Ranking the BEST and WORST Art Advice! (Art Tier List) || SPEEDPAINT + COMMENTARY

S Tear: remember which is your drink cup and which is you paint water cup

"Use hue shifting while shading and lighting" is A tier in any media. S tier in pixel art. Hue shifting is the best tip that I ever have.

"Let hobbyists live." As a writer, I DEEPLY appreciate your ability to recognize and separate hobby artists from those trying to get better/more well-rounded/professional. Whenever people come to me for writing advice, I first ask them which group they fall under. Do you write for fun, and want advice to make this hobby more enjoyable? Or are you aiming to write professionally on some level? The amount of critique I give, and sometimes even the advice itself, changes depending on the answer.

Flipping the canvas is such a useful skill but it’s so forgettable at times

Another thing to add with the "learn the rules before you break them" is the fact that having a strong knowledge in realism doesn't magically translate to being good at making stylized works. You being able to draw one hell of a photo-realistic fruit bowl doesn't also mean you are going to automatically be a great comic artist, they are both skills that need their own time and effort to develop. Being able to stylize and create your own visual shorthand is a skill in itself, that's why I always recommend to new artists to do both. Study basic fundamentals and draw from life, but also observe and learn from the professionals in your field of interest.

Getting "just practice" "learn rules first before drawing ANYTHING" and "draw every day" put me in such a hellscape mind palace thanks to my OCD that now I have to ween myself from constantly drawing nothing but boxes, circles and cylinders every day to actually draw something I have fun drawing.

"Don't avoid weak point" should be S tier, still remember when I don't know how to draw hands, so I always draw something to hide them

As guilty as tracing makes me feel, it honestly saves so much time when I draw. I trace poses and then alter limbs and body builds to suit the characters I’m drawing, and as someone who just likes having fun with art and draws horribly slowly, I’d rather trace and alter than try and make my own poses when it can since it saves me hours on pieces and it already takes me hours to do a single character without a background or fancy lighting. It lets me keep a hobby a hobby without wanting to tear my hair out

The “learn rules first” always made me so upset as a kid. I hated the idea that I needed to learn how to draw realism, that I needed to perfect a realistic art style before even thinking about going to a stylized art style. I haven’t drawn in a while and as much as I want to get back into it the idea of having to learn everything again makes me want to cry when this was just supposed to be a fun hobby to begin with.

"Warm up sketches" S Tier! Draw some Doodles that it be some gesture drawings or just some random shapes before you actually work on something more serious/important, it really does help. 10/10 totally recommend! 😊

Personally, I’d put using black and white to check values in A tier. Yes, it’s absolutely a great tool, but I find that doing this often fails to account for the way our eyes perceive color. For example, the exact same bright yellow, if hue-shifted to purple, would register as a darker to our eyes, because yellow registers as an inherently ‘bright’ color. I’d love to see this as a public tierlist!

14:20 For me, the pen stabilizer tool has the opposite effect. It drives my perfectionist mind ABSOLUTELY INSANE because the lines never land exactly where I want them.

Something underrated I don't hear about often is to train your eyes. Like just observe outside, images and analysing them on shapes, shadows, structures and colors. You can legit do that everyday and it's like you draw with your own eyes. Even If your hand skill don't catch up with your eyes right away , you will be able to auto correct yourself and have a way more objective view on your on art. This is just so useful

I try to draw every day, but I'm disabled and sometimes even leaving the bed or using my hands for anything is hard. On those days i watch youtube and feel guilt because of how much i hear "draw everyday"

> Everyone knows they need to practice to get good at anything You'd think this is true, but even though it's a common refrain you hear all the time, I think very few people have actually internalized it! This is advice aimed at complete newbies, and it would be good advice, if it was able to get the message across fully. People will often say stuff like "I can't even draw a stick figure" or "aw man, I envy your skill" and if they had truly internalized this, what they would mean is "I don't have the motivation/time/etc. to practice and learn drawing", but no, what most people mean when they say this is "I don't have the holy blessing of drawing skill, I am but a mortal." Since "Just practice" is such a common thing for people to say, it's just white noise to most who hear it. What they really need is a paradigm shift. You don't just have skill, you create it, you earn it, you work for it. You, too, can be a great artist, if you put in the effort. That's what "just practice" is supposed to mean. People expect the skill to be handed to them, and when they sit down to draw and they don't spout magic from their pen, they just give up. My preferred versions of this advice are "fail fast, fail often" or "everybody's got thousands of bad drawings in them, the good ones come later" or "anyone can learn to draw if they actually try"

"Don't start digital" is actually some of the best advice IF you want a painterly style. I would've put it in A tier for that but if your someone who doesn't mind your work looking digital the you can ignore it no problem!

It makes me happy to see you rank "Draw Every Day" at C tier, because as a person who has focus issues (possibly ADHD), that just isn't possible for me right now. I'm busy trying to stay afloat doing the bare minimum and I don't have the energy for it.

I'm someone that prefers messy lines, I adore the way they look, smooth lines are honestly boring to me. Messy lines are one of the reasons Wolfwalkers is such a gorgeous movie <3

My favorite price of advice (for traditional art) is: Make a mark on the first page of your sketchbook. Any mark, even if it's just a line. Why? So that the stress of "it has to be pretty cause this sketchbook is new/aesthetic/ect." Is removed. If the first (or last) page, then at least one page is already "ruined" I'm bad at explaining things, apologies. But seriously. Just marking through the first page has decreased my anxiety around art SO much lower 😂

"don't shade with black" is misleading because it comes from the assumption that the artist aim for a colorful look. All the backgrounds in Over The Garden Wall are shaded with blacks and greys on multiply layers (there's a tutorial/walkthrough by the background artist), and those paintings are absolutely gorgeous - because they still used highly saturated colors for the lightened areas. It blew my mind when I found out and it changed my view on certain art advice that just say "dont do X" - because there are cases where doing the "wrong" technique is intentional!