u/f28c28

For background, I'm a digital artist who has recently been working on getting into life drawing/still life on occasion after doing illustration as a hobbyist and occasional work for years now. I'd say I'm pretty experienced as an artist and at least intermediate, I've delved into countless resources and spent time on and off hankering down on doing studies.

However I've found that no matter what I have never been able to achieve the same level of accuracy and polish when it comes to referencing. If i don't diverge from ref to a degree my art will almost universally look worse, and the closer I try to copy the worse it tends to look. I can approximate anatomy and gesture nicely and have received positive feedback in life drawing sessions, but accuracy is lost on me no matter how I study or what I do.

Does anyone else relate to this? If so were you able to overcome it or understand why you were having difficulty?

Maybe useful but I also have aphantasia and adhd so I can be a little impatient, my drawing mostly comes from muscle memory not visualisation.

I'm in a lot of tattoo sub reddit and find that it's a really great sample of this idea, a lot of people who could not draw anything without reference are able to develop fairly commendable technical proficiency with realism in mediums like ink, graphite etc.

On the other hand the bar for illustration seems to be a lot higher. Many people make origonal illustrative or creative work, but seeing people who appear to pass the skill level bar for high proficiency seems a lot rarer.

This kind of intrigues me, since you would think proficient realism would lead to proficient illustration but that doesn't appear to be the case.

I'm more on the creative side, though I'm not particularly skilled with realism. It makes me wonder if a larger percentage of the population is geared towards making art analytically, but are more likely to struggle with creative interpreting or drawing from imagination. Seems like successful artists who rely on technical skill for the most part are able to add flare to their style that makes them stand out above others, while ironically imaginative works seem to stand out most when artists have a high understanding of basic fundimentals you may learn in any fine art setting.