okay so hey let’s talk about something that bugs me in fanfic about artistic characters: not all artists will wistfully draw the dude they have a crush on’s face over and over in their sketchbooks. like, few of them. very few of them.
i went to a visual arts school full of horny, lonely young people ages 18-28 and we were all constantly showing each other our sketchbooks, as is the traditional combat maneuver of the visual artist, and you know how many sketches of anyone’s boyfriend or girlfriend or love interest i saw? several hundred, if you count anime characters. maybe two or three if you only count real life people. mostly we just drew our friends. as anime characters. i’m an illustrator. i live with other illustrators. i know my roommate’s girlfriend’s cute anthro dog oc’s better than i know her face.
so like— is your character an artistic? do they like to draw? do they have a crush on someone? is it unrequited? they’re going to fill their sketchbook up with like, inu yasha covered in blood. or whatever the cool sad anime is for kids these days, but definitely someone sad and covered in blood. or like two faceless dudes fucking a cake, i saw that once. i knew a girl who only drew people fucking cakes, her whole sketchbook. your character also might just draw dragons everywhere, or really bad robots in smudgey pencil. your character is at some point going to draw a really skinny girl with really big boobs, holding a sword.
but like, as a general rule, visual artists don’t casually or absent-mindedly render things that are hard or make them anxious. like, drawing realistically from memory a crush’s face. will your character draw maybe a wolf or a horse or a dragon that somehow symbolically represents the object of their affections? pretty good odds. absentmindedly launching into a whole portrait of their beloved without noticing because they are so romantically forlorn? very unlikely. drawing their crush’s favorite flower or food or animal or character or something? definitely.
anyway, drawing from life is tough. drawing from life from memory is tougher. unless an artistic character is stated in canon to be good at portraiture, they’re really unlikely to fill their sketchbook up with wistful handsome faces.
feel free to reblog this post and add your own opinion, though, if you’re another visual artist.
as someone who absentmindedly draws a lot and has the occasional crush, I agree, when I am absentmindedly draw, it hardly ever even ends up as a RECOGNIZABLE THING, much less a person you can identify. I mean drawing something recognizable takes concentration, drawing from real life takes focus, so absentmindedly doodling your crush? only if you make a habit of drawing from memory anyways, is the only way one could realistically swing that pitch.
actually drawing my crush would take either that person actually being there and/or a photograph of them in front of me while I draw. I probably couldn’t even draw my own mother from memory, tbh, though I’m not sure if that’s because I’m not that good of an artist or if its because I have some mild face blindness going on.
anyway yeah, as an artist who went to a state college and majored in art, I will have to agree with roach. people’s sketch books are almost universally full of whatever cartoon character or mythical beast they like best, and almost never have real people in them unless it’s a class assignment
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