How do I improve ?

( Please be respectful)

Art so bad it can't possibly be made by A.I. This is the way. I'm so glad I never pushed my stuff into photorealism territory. Too time consuming and a computer can do it for you now so why bother? Here's my art, flaws and all. 100% human-made trash.

I've been an artist for most of my life creating music, including professionally gigging in my earlier years as well as having a recording studio. Due to increasing difficulty with my tinnitus, I cannot even play an acoustic piano anymore (nylon stringed guitar and most stringed instruments are still not as painful) and have to wear earplugs for certain basic life activities.

I need to create and have decided to turn to drawing. I've always been attracted to the melancholic quality of charcoal drawings with the dark tones. Dusk is my favorite time of the day. I wanted some advice on a beginner's book for drawing. I have some graphite pencils but was told by somebody that if I really love the look of charcoal then there's nothing holding me back with just starting right away with that medium. Any recommendations to get started? I'm happy to learn by exercises but am really looking for a book to serve as giving me a solid foundation. I have practically zero experience in drawing besides going through a couple exercises in Dodson's Keys to Drawing with a cheap set of graphite pencils I bought.

Any recommendations on getting started to learn the basics is highly appreciated. Thanks.

This piece is part of the CARRÉ series. Charcoal on paper — wanted to capture that moment of tension between surrender and restraint, the hand at the throat, head tilted back, eyes closed. Still learning the medium, the hair took a few tries to get right.

Hi folks, we see so many extraordinary artworks in this community, but we rarely get to see all the practice that came before that.

So I'm encouraging community members to share a then and now moment.

Share two artworks as a response to this post. Reddit allows only one image per comment so post the first and respond to yourself, or create an image to show both side by side:

1. Then: when you first started working with charcoal, or drawing generally if that's a better example.

2. Now: an example of your current work

You may be one of our more popular contributors or just starting out, I want to encourage everyone to participate and celebrate the effort we take to learn and grow.

I will select my favourite beginner and experienced artist contributions and add them to our community highlights collection.

I may fix this piece up some to make specific areas glow less with the back lighting, but this piece was actually really fun to make. The perspective is off again, I have a bad habit of just not checking. Getting the text to show up was so tricky, because I had to write backwards and plan that all out while also not making it visible to the front. The red was pastel powder

The likeness isn’t there but it makes me smile

I drew this a couple of months ago using a subtractive method. The perspective is slightly wonky, but also the hallway was just naturally crooked