How to DRAW / PAINT FASTER (literally)

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Marc Brunet
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Video Transcript:
oh hi this new episode of YouTube art school is going to be all about speed so let's hurry and get right into it I'll show you how pros and experienced artists get so quick at pumping out new paintings and drawings because it's something that you can actually do too if you just know how uhoh quickly let's get this class started all right class is in session pay attention and pay the class fee of either one like or one sub you'll see it's good value for the money so I see you have a Need for Speed
I hear you I think we all get to this point as artists where we've learned the basics you know and then some and then we can bang out some drawings that we're relatively happy with but everything seems to take so damn long I felt so inadequate when I started working as a game developer always comparing myself to other artists on the team who seem to be able you know to do twice as much with the same amount of time and that wasn't a new feeling before I got faster it always felt to me like things
were taking too long and it's the number one question that my students always ask like how did I do it how do you get to the point where speed is no longer a concern as an artist now the first thing to realize is that drawing faster is actually not about moving your you know hands faster or anything like that instead it's about avoiding to waste time because imagine you're driving on a road that's littered with trees that have fallen over and big branches blocking your way as you drive you know you'll probably have to take
detours to go around them or get out of your car and remove the obstacles before you can keep going and all of that takes longer than it would take you if you just had a clear road ahead of you right so how do we clear the road well the first obstacle on your path to getting faster might be your method what I usually refer to as your recipe when working I teach all sorts of recipes for free here on the channel like this class showing how to do cell shading that's one example but the point
of these is to have a list of steps that you follow you know so that there's less to think about throughout the process less guess work just like when cooking using a recipe from a book when you use the same recipe over and over again it quickly becomes easy to Remember by heart right and well that only allows you to bake that batch of cookies faster or with art color that drawing faster eventually of course you'll probably start to customize it to your liking you know and make it your own the method that is which
will all contribute to you getting faster at it so here's my advice find a method that you like and stick to it like for long enough find one that just speaks to you one for which you like the result of course and just do that from now on and you'll see not having that hesitation not wondering what the next steps should be is going to save you a ton of time and dramatically increase your speed but that's just one of five tips that I have for you and each of these will contribute just as much
so here's the next one Focus your efforts what we're artists so we think you know initially at least that everything's got to be perfect we'll render everything and add details to every corner of our artwork so that everything looks print ready when zoomed in at 8,000% but you don't need to do that and the reason is the same as why you yourself don't spend much time looking at other people's artwork like when you're browsing Instagram or Twitter how long do you think you look at any single post on average 1 second 1 2 3 four
five seconds maybe if it really catches your attention but that starts to get pretty long my point is it's not a lot usually so you can expect others to behave the same way towards your own art so what's the point of spending dozens of hours rendering everything if nobody will see it really it's a waste of time is what it is so my recommendation will always be to focus your efforts on what people will actually notice and what they actually do notice is whatever your focal point is and you know usually it's immediate surround suroundings
so for most drawings featuring a character the focal point will tend to be the face because this just how we communicate with people looking at their face so I would spend roughly like 70% of the time working on the face and torso the immediate surrounding of the focal point and maybe like 30% working on everything else including the background if any this may be a little extreme of an example but this painting you know at first glance looks pretty finished right but if I zoom in you can clearly see a left the background and the
lower body pretty rough since those details are relatively far away from my focal point again the head of the character and most people won't actually notice them anyways it's a deliberate choice that I make to stop myself from rendering everything and taking potentially five times longer than it would normally take me if I didn't care about being more productive now if you're getting paid to paint a game splash screen maybe then that's another story and you should probably render it longer you know since people will stare at it much longer but my point is to
know your audience if you're just posting online you have mere seconds to grab people's attention so spend your time wisely and well A very wise way to spend your time is by learning art with my art program check the link in the video description and you can actually grab it at the cheapest that it's been in years until the end of the month to celebrate its 7ye anniversary 7 years of art school and everything seems like it costs more now and the price of the program has been going up in the last 2 years as
I kept adding content but on top of the sale I've actually de decided to reduce the base price of the program to allow even more students to join and get a complete University level art education for less than the price of a basic pen tablet I don't want you to miss out on this check the link down below there's still time all right plug over so let's check out the third tip that I have for you which is to know your tools the rest will go a little faster but it's just as important so knowing
your tools here means to get used to them I always see students collecting millions of brushes from every artist they know and I think that's a f fantastic way to never improve your speed brushes just like all traditional tools you know they each have a learning curve even when I create a new custom brush for myself it'll usually take me a few paintings worth of practice before I'm actually fully comfortable with it so I always recommend having a handful of brushes maybe a dozen or two dozens at most unless you're very experienced and stick to
those just like you'll get faster sticking to the same recipe stick to the same tools too if you're looking for all the brushes that you should really need to paintt like I do I actually give my brush set away for free and you can find the link down in the description below to start a brush set maybe that'll help now the fourth tip let's move on will be a boring one but one that needs repeating over and over again don't guess when you paint if you find yourself having to guess what a certain thing should
look like you're actively wasting time find a reference instead and copy from that there's no shame in using references every Pro artist does it way more than you probably think the only time it should really be fine to not use one is when you're very confident that you can draw or paint the thing from memory this will happen obviously more and more as you gain experience but early on in your art Journey you should be working almost exclusively from references if you want to both draw faster and progress faster win-win and finally the last tip
for this video is I wrap up a new painting in the background here will be to work confidently I know what you're thinking I can't work confidently if I'm not conf confidence you're wrong you most definitely can and should to improve your speed what I mean here is to stop relying on a near Infinity of layers you know when you paint or stop using chicken scratch lines when you're drawing I would challenge you to actually do the complete opposite for a while however uncomfortable that might be initially if you want to go faster that is
force yourself to use only like five or six layers at most for a while maybe force yourself to only draw long confident lines instead of a bunch of tiny short lines or maybe if we're talking more traditional art stop using a pencil and maybe switch to a pen where you can't erase I know you're already telling yourself that's crazy and you probably won't do it but if you do for a couple of months just like I did many years ago I tried all of that it'll blow your mind just how well faking it until you
make it is actually the best way to make it in the first place when you commit to something when you just go for it you know and stop giving yourself a way out to undo a bunch of work your decision- making process changes completely and you'll learn to live with your decisions and just make the best out of them and you'll actually start to more carefully do everything which just removes the need to redo anything most of the time and of course this also translates to faster speed overall combine everything that we covered in the
last 10 minutes and you should be able to draw or paint a heck of a lot faster those are the secrets so if you want to go faster just got to do it good luck and that's going to be it for this week's CL hope that was helpful let me know in the comments if it was or if you have any questions since I still read all the comments and I appreciate them and now YouTube thinks that you'll probably like these other videos so go check them out to see if that's true all right bye
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