single time you tested.
Right?
And in order to test it, you have to draw from imagination.
If I am studying the different muscles in the leg, for example,
I can look at a diagram of the leg and draw it right, but that's not testing
the chain strength.
What will test the chain strength is when I try to draw it from my imagination.
I try to recall it.
And that is what builds it.
Now, of course, you can do it exactly from memory, but that's drawing in
exactly the same leg, the exact same pose that you saw in your anatomy book.
Imagination is saying, OK, I want to draw this leg,
but I want to draw it from below.
And let's say I'm looking at someone who is.
Out to get out of bed and what pulls their legs might be in
and what muscles might be contracted and what muscles might be relaxed
and how that's that's really challenging and that's really going to stress that
tension of the link of your memory of that thing even more.
Now the second benefit is huge.
It's really the best way to find out what you don't know
about something, because let's be honest here.
When you learn something,
no matter how much you think you might get it,
you don't understand the whole thing.
You learn things in layers, and your understanding of something
that might be simple gets better and better with time.
And so the best way to find out what's left for you to be able to learn
is to see how much, you know, right there and then or then in there on the spot.
And the way to do that is to just draw from imagination
and test and see what you can do.
So, for example, one of my friends told me,
You know, a great way to test your understanding of anatomy is
just try to draw a skeleton from imagination.
Just do it, try to add all the muscles from imagination
and whatever you can't add.
That's the thing you need to study.
And the last huge, hugely important thing the benefit
to drive for imagination is something I mentioned earlier.
It's that word again, assembly.
You are going to build your ability to assemble things
in your mind, in your imagination, and that is really good for illustrators
who are creating not just concepts of , you know, a character standing
and you turn them around,
but you want to be able to create an idea for, let's say, a whole scene
that's going to make your character really, really shy.
And even in concept art, let's say you're not just doing a character.
You're trying to concept a city, a village, a space, an entire cabin.
For a certain character,
you want to be able to assemble all of the different things,
all of the different references you might have into a cohesive product
that's going to be the very concept that you want to sell.
And that is a skill in and of itself.
Trust me, I have struggled with growing and building my anatomy
and trying to practice all my fundamentals so much to where it's like, OK,
I want to make my own illustration.
I want to make my own animation, my own comic.
You know, I'm sure the most simple version of this is,
Hey, I don't know what to draw
because you haven't practiced that skill of assembly.
How do I take what I've learned and make something out of it?
That is the very thing you practice when you're drawing from imagination.
And I'm just going to give you a tip really quick.
It's going to be very hard when you start.
If you haven't drawn from imagination at all yet, trust me.
And I just want to let you know that now, because that will at least
give you the courage to keep going because there are big rewards.
If you push through the difficulty in the beginning.
Again, with what I said about not knowing what to draw,
some of you might be thinking, Well, Josh, I always draw from imagination ,
and I'm not that good at drawing. I'm still a beginner.
And yeah, that makes a lot of sense because a lot of beginners tend to
just draw from imagination, which I think is an excellent behavior, to be honest.
Let's just put that there.
I never really drew from imagination that much as a beginner, and I wish I did.
But the thing is, as a beginner, you also need to remember that,
hey, remember the first thing that everyone says draw from reference?
That's still very important.
And I actually think that's just as important as drawing from imagination.
It just so happens that I think a lot of people draw from imagination
for a few years in the beginning.
Then they're like, Oh, I need to draw from reference.
That's going to be how I grow.
And then they put drawing for imagination behind, and they never do it right.
Or at least they don't do it from a place of trying to use it for a way to grow.
They just do it for fun.
But I think you can use it to grow really, really fast in combination
with reference.
And so just analyze, take a step back and think about what
you've been doing for yourself and see,
am I doing a healthy balance of both or am I heavily leaning on one end?
And if you are, try to bring back the other
and see if that can help you grow a little bit faster.
For me,
drawing from reference was the only thing I did growing up almost the entire time.
For me, unfortunately, a lot of my drawing and how I did was very, very
tightly linked to my self-esteem.
So of course, mentally it's like, OK, if I want to draw something good
so I can give validation, I need to use reference.
I'm not even going to like I rarely even just drew from a reference.
I would use the grid method or straight up tracer
because to me is like, if I don't get it right, then I'm a failure.
So it's only until lately where I've been drawing from imagination
and at the video that you're seeing the footage that you're seeing of me
drawing the two women that I'm drawing are completely from my imagination.
Part of my fake tober challenged I'm doing for this October.
And just in case you're wondering,
what you're looking at is me just using my iPad Pro.
It's going to be the this is the 2021 model, I believe, with the M1 chip.
And I'm using Procreate 5.0 and I'm using a paper like screen protector.
Really nice.
It just makes it really chill and relaxing to sit here and draw.
It's pretty much right here.
I already finished the drawings, though,
but this is just how I work and I really enjoy it.
And of course, I'm using the Apple Pencil too.
So, yeah, that's also a big factor.
All right.
So in summary, I.
I just want to remind you guys
that this is going to be hard to do if you haven't done it a lot, right?
I struggled with it a lot.
I remember when I started around June, July this year when I started
saying, OK, I want to try to draw from imagination a lot more.
And I take it really seriously. It was hard.
It was very frustrating.
And I think some of you, I don't think many of you will find it is
frustrating, as I did, because remember, I haven't done it for years,
but I don't want to give the impression that this is all you need to be doing
or all you should be doing.
You should only do this some of the time again,
like start at 5050, do some reference and do do some stuff for imagination.
You can also just use it as a test, maybe every month
to see where you're at with what you've learned or what.
I like to do a lot.
Is I like to do some drawings,
ideally daily, but let's be honest, it's really hard to draw every day.
Let's start off for the first ten to 20 to 30 minutes of a drawing,
or you're just drawing session draw from imagination
and where the gaps are, where you couldn't really figure out like the hands.
Usually that's it for me, the hands or the, you know, the facial expression.
Or maybe you want a different hairstyle. Go get some reference.
Finish the drawing with all the reference you need.
And I bet you you're going to come up with a drawing way cooler
than any reference that you would have copied from the very beginning.
Because what you have in your imagination is special
and something that is worth showing and sharing with the world, and people
are probably going to find it really cool, and you might develop building a whole
audience that wants to see the stuff you've got later on down the line.
Thank you all so much for watching this video.
Let me know what you think about everything.
Let me know if this has helped you out.
How much are you drawing from imagination?
And I will see you all in the next one.
Keep drawing and stay positive. Peace.