So you wanna draw?

[Turnsky]

I've noticed as of late that folks want to draw and so on, asking for advice here and there. So i figure i'd make a bit of a mention of the basics before folks can even think about unfurling that shiny new wacom tablet they've been eyeballing, or petting their expensive copy of Photoshop CS5 that they've either legitimately purchased or gotten off a torrent site.

The Basics
What you'll need in actual "art supplies":

• Crisp, Clean white paper. Xerox paper will do quite nicely, and can be acquired cheaply by the 480-500 sheet pack from anywhere that even remotely sells stationary goodies... or even cheaper if you filch them from someone's office supplies.
• Pencil, now i'll go over this in detail later, but really you'll just need a HB pencil for the most part, either mechanical or just the plain ol' wooden ones, if it's the latter don't forget the sharpener too.
• Plain, white, Vinyl erasers are generally the cheapest, most common, and the most effective to use, go with that.
• A clipboard to hold the wads of paper is optional, but it does soften the back of the paper somewhat and generally makes it easier to draw with when you don't have a table/desk available to ye as well. The Sturdier the clipboard is, the better.

Other Stuff:

• Rulers: if you need a "straight Edge" anything will do, but if you want my opinion, and especially if you're thinking of doing a webcomic under the traditional formats, shell out the extra for stainless steel rulers, they don't break for a start, and they're rather thin, too. if you can afford it, shell out for a setsquare, too. it's nice having a perma-90 degree angle to make nice, square things with.
• A pencil case to keep it in, naturally.
• If you plan to show it on the internet, an A4 Flatbed scanner of some sort will do. HP make a few nice ones, so do epson, and any number of companies, if it's cheap, don't worry, it'll do the job.
• on the subject of image editors, i can only really suggest "three" that'll do the trick, on the high end, There's photoshop of course, and on the free end, there's GIMP, largely your choice what you use, they all accept scanner inputs

General advice.
Now this is just me here, and a few observations, so take them as you will.

"Learn to draw": i know it either sounds funny, or harsh, but it's kind of true in this regard, if you have a look at people and think they're great, and you wanna draw like them. Don't. Learn from those whose job is to teach people to draw, to make with the art, to properly appreciate the form and function of the world around you. To put the spin on it;Mother Nature is the best artist of them all, only learn from her. As folks have stated in the past, observe, and learn.
Form and Construction

• It's funny, but the basic "stick figure" type construction is the most widely used and easiest to grasp, taking from basic skeletal forms that all bipeds share, you can break it up into a more basic form that allows you to do so. alternatively: there are teaching aids that can help.
• Historical art also has a few basic things down, faces protrude, have jaws, people have fingers on each hand, that kinda thing, human history has a lot of art abound in it, and various appreciations for nature and the human form, also take heed of that.  
• For budding furry artists: examine nature, take up zoology as a major or something. But the general idea here is to learn how things work.
• for those of us without access to university courses, there's always corbis.com or google image search for our photo reference needs
• or the library, or purchase your own books, use google to find figure drawing books and references, refine your google-fu, grasshoppah

On the artist's psyche

• Don't copy other artists because you like their "Style". Their style is their own, and if they're ones that only have the one style and refuse to move out of it (more on that later). Then you pick up all their nasty little habits as well.
• Develop your own style, but also develop more than one, as above it's easy to get into the single "groove" but a good artist has more than one way to skin the proverbial cat, Learn more than one way to do things, and you'll be the wiser for it.
• Ignorance is not bliss, Listen to advice given if others spot mistakes, don't just fob it off thinking "oh, it's my style". To put it harshly, "just because it's your style, does not mean it doesn't suck"
• Check your ego in at the door, i know it's natural to feel proud of what you accomplished, but do not rest on your laurels, always feel the need to learn more, to move forward... an artist is like a great white shark in some regard, if it stops moving, it dies. If an artist stops moving forwards, they just suck horribly. Learn to swallow your pride, admit your mistakes, then endeavor to move forward, and to silence your critics, show that you're capable of doing so by making something recent that shows improvement.
• For webcomic artists and the like, Don't go into it for the money, or for potential employment later on, i can still count on one hand the number of webcomickers that have actually made a very comfortable living for themselves doing what they do. There is a reason the phrase "Starving artist" exists, basically while you're learning to draw, either have a good tradeskill in order to pay the bills with, or turn your artwork into a tradeskill via graphic design or somesuch, Just because you draw good doesn't mean it'll pay the bills.
• On that note: make a portfolio if you do plan to go on the "graphic designer" route, just because it says you can do so on your resume, doesn't mean an employer will just take your word for it, to put the netspeak vernacular upon it: "pics or it didn't happen".

