4chan is back up

Geez louise, I wonder if some of you ain't posting your cute girls because no one's made *the* thread for it yet. There's already a cute guy study gen here already... start making boards here, we don't know when our mother site will be back, could be next week, could be 3 years.

It fucks me up that that the best place to find artbooks is exhentai. I understand how this state of affairs came to be, but it's still absurd.

This board represents a very small gathering of artists pursuing artistic self-actualization through a combination of labored study and strategic visual shitposting. We welcome all those interested in discovering the bittersweet struggle of artistic improvement for themselves to take up the pencil, the pen, the paintbrush or the p'tablet to join us on this board as friends. Please understand though that coming here expecting to solicit free or "cheap" work from our community is frowned upon-what you might flippantly spend seconds requesting can represent hours of work informed by years of study or experience to grant. Those enormous tits? Someone cried themselves to sleep trying to get them just right. That perfect dumptruck ass? Only possible through hundreds of highly detailed studies of the pelvis bone, gluteal muscles and the related fat deposits-to say nothing of the impassioned observation of countless references in extremely high resolution at all angles (all done purely for professional purposes of course). A few of us may delight in participating in request threads on other boards on our own free time and on our own terms. Doing so on our own, sparsely populated board however is a totally one sided affair where the artist can expect as payment for their labors a pitiful handful of (You)s, coupled with further outstretched hands anticipating the delivery of more requests. It's nothing personal so please don't take it as such, but as it stands I will not allow requestmaking to find a permanent home on this board-we instead choose to reach out to any such people and invite them to take their first steps on their own journey, to seize the power within themselves to answer their own artistic longing with decisive and well-informed action rather than gracelessly pleading out to we few strangers in the night: >"please help me masturbate" I hope you understand but if you take issue with anything I said-whether you're an artist/regular or someone just passing through-I welcome any further discussion on the subject to be directed to this thread for now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uO9tyyjRd4

Let off some steam, Bennet

I mean, there's the concrete and formulaic aesthetic aspect of art, and then there's the expression part, the part that gives it life. I think we deserve this. We've been commercializing art ever since we could televise talent, and since then we've been chasing the the ultimate formula for what attracts our sense of appeal. It started with the golden ratio, ended with the revelation that anime characters look like cats. People forgot about the other half of the definition, which was expression. Have you ever heard someone sing, and has it touched your soul? We can dissect what made it resonate with you, the way the voice cracks, the timbre, how the vocal folds constricted and relaxed, and try to replicate it all scientifically. But I don't think we can. It's just too magical. It must be connected to the turbulence and the uncertainties of the quantum fields. You can't rely on your prefrontal cortext for expression, man. You gotta turn that off and go on your instincts, just feel what's right and channel it out, like grabbing ahold of some kind of magic from a higher being and doing what it tells you to do, without thinking. Let the puppet strings take over. Do you use your pencil to "sing" out your drawings? Can you draw without thinking? Does every line need to be planned, and scrutinized? And I don't mean that the strokes should be random, I mean that you should let the higher being take over, and you shouldn't fight over where the strokes should go. The higher being knows better. And the higher being is not god, it's you, it's you without your prefrontal cortex. You can turn that off. It's what freestyle rappers and tennis players do, and it's what you do when you mow the lawn every week for the 900th time. Have you guys watched old cartoons and old western animations? They were made by people who had to talk to humans every single day, whose minds weren't corrupted by this formulaic, meta bullshit that seems to suffocate the sincerity out of most modern interactions. I could feel the sincerity in their fucking psychiatric medical textbooks. The way they explained mental illnesses back then were much more intuitive, much more connected in relation to our humanness. What the hell happened to just drawing? Just looking at life, and not replicating life, not studying life, not forcefeeding life into ourselves, but simply partaking in it, and letting it flow out onto the paper? When did fundamentals becoming a crutch to walk on, and not a point of reference in the back of your mind? We used to draw what felt right, and then used fundamentals like anatomy to supplement our work. Art has turned into a soulless pursuit of aesthetics, and when they fed our formula to a machine and it replicated it, and then we got mad. That's on us. We can only beat the machine by regaining our sense of expression. Go ahead and just draw pretty pictures if you want, but for humanity's sake, have some goddamn fun with it... god. We're more than wires in a box, aren't we?

There are a few drawthreads here, but no place for art trades/exchange. So I made one! I'm a hobby artist myself also looking for a few trades to get back in the grind. My most prominent character is Gabriel (red-haired boy) and his girlfriend Larissa (purplish hair, deadpan but kind) Anyway, feel free to share your characters too =)

/ic/ was raided by sharty it seems from here >>/a/27391

What's the edgiest thing you ever drew? Also, edgy art thread.

This is a thread for questions that don't deserve their own thread. The second such thread, in fact.

How to define artstyle, content, that will gain some hundred thousand traffics, sales, on interwebs, pixiv, DA so on? what are the summary, of the criteria, maybe in numbers?

I checked the resource hub, and could not find anything specifically related to color theory alone. Currently I am still working on Fun With a Pencil, but I've started into the grind phase in the middle of the book, and want to lightly study color theory to go with the very simple characters I am producing just get some variance and keep me engaged. Sorry if this doesn't deserve it's own thread, couldn't find anything in the catalog other than the share thread, but I wouldn't know what to ask for specifically. Please help. Pic unrelated.

Our Drawpile goes back perhaps a decade and I figure it'd be a good idea to host as much of it here as has been preserved (sadly, a lot of it didn't make it), given MEGA's limitations. The very generous 50mb file size limit means only two or three canvases can be posted at once, so they'll be posted in archival threads for easy viewing rather than the Drawpile thread. Enjoy! Edit: Due to performance concerns this thread will be divided by the year in which the canvases were completed.

Is this board dead? Are you drawing anons...?