How would you rate your art abilities out of 10?

@HJSDGCE  
It’s like Cyanide and Happiness, except better.

@atalarikt  
Thank you.  
I appreciate that.

 
Rate me.

@HJSDGCE  
8.5/10

@atalarikt  
Is that true or are you just being generous?
 
I’m not offended either way.  
I’m used to people undermining me and my credibility.

@HJSDGCE  
It’s true. I like the details there. It’s hard to draw details with a not-so-sharp pencil.

@atalarikt  
Why thank you!  
I’m actually better at drawing small details than large ones. That picture was only half of the page at best.  
If I were to draw it one a blank piece of paper, it wouldn’t look nearly as good.

@HJSDGCE  
those are some neat little doodles c:

Ok, sometimes artists do that “do this again” thing. I gave it a try with the Apple Saucer drawing:
 
June 2014:  

 
Annnnnd a couple days ago:  

@ArkyNoid  
there’s.. uh.. hmmm..  
I can see you changed the way you drew everything and the way you coloured..  
the linework is aliased, that’s an improvement  
the way you’ve coloured.. I can see you’ve experimented with shading and making things look shiny, so that’s an improvement, there’s still a lot of room for improvement, but it’s a start.  
As for HOW you’ve drawn everything, I can’t say there’s an improvement. You have used actual shapes to make the ship and used straight lines so that’s a start, but the position of the bubble on the ship doesn’t make physical sense, i prefer the original because it at least looks like it’s conforming to the shape of the ships exterior. As for how you’ve drawn applejack, well..  
Her body and arms just look like different sized noodles, her snout is very much just like a pasted on rectangle with a mouth on the front, her hat is in the right place now but the shape of it is still very much a cartoon impression, and her eyes are worse off than before, especially for mlp:fim’s style, where the eyes take up a fair amount of the face, and the snout usually covers one of the eyes slightly due to the curvature of the face and the viewing angle, your original was closer in that regard.
 
You don’t seem to have any sense of form, everything is very much flat, even cartoonists have some idea of form (even if their style from a glance seems to say otherwise,they know the rules and purposely break them).  
what you have is no method, you’re either drawing what you see or you’re relying on your imagination’s idea of whatever it is you’re drawing, the symbolisation of it rather than its actual form. So if I were you I’d look into the basic methods of drawing where you break everything down into solid 3D shapes.  
Here’s some guides to help you understand what you’re doing, and hopefully give you some direction:  
Drawing methods  
How to draw form  
Foundations of light and shadow  
This one talks a lot about doing traditional drawing alongside drawing shapes, but i’d recommend practicing on paper with a pencil anyway, as drawing very much involves muscle memory and doing it traditionally can make the learning process more natural:  
Shapes, using a pencil, etc.
 
i don’t know any videos for cartoonist stuff so w/e  
As for ACTUAL PONY, there’s a bunch here on derpi:  
>>923935p (merged)  
and of course it helps to understand how the show anatomy style is similar and different from actual horses/humans:  
 
 

@zippysqrl
 
That entire dissertation felt like having the comic shop guy from the Simpsons as art class teacher.
 
Noted in any case.

@zippysqrl
 
I might add for the record I’ve never been trained to actually draw. My required college art class was just an appreciation and historical study course. My digital media class likewise only reviewed what tools did what in Photoshop and other software and quizzed/tested us on them. No drawing instruction ever occurred in my education.

@ArkyNoid  
I know it wasn’t even directed at me and I feel depressed lol

@ArkyNoid  
Don’t take what he says too hard. Even having taken art classes myself, I still struggle to draw basic stuff like ponies.
 

@jakcspellgood
 
Hehe thanks. I didn’t expect Zipp of all people to get all masterful on me. Geez.

@Sdf1jjak
 
Thanks. I also think “quality” of drawing is not only in the eye of the beholder but if I try I can enhance it with other things like jokes/humor.

@ArkyNoid  
@ArkyNoid  
A lot of people haven’t done any kind of art class, drawing is for the most part a self-taught skill unless you want to pay lots of money for courses, and even then they are just guidance on how to teach yourself.  
I know I may have sounded a bit harsh in that wall of text, not much I can do about that, some things may sound harsh when blunt, the key point is to take the jump from this typical beginners drawing method to one that can yield results, drawing is all about understanding how stuff looks and bringing what’s in your head onto a canvas. so for drawing living things you need to understand their shape and form, even in a 2D world things have some depth to them.  
If you keep drawing, over time you’ll develop a good sense of how things look, how they work and move, and the 3d space they occupy, fiddle around in a 3d program like blender or google sketchup if it helps you.  
When I was in secondary school I was very much the same, trying to draw what I saw rather than trying to understand form and stuff, so a lot of my stuff was pretty shit. I deleted a lot of stuff when I started drawing ponies so I don’t have anything to show :T  
I got where I am now just from observing other artists, watching videos and looking at tutorials and just figuring stuff out mostly on my own, and I’m still learning.

@zippysqrl  
Very true. I’ve drawn human characters much longer than any other type (maybe dragons) but my first pony drawing was actually an after thought when making this picture (it’s been edited so other ppl can use it as they please.)
 

To add to what zippy said, please use reference. Go look at and study real horses, art from other artists, pony 3d models, or pony toys if you have any. If you can’t draw accurately from a reference first, good drawing from imagination is impossible.

I think I’ve posted in here before, but probably 4/10. Worse than that I feel like I have wasted the time of artists much better than me as they try to hammer stuff into my brain and hate that so much.

@HJSDGCE
 
How long did that take you to draw? Kinda cute, to the point and not exceptionally complex necessarily. A respectable style.
 
Meanwhile I waste hours trying to create stuff that gets essays on how low quality it is. Not a great feeling.

@ArkyNoid  
It was a class doodle and took me more or less 3 hours.  
I wanted to make the front page of my book look nice so I thought “Why not make a planet?”.
 
So I did. It started with the castle and the idea was that different parts of the land would have different themes. The castle was suppose to just be a castle but I added mountains for more depth, a church and farms for a bit of culture and fireworks for the Disney feeling. If you look closely, there’s even the Sword in the Stone.
 
I added a sea to make it more country-like and the boat to make it look not empty. The smoke and the SOS was added for fun and to balance it with the rest.
 
The city was the hardest since I literally had no idea what to put. It started with a bunch of rectangles and squares as windows. I made the buildings black because I thought that being at the other side of the world, it would be night. The big building at the back and the tower was placed so that it adds more diversity. The trading port was basically made to connect with the sea and the crane plus containers was for the atmosphere. The landfill/trash heap was just to fill the space and the Batman signal was for fun.
 
Finally, I made Asgard, literally based on what I remembered if Asgard. The forest was added to blend with the castle area, waterfall because every floating island has one, chain to Earth was because I didn’t want it to fly away and the shaded, starry sky was just a way to divide the two parts of the world.
 
Then I added a compass.

@ArkyNoid  
I’m sorry if i’m not the best at giving critique, it’s significantly harder to make it not sound mean when the person is on a vastly different skill level. I’ll tell you now: the road to success is not a walk through a flowery meadow with sunshine and lollipops, the road to success is paved with many failures, it’s not just about learning what to do, but what not to do, you wouldn’t have learned anything(you should have learned something) had you not drawn it in the first place. So you didn’t waste hours, all that time you spent was time practicing. Doesn’t matter if the outcome was a success or a failure.

I started creating something. Dunno if it’ll appear in these parts. But anyway a friend gave me some good instructional diagrams.

How does my art look?