This Art Advice Will Save You Years!

Professional illustrator and art educator Clint Cearley has a straightforward conversation on art that could shave years off your art progress. Originally part of a Twitch livestream, the video has been edited for brevity. He discusses why images often feel flat, shapes and forms, replicating reality, reference degradation and more.

INSTAGRAM - @cearleyclint

[crystalbernard]

I had a mother that kept saying to me "real artists can draw from their imagination, they don't need to be looking at what they are drawing". That was the most harmful advice I have ever been given.

[lavrentish]

“It’s much easier to get something and simplify than to get nothing and complicate”. Life lessons right there!

[kaizze]

references, just like Ethan Becker teaches, reference reference reference. pro's DO NOT GUESS. best advice in art I ever heard, simple but so underrated

[billjones]

"If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all.
" -Michelangelo

[VizualeyezProductns]

When people see great artists draw from imagination, they don't realize the length of time it took to develop those skills.

This video is gold. These are things that I had to discover on my own over my many years of drawing and being self-taught.

[LaurArt_UK]

My drawings skyrocketed in quality after I started making ref boards. Don't just use one reference photo. Have as many as you can find, make a board of them. If you work digitally, its great to have a second monitor so you can have the references on one screen and the art in the other. I usually use 3-5 references for most pics now and it has made everything easier.

[lily]

subconsciously was following this rule all along, but it's so validating and reassuring to hear a teacher say it out in words, makes me understand this behavior and learning pattern phenomenally better.

[JulyRuliia]

"Trying to win a game that you don't undestand all the rules to.. and.. you end up having to do a lot of trial and errors to get through"
You just describe life here.

But without joking, thanks for the advice so much !!
I love your channel and this video makes me understand how to work so much more !

[Visualprogres]

I think the main difference when studying something is the difference between COPYING/UNDERSTANDING

[WillywonkaHC]

The real secret is to wear a fedora and fingerless gloves. But for some it might be too much power.

[ZephrusPrime]

I'm a 3D Character Artist and one big thing I get when I need to work from a 2D concept is that often the 2D concept just simply will have the wrong proportions and wrong anatomy. There are things that look cool until you make it 3D then you see how broken it is.

[-hondosolo]

Great artists = a stack of bad drawings about 20 feet high. Don't shun your bad artwork, allow it to stack up. Never focus on the results, just focus on the stack. One other thing. I never focus on the lines or brush strokes I need to make; I only focus on the image that's coming to life in front of me. I try to work slowly so that there's a switch where I can see the image forming even where I haven't draw. My mind starts to project the image onto the page and I'm more or less just tracing.

[GeneSysFNLT]

*Finally!* I've gone around asking the question "How do I start learning? Where do I begin?" And no one seemed to give me a straight answer. Thank you so much for pointing people like me in the right direction. I feel so much better now that I know where my steps begin on this art journey.

[TheFailedArtist]

I just want to say that this is one of the most valuable videos on creating art that I have ever come across. I’ve been working as a professional artist for 25 years and have struggled with this very problem regarding using references in creating work. Thank you for breaking down this into an explanation that is logical yet easy to visualize and grasp . Much appreciated!

[whathmm]

Outstanding! Having been an artist for over 50 years, I can verify that it would be simply luck to come to this level of awareness of this process. Thanks!

[cold_static]

I'm not even an artist, yet I noticed when I started to use 3D software for sculpting, my drawing skills immediately improved, because my understanding of forms improved and I became more aware of what the thing I am trying to draw would look like if it were real.

[mikexirou]

Man this is pure gold. The information in this video is insane and I love how you break down everything and the way you get your points across.
Finding great artists is common but great teachers are rare.

[gracezhuart]

I actually work as a rendering programmer, and I love the parallels you draw between the game engine kind of rendering and the artistic kind of rendering.

To expand on this, I think there's a lot that artists can learn about the 'physically-based rendering' that's used in almost all rendering engines today, and how it can be applied to even stylized, non-realistic art, as long as you want that art to look more three-dimensional than graphical.

The cornerstone of rendering depends on something called the 'BRDF', which is just a fancy term for how light behaves at it hits a surface - what happens from a particular viewpoint (camera/eye) when it's absorbed, scattered, or reflected. Understanding this is, imo, critical to understanding how to render paintings.

[Hoonters-goona-Hoont]

Wow. I actually noticed exactly this problem when I started drawing, I always hung up on representing 3d from imagination because my brain was basically overloaded with simulating the whole scene in my head with perspective accuracy despite having no training in it whatsoever, and I instinctively came to the same solution!
This might not seem like anything special, but I had little to no exposure to learning art in my life, so me "getting it" so naturally and then having it confirmed in a random YouTube video really boosts my confidence and shows me I should keep going.
Thanks, algorithm ! X3

[susantower]

I have a degree in illustration from a top private college. The whole reason I went was to learn to draw from my imagination bc I had the observation thing down. They never got to that part, but had us mindlessly recreating photos the whole time. This video was more informative than my entire four years there.