Hey artists, and everybody else...
Yo, I am still trying to learn how to draw. Anybody have any suggestions on books I could get or something to help myself learn faster? Any tips you can offer? Anything would be good.
Oh, and I'm writing a sort-of anthro-war novel right now, and everyone who's read it so far likes it. I was wondering, maybe if you guys had any stories or something you might want to see in a book or... IDK, I'm out of ideas. Just comment something!
You will always learn best when you use real life to help you. Going to your local zoo, museums and watching discovery channel will help you get a feel for animal anatomy. A few life drawing classes, some medical anatomy books and an enormous amount of practice will help you. Never be discouraged by your sketches either, everything you draw from stick men to full finished sketches are practice and only help you improve.
My experience has also been that i do my best figurative work from life when i divorce myself from any understanding of what the shapes i draw mean.
That probably doesn't make any sense; i'll try to explain.
Part of the way that your brain processes images is by simplifying things down to a series of symbols - a smile looks sort of like this, glasses look sort of like that, and so on. To do really strong drawing from life, however, i generally need to let go of those symbols and focus on light and shadow. Intellectually, i know that a pair of glasses looks different, depending on which side or angle is facing me. But i have to draw like that, too, and to do that, i need to stop seeing the glasses as glasses and start seeing them as a series of shapes.
One of my big moments came in a life drawing course. The teacher put the model under one of those massive construction lights, cut all or most of the other lights out, and told us that instead of drawing the whole model, we should focus on one spot and just draw the shadows. That was arguably the most realistic body part i'd ever drawn.
I'm making pretty much all pencil sketches right now... You know about a book called "Drawing Human, Animal, and Comparative Anatomy"? I was wondering about the comparative part, lol 
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So, now that we're all nude in this public facility, what comes next?
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There's this one book called "Freaks!" that's waaaay better than it sounds. Its really helpful if you're trying for more muscular artwork.
Yeah, I love that one. I think the only problem is that there ain't enough pics of the different animals. I mean, the only wolf they show you how to draw is a silly cartoony looking one. The cats are good in it tho.
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So, now that we're all nude in this public facility, what comes next?
-BRING BACK BLOODY ROAR!
I want to do my sketching on computer, and I got a bamboo tablet and notebook for that, but I was wondering if anyone has a favorite drawing program?
Photoshop? Gimp? Blender?
Just curious what most furries use?
Jeef
Photoshop is an excellent product; I use it myself and it is highly recommended by most artists who use it. Due to its high expense, quite a few people use more inexpensive options such as Paint Shop Pro, or free ones like Gimp. Also, OpenCanvas is a popular freeware program with a online-social aspect, allowing you to collaborate in real-time online with other artists.
--Chi
Hey, I have it on my cpu! I tried to use it to color some drawings, but I can't figure it out. Help?
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So, now that we're all nude in this public facility, what comes next?
-BRING BACK BLOODY ROAR!
By 'it', are you referring to photoshop?
My experience with photoshop is that i love it for graphics work now, but i hated it before i learned it.
Photoshop is one of those programs that allows you to do virtually anything (well, virtually anything in raster and a lot of stuff in vector, anyway). And one of the side effects of setting up a program to do virtually anything is that it stops being terribly intuitive, and a lot of things seem to become so much more complicated than they were. There are only so many intuitive places to put features, after all. Mostly i just had to learn how to wrap my head around the way that photoshop does things; once i did that, i was completely fine.
Example: If you don't know that photoshop uses layers, it may make no sense why some features just don't seem to work at all, some of the time. But once you know about them and how to use them, you get completely addicted to the power of applying tools and filters selectively.
If you're using photoshop, i'd drop by your local bookstore (libraries don't often have the most up-to-date books) and look for a good guide. Don't just pick the thickest; look through and make sure that it's talking about the right version of the program, and look at the first chapter or two to make sure it's not talking too far above or below your level. I've had good luck with the 'teach yourself X in 24 hours' books, if only because i like the writing style and i like having everything grouped into convenient lessons. But reading up should help a lot.
Thanks for the tips!
I loaded up Photoshop Elements on my eee and it seems to do everything the full version does in regards to actual art related stuff. I had to upgrade to 2gb to get it to run faster, but it sure looks like the way to go is to go through all those tutorials on the web to learn how to use it. Some of the stuff that people do is pretty amazing! Not very many cartoony tutorials but I guess regular how-to-draw ones are best for that anyway.
The full versions of Photoshop seem to be dedicated to web stuff, and overloading my little notebooks resources more that anything, so I will see how Elements does the job.
Gimp seems to be even more powerful than Photoshop, but with one hell of a learning curve...not for me!
Thanks everybody for the info!
Jeef
Im actually taking a photoshop class right now! But for some reason I am better at just looking at something and drawing it... I feel inferior to talented artists who can just create a masterpiece straight from their mind...
Suddenly i'm remembering the start of the cartoon Broken Plot Device...
Mike
http://www.howtodrawmanga.com/
this is what im considering
Believe it or not, my cousin's friend's older brother is the maker of that series. 
CONNECTIONS, WOOT!
I was reading above. Regarding my mediums I'm mainly using pencil and paper towels to blend and shade. A little chalk and charcoal here and there, but not much.
Also tried using photosmart, IDK, it must be different from photoshop? I can't color anything in it!
I would say that it's almost certainly different from photoshop. Photoshop can be identified by the fact that it costs an arm and a leg, takes aabout 15 seconds or so to fully wake up, and not only does it colorize in a few different ways, it has so many different options and filters and features it'll do virtually anything, up to (and one day perhaps including) walking your dog.
Oh well. [shrugs and smiles]
Are you working with any specific medium or are you just sketching right now? I know of a few anatomy and other books you could use.