What are you actually doing while you draw?

General Forums Art Discussions and Advice
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I’m a software developer working on my own. I use Krita myself, but I’m a
complete beginner at drawing — it took me a whole day to draw my own icon.
(The model was my cat.) So some of the questions below are probably obvious
to anyone who can actually draw.

I’d like to hear what steps you go through to finish a piece.

For example:

  • What goes down first? Thumbnails, blocking in, or straight to lineart?
  • How do you split up your layers? (I imagine some people don’t.)
  • How often do you save, and how far back do you undo?
  • Out of your working time, how much is spent not drawing at all —
    hesitating, stepping away, comparing things?
  • Something you do without thinking about it, that surprises people when
    you explain it

Why I’m asking: I keep seeing people say they were accused of having drawn
something with AI. What interests me there is not the finished image but
the process. You can’t read much of the process off a finished picture,
and I would guess it differs enormously from person to person — I’d like
to know how much.

Eventually I want to write down, as a document, what is actually worth
recording about a working process. Writing that from a programmer’s
imagination alone felt like the wrong way to do it, so I’d rather ask
people who actually draw first.

And the other way round: if there is something you would not want
recorded, I’d like to hear that too. That may well be the more important
half.

I won’t quote anything in a way that identifies anyone, and the document
will be public.

This isn’t about skill level. I’m just as interested in how someone who
started last month works.

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I think a process is a complicated thing, because it’s not linear in any sense. I’m also not sure what you’re trying to achieve here – like, what do you mean “what is worth recording”? A document?

Some elaboration would be nice!

EDIT: I tried to not be as blunt as Takiro is LMAO :kikiexcited: had the same thought, though.

1 Like
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Are you the same person who registered like four times already and tried to extract artists workflow data for their AI model to train on, giving different made up reasons like export drawing progress data into an undisclosed third party application?

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@Takiro

No. This is my only account — I have never registered here more than once,
and I am not the person you are describing.

I have had one topic removed, under the AI policy. It was an announcement
of something I develop and of a Krita plugin: several links to my own
repositories, plus a section asking Krita developers to work with me. I
don’t dispute the removal. Reading it back, it was self-promotion and it
didn’t belong here.

To answer that directly: nothing I do trains a model on anything. I am not
collecting workflow data as a dataset, and there is no model on my side for
it to go into.

The plugin isn’t undisclosed either:

and my profile links the project site. It hashes saved files locally and
anchors those hashes, so that a save history can be checked afterwards. It
never looks at the images themselves.

If that history means this topic isn’t welcome here, say so and I’ll take
it down. I would just rather answer the question than leave it standing.

@wakocima

You’re right that a process isn’t linear, and that is part of the
difficulty. What I want to write is not a definition of “human”.

What I want to write is a specification of what a record of a working
process could contain: how much of a set of steps, agreed in advance, was
actually carried out — recorded so that someone else can verify it
afterwards, and can also refute it.

Unfortunately, even the system I am building cannot prove that something
was definitely made by a human. The most it can show is that a process
defined by rules set in advance — one that would probably be difficult for
an AI to go through — was actually followed. When someone says you must
have drawn it with AI, you have something to show. That is as far as it
goes.

The reason I asked here is that those rules are exactly the part I did not
want to write out of the guesses of a programmer with no drawing
experience.

Lastly, thank you both. I think it is only natural to be suspicious of
someone who turns up and starts a thread out of nowhere. Questions are
welcome — I will answer anything honestly.

5

Where on your keyboard do you type the em dash?

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I am a Japanese speaker. I wrote that reply in Japanese and used an LLM to
translate it into English, so the em dashes come from that.
For what it is worth, dashes are easy to type in Japanese input.

The content is mine. If translating that way is not acceptable on this
forum, tell me. I can write in my own English from now on, which will be
much worse.

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It’s okay for translations