What is something like a hobby or skill that you belive almost anybody should give a try, and what makes your suggestion so good compared to other things?
i feel like this is a descent question i guess.
What is something like a hobby or skill that you belive almost anybody should give a try, and what makes your suggestion so good compared to other things?
i feel like this is a descent question i guess.
ive always wanted to create a book or a comic but i stink at everything and im bad at spelling, i can only draw stickmen, but i still have the urge to be creativ eand share it.
Sucking at something is the first step towards being kinda good at something. The more you write / draw, the better you’ll get. Just keep practicing, take constructive feedback into account, and you’ll start getting better and better.
(PS: Even if stickmen is all you can do, that’s totally fine-- one of the most popular web comics of all time, xkcd, is almost entirely stickmen!)
Also, when you create something that you’re unhappy with, that’s what you do when you’re developing your taste and style. Don’t think of it as sucking at it.
For writing, practice writing short stories using writing prompts (I normally use Reddit’s /r/writingprompts but I’m trying to find an alternative here) and post them on the thread even if they suck. The commitment is low since it’s a short story and you can afford to twist the story to match your writing style rather than the other way around. You’ll also get votes and feedback from other members.
I started drawing as a kid, stopped for a while, and got back to it in my teens since I started doing a lot of writing then and wanted to visually depict what was happening as well. One thing that helped me a lot was to not look at other people’s art or photographs but rather solely work with what you’re visualizing in your mind and reiterate (with many many strokes) until the quality becomes acceptable. Use pencil and sketch with short and light lines. The point here is to develop your own intuition for perspective, splitting an object into basic shapes, and so forth.
I’ll also add that it’s extremely important to create your own style both for writing and drawing. Make your stuff look good, but always keep in mind that it’s fine to have your own quirks and distinctions. E.g. if your lines are a bit sketchy or if your circles aren’t perfect that can easily be part of your style.
Sounds like you just volunteered to start the writingprompts magazine.
There already is a https://kbin.social/m/WritingPrompts, but there isn’t much content.
Takes time. I always wanted to be part of r/writingprompts but I would see a new prompt and the there would be a novel written about that prompt 30 seconds later. I can type pretty well but that is out of my league.
The way Reddit works is that the first commenter with a decent response gets all the karma, so yeah people rush it. It’s good practice for writing under a tight time constraint though as you go through the entire cycle of planning to draft to editing in only 30 minutes - 2 hours.
You get better with time and you’ll be surprised as to how quickly you can improve after doing dozens of them. Here’s my WP archive for reference, the oldest responses at the end of the “archive 1” pdf (from 8 years ago) I laugh at today but the skills I learned there carry over to the recent ones.
I’ve always made up for the lack of prompts with other people’s art, primarily images of any kind. I often see some sci-fi picture, think it’s neat, and write a short story involving the scene at some point.
Simon Stalenhåg is a great starter.
I have to do some searching but I like the looks of the community on Beehaw. I think there is one here but I haven’t looked around very much (I was waffling between Lemmy and kBin, and have turned back to kBin because of the versatility).
You should check out My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable and Get Your War On by David Rees.
He made a great comic strip that didn’t involve any drawing skill at all.
Drawing gets a lot easier if you approach it as a muscle-memory skill like calisthenics or juggling - if you can write letters neatly, you can also learn to draw shapes you’ve practiced. The early exercises in books like Keys to Drawing (Dodson) or The Natural Way to Draw (Nicolaides) introduce ways to practice those skills, and then the rest is “find subjects you want to draw”, which can be as simple as watching a video, pausing it, and quickly using that for the exercise. Do that for a few minutes a day for a few weeks and drawing skills will magically emerge.
There are tons of “how to draw tutorials” that don’t explain any of this, speak about it conceptually, and tell you to go draw a thousand cubes, which will make you better at drawing…cubes. (There is some point to that kind of technical skill, but it’s not the thing to invest in if you just want to use images to tell a story)