My art journey

I wanted to document my journey with art because I never saw someone sharing it in a way that felt real. What I mean by that is that most people will talk about a journey where they drew for years then stopped, then came back.

So I wanted to share what a "realistic" learning process is for an adult. My background is that I always liked the idea of drawing but never could find a process that didn't physically hurt me.

I only took some lessons when I was 8-9 years old then just dribbled throughout the years, never took the courage to continue studying seriously. If I ever find my drawing from that age I'll share too.

My goal with it is to learn to love the process again, have fun and become good enough to start making my games.

The timeline, routine and resources

Let's start by explaining how I'm learning. I've decided to start working towards my old objective of making art in September 2025 and enrolled in an art course in October.

Just like many things, I've put it aside for years thinking I was bad or something. Since I was little, I heard some insane shit that stayed with me (people told me no left-handed person in the world was good in art lol wtf), I was very impatient with progress and had no support in learning how to deal with frustration (my parents essentially left their kids to raise themselves).

I'm now almost 30 and understand my problems, tendencies and issues. I still feel impatient sometimes, but I'm finally at peace enough with myself to pursue my interests.

I work at two jobs (work-from-home), I go to the gym 3-times a week and have therapy every week. That's essentially my routine. My art classes are 1h 2-times a week. Everything else I do is in my spare time.

I'm fortunate enough to be able to pay for classes and have a tablet to train on, but most of the "progress" I've been having was done through online resources, I believe.

Art course

I enrolled in a "realism art class" in October 2025 that should let me draw realistic pictures of things, animals and people. It takes a project-based approach, which I like, because I wanna see my progress through the output. But it's kinda annoying because realistic drawings take so much time, in 5 months I did only 3 full drawings phew

You can click on images to enlargen them!

The first one I did was the toucan, I learned about basic shapes and simplifying the drawing before adding details. It was simpler than the others because I basically painted it black.

The wolf was a lot harder because of the fur, and it took me the longest, I think 2 whole months on it alone. I can see now that is very disproportionate in regards of its face, but I'm still very proud of its snout.

The latter was the bat, which was challenging because of all of the details, but the fur was surprisingly manageable. A lot quicker to do than the wolf lol. And I think I did the nose details kinda nice. Proportions are my weakness still, especially with the ears that don't match in size, but I feel like I got better.

My notebook

My notebook has some sketches and studies that I do in my spare time. For a while, I tried studying one hour per day and I had some decent results. I'm not gonna share the boxes and circles I did because there's a bunch of random stuff in there. Maybe later I'll update it.

The shark was done after the wolf, so I was kinda reusing the techniques I learned. It was easier than the deer because of the simple anatomy.

The last one is my attempt at understanding Mirror dragons from Flight Rising. I think it's decent but I don't know when their bone head ends lol.

Then I decided to study people. Anatomy, gesture drawing and loomis method. I'm still getting the hang of it, gesture drawing is awful. I still think none of these drawings make any sense, and I need to come back here later.

Then it was time to go to the head. Most art teachers online swear by the Loomis method but I'm still struggling hard with it. Sometimes, I try with some "square method" and it makes more sense, but I still strugge. More mileage is what I need, I think.

The thing is: every time I do a new head, the proportions seem off in ways that I can't make sense. For example, I thought the nose was longer than it should be on the face, but it's so hard to make the space after it make sense and not feel "stretched" if I don't make it super long.

I have been staring more at people since I started. This is definitely making me seem insane! But yeah, people are so fucking different from each other I'm not sure that's helpful at all.

I'm also learning digital despite everyone telling me not to!

Spoiler alert: I have no idea if it's helping or if it's hindering my progress, ok? I can't testify it yet.

But I wanted to learn digital art because I wanna make games and I wanna be able to do it myself. So I decided to download Clip Studio Paint after trying every available program and hating every single one of them. I have a Samsung S7 Tablet, so no Procreate for me, I also hate Apple.

I'm gonna tell you this: it's a whole different beast, ok?

This is a mess. The first picture is my attempt at studying Ami Thompson's Phantom of The Gays while obviously failing hard.

I decided to try digitally so I could trace the drawing and create reference lines to understand the structure better. One thing I'm learning is that tracing is an absolute beast of a teacher to understand how someone got to that result, but obviously you can't just do it and call it a day, that would be stealing. However, look at my study in blue, then my second attempt in red. How much it improved from the purple (old) one!

