A little bit of personal yap. This could be useful for any artist out there but this comes to personal preferences and experience, and this text most likely won’t have a proper structure neither proper foundation to be taught or be of use. I encourage you to critically read and disagree with it.

This text may be considered incomplete from every standpoint as it was written and thought out in a single day. It may be edited or redone in the future, using proper terminology like «reductionism» which is what this text is partly about; part of our brain IN FACT does this as a way to save time and be more efficient – at the cost of being in the present moment but specially, in our case, sacrificing proper visualization by reducing everything we know to a label or description.

June 2026 will mark 10 years (a whole decade, woah) since I started drawing frequently and «taking it seriously», whatever that means.

Ever since I started, I have not received formal art education (with exception of bargue and very basic color wheel theory at an oil painting workshop). I have passed through countless youtube/instagram tutorials which didn’t help at all, to trying a few books which I abandoned at page 5 (the pdfs are still collecting dust).

I have only relied on my intuition and observation for the most part to understand every concept ever and I think it was the correct decision. Whenever an object is given a label and rules on how it has to behave and look like, the object is no longer present; what is present is a set of textual rules. A big reason on why I am against eg. studying all of the muscles and their names, is because our job as illustrators is not to learn those labels neither to «scientifically» understand any rule, but to visualize the subject and translate it onto a canvas.

Illustration presents not so many challenges, as you’re most likely working with an existing character and world (which is tipically our world, one that you perfectly understand because you’re able to experience it and you know that everything that happens or is seen, is fundamentally true).

I do believe there to be a major flaw in observation and perception of 3d spaces and form if one is unable to reach conclusions on «how something is visualized and portrayed into a canvas» on their own; and needs to read about the subject. Mainly because you have been using these «fundamental skills» ever since you were born.

You understood and experimented the concept of gravity since you were little without the need to confirm it was there, without the need to know the earth was a sphere and the core pulled every bit of mass towards it. You jumped a little bit, you returned to your original position. You threw an object, and understood that it had to fall. You threw a piece of plain A4 paper and you were confused on why it didn’t fly but swing in a weird wall, then falling to the floor. You threw a paper folded into a triangular shape and suddenly it could travel a straight large distance, but eventually, it would fall, perhaps in a more elegant way than your previous plain piece of paper. You discovered aerodynamics, even though when an adult would mention such a complicated name, you would refuse to listen further.

You understood and experimented your own shadow being casted on the opposite direction of the sun. You lifted an arm, and the shadow grew an arm. Some time passed while you were playing, now the sun doesn’t scorch from above, it’s slowly setting in the horizon. Your shadow has grown inmensely on lenght.

You travelled to the city, in the backseat, looking to the front. All of the buildings and objects were converging in the distance, into a single point. The road followed the same pattern, forming a triangle. You stood upon a huge skyscraper, and looked up. This enormous piece of concrete and glass, which you were certain that was rectangular, had the edges of its walls converge in the distance, as if reaching for the same destination.

You don’t know it, but you can understand every piece of art you see online by yourself.

Why do we re-learn skills that we have since we are born, that our own body and mind are capable of learning and interiorizing already? I believe the answer lies in how we perceive the exterior world. For the sake of convenience and proper communication, we need to name every object and give it a purpose. By doing so, we start using the brain to visualize this object, and we stop using our vision, as weird as it sounds.

This is, for me (an artist), a mistake. As an artist, what I need the most, is to observe the form and behavior on my own. What I believe the brain does is add an extra step and flaw the process.

You initially have, lets say a small dot in the sky, that travels at a low vertical distance. This small, very circular mass extends itself into two thinner extensions to its sides. Sometimes it makes a weird noise. However, you are pleased with the sight. But you don’t remember this information. You remember this is a crow, you accepted the label that people give to these pieces of information, and since then, you only think about its name. You don’t need to remember its appearance or visual information anymore. You stop looking at it for what it is, and you stop noticing the details you like about it. You only refer to this for its label «a crow» and you have a general idea on why its there up in the sky. You do remember other pieces of similar information fall into this category we call «birds» like their behavior, personality, diets, them reproducing through eggs, I don’t know.

However, when you try drawing this crow, you fail. You don’t even know where to start, because you didn’t form a visual library, but a textual one. You need to revert the thinking process until you reach to the point where you didn’t know its name. That is, how you used to think and process information when you were a child.

Some information is definetely possible to convert from textual to visual knowledge. However, you still convert the information. You can avoid this step. Stop reading for hours on «detailed muscle anatomy» and stop naming every muscle. You can skip this step.

I believe that later, and only later, after you mastered your observation and you can visually represent a subject, is when you can «safely» give it a label without risking forgetfulness. This is a way to draw literally whatever you want, having to use less and less references over time. Because this practice restores the visual library you once had in your mind. This is how «creative freedom» can be gained, the one you see in artists like Kim Jung Gi, Bryce Kho (self taught) or Katsuya Terada.

But it is also the only skill you need to practice. Every other skill, be it anatomy, perspective or light, or any other sub-skill, falls under this process.

This is my daily dose of misinformation, thank you for listening.

NOTE on 3rd/4th paragraph: A very punctual exception can be made when someone is designing a character since you are operating in a constructed world which may have different rules. That is not the usual case, as most constructed fictional worlds operate under the same physics (gravity, light behavior, biology, etc.).

Anatomy is the «fundamental skill» that tends to change the most, as people are into character/creature design, so I will use it as an example. In this case you need to understand how a living creature body works like, if you want to create new species with different biology.

However a further distinction will be made between artists who create species and designs based on visual appeal (aesthetics and functionality both fall into this category), artists who create species but don’t change the biology/rules of their living being, and artists who create species and change the biology/rules of their living being. This last group is a devastating minority, but is the only group that would ever benefit from learning our pre-existing set of rules.

Even concept artists, in their vast majority, do not create but «design» combinations of pre-existing elements on a pre-existing world with pre-existing set of rules, most of the time responding to a general audience’s needs for certain aesthetics or a personal IP.