>>5143188- If you're an artist make art, if you're a businessman sell yourself; learn how to market your skills and what rates to give, you have to be cold and cunning, when dealing with clients make sure that you know your worth but don't be an asshole, show the client you actually care about the damn project.
- Someone who works doing art will never get better than someone who plays by making art; if you gotta "force" yourself to draw rather than doing so as a way of relaxing, see the first point.
- If you want to get into the industry, you gotta look for connections. There is no way around it. Get a good portfolio and make sure to get noticed, you don't have to wine and dine people just make sure they know you can do a job.
Now for actual painting tips:
- LEARN THE POWER OF CYAN MAGENTA AND YELLOW. Start with a yellow undertone painting (Kames Gurney did a video on this), highlight with these colors, add random splotches in your picture, cmyk exists for a reason.
- Learn your damn colors and how they interact with values, how blue can be used as a shadow or a highlight
- Paint in the traditional way, even when doing lineart paint the lineart. Mistakes make the art have that "look" rather than a fully digitalized ctrl+z perfect looking render, unless you're going for a way more "clean looking" style like your favorite chinese cartoons
- Fucking hell stop using multiply and overlay layer for colors, learn how to saturate them instead
- Unironically practice how to paint or draw chains in stencils, have them not only be straight but also play with the perspective, how the light would bounce with only black and white. This is a great exercise to help you with negative space, shapes, line action and more.
Good luck, we're all going to make it.