Below it, there is another drawing I did before learning loomis method, so there's no strucure. And guess what, is ugly too! So now we know, we need to understand the fundamentals, ha. This angle was so much harder than I envisioned too, because of the nose. It's not right but I couldn't for the life of me get it to look correct.

That's fine, so let's study more heads.

The first drawing I did from the reference on the center. It was really hard to understand how to capture the likeness of the person, while maintaining a good proportion. I believe I failed this drawing as it has nothing to do with the other, but oh well. Also, I need to learn how to shade the way these people can.

I then tried studying another guy (I lost the reference), and it's nothing like him either. But this time, I wanted to check how to paint my drawings for the first time. It's somewhat better than I thought I could have done, but it's still bad.

I didn't bother with lineart this time, focusing solely on painting techniques. I like cell shading and don't like "painting", so that's what I did using a ball as light reference. It's ok, but there's worlds to improve from.

For now, that's what I have. Hopefully I can update this soon with some progress.

Update 01: 2026-04-08

It's been a while since I updated this, but I wanted to keep the archiving alive. I tend to burn out easily and it makes progress slow, but I'm trying to stay consistent.

I don't have much to show now, but during this month I trained more than just created things.

The thing is that I started to get confused as to what to do next. I had improved quite a bit, but everything still felt off. Like, my head structure is weird, my proportions are off, and my shading is inconsistent. What should I do?

I decided that I should focus a little bit on what I find interesting - or most importantly, what I want to eventually do with ease. I want to create my own characters and games, so I need to learn how to build people.

So I studied the human face a lot more. But I still struggled a lot with the Loomis method, then I realized I didn't know how to rotate a sphere or a box. Not only that, the method itself felt very complicated. Then I found people who talked about this "square head" method, which made much more sense to me. So I did these exercises, I think you can see I'm more confident.

You can see I can't do like 100 exercises or something... I get burned out so quickly. But I'm trying my best to get more mileage.

Now, for digital art, I did a few heads based on what I learned.

Ok, so, the brunette looking up was done quite a while ago, before learning the square head method, but it's nice to see how I already tried to apply some of the these techniques intuitively.

The woman in center was the last work I did, as in, last night I did her hair. I feel like the structure is much better now, I can do it wihout too much hassle. But the features still feel so quirky. If I compare the two girls with the guy I did, he had some kind of expressionism to him that I'm kinda losing and I don't know why. Structurally I feel myself getting better, but everything looks so dead.

Thought: I'm very inclined in getting into one of those groups or classes where we get feedback every week once I'm more stable in my training. I'm hitting a lot of brick walls now.

The last one was done previously from the center piece, but this one is probably the best thing I ever did until now. For context: the head in the right was done tracing a Clip Studio Paint model, then in the right I did a mashup of Loomis/Square Head methods to get the result I did. It's so damn good I can't really believe that I did it without tracing. I have no idea how to replicate that consistently.

Now, for the critique: Comparing both pieces, I can see I'm struggling with tridimensionality. Some things like the eyes and the nose are not quite in the correct positioning. I redid it several times and couldn't get it exactly right.

The eyes should be more like a ribbon across the face, but I keep doing it flat. I know it's wrong but physically I can't seem to make my hand do the correct thing. I wonder what I need to train to fix this.

Sidequest: Lettering Workshop!

Yeah so I'm a compulsive hobbyist so I decided to try my hand at lettering. It's a whole different skill set, but I think it complements my drawing practice nicely.

I like doing stuff that prevents my brain from doing into dark places, specially if I get to see people more talented than me doing their own thing.

So I went to a lettering workshop at a tattoo shop to learn mostly cursive and gothic lettering styles. Spoiler: It was difficult as fuck and I sucked hard at it. It was also fun as hell.

Everything is in portuguese because I'm brazilian, sorry, but basically what's written is: Family, Mother, Life. The final piece says "Be good". There was a lot more that I did, but we basically wrote our own names a bunch of times so I don't wanna share lol

Controlling the pens was really hard and as a left-handed person it was very messy. But also very satisfying. Everyone there already tattooed or knew how to draw except me so they were super nice to me.

Thank you for reading this behemoth of a story. It's far from over and I'm finally having a lot of fun. This is way better than just wishing I could do it, a bad drawing is better than no drawing at all. Oh, and fuck AI!