Onto more art stuff.
"Advanced" equipment.
So you want to Ink stuff, neh? there are numerous methods one can follow, but here's a few that worked for me in the past.
no matter what anybody else says is best, go with what feels right for you. This is just general advice for folks to try and see if they like. what they choose after that is up to them.
Traditional stuffs

• Okay, while Pigma Micron pens like these are generally highly regarded, any pen of this nib type (that's the tip of the pen, folks) that's marked on the side with either "Archival" or "Pigment Ink" will do the job quite nicely. Writing pens also work well, and oddly enough, so do Gel Ink pens, only not so much.
• Technical pens are also good, and i've seen good results come from it, but start out with the basic stuff first, see how you go.
• still HB pencils for this one, but you can get away with 2b pencils for lighter lines, however, save up plenty of elbow grease for erasure if you wanna scan that lovely inkwork
• alternatively, sketching with non-photo pencils like this or these suffice nicely for when you want to scan, i'll go over scanning later.
• There are oodles of ways to traditionally color, from paints, watercolors, to copic markers (and the like) and so on, try them all, see what you like

Papers
Now, i haven't mentioned anything about paper yet, because that's a section in its own right, basically there's terminology involved that you need to be aware of.

• GSM - Often refers to the weight of the paper, meaning its thickness, generally the heavier(higher number) the better for inking, with archival ink pens, xerox paper doesn't perform too badly under standard lineart conditions, but for heavier inking as well as different types of inking pens, i suggest heavier types of paper, Bristol board being the absolute best, there.
• Paper Size. Now i'm australian, so "A4" is the standard size of paper (8.3 x 11.7inches) is what i'm used to, and should be roughly what most folks should at least use. US Letter sizes come close also.
• if you're interested in bristol boards, here's something, They are pricey, but some found it worth it.
• Minor caveat, there are "visual art diaries" which are a tad lighter, but hold ink also relatively well.. also tad cheaper than bristol boards. price varies wildly, best shop around

Just a technique note here, but one should not "sketch" when inking, it should be smooth, even, and attention to detail paid to. Patience is key, be methodical with your inking, early on it's not good to rush.

Anybody notice the lack of digital stuffs so far? good. I'm gonna go over that in a bit. first of all, however, i'll cover the tricky bit of getting that lineart into your image editor if you wish to, or if you've decided that traditional color was a bit much.

we'll go over this step by step:

• 1. If your lineart isn't clean because you're not using a non-photo pencil, scan in greyscale the "one bit scan" thing is only really meant for things that you can separate your color channels out of, the blue color of the pencil (or red in some cases) means that that color can be singled out and not scanned in, that's how it works, folks. you can tweak your greyscale in your image editor later to 'cleanup' (in photoshop you just tweak the "levels" in the image->adjustments->levels.
• 2. Scan at 300dpi, if you've got a real fast PC, great, then scan at 600 dpi, it does affect the quality of your lineart scan in this regard, and the size of the pic initially scanned, after that, you're dealing in pixels.
• 3. in tweaking the levels, you want to make sure that only the lines YOU want are nice, black, and vivid, nothing else should be showing, not specs of dirt, no errant pencil lines, and so on. It should be just black. and white.
• 4. A little trick to make sure is to take your flood fill tool, i dunno how gimp handles it, but on photoshop the settings are: 0 Tolerance (you'll want this regardless), and all checkboxes unchecked. you pick a color like a purple or somesuch, and click it on the white, now examine the lineart closely, if any white or light grey bits show, just click on them with the fill tool again to make them go away, any darker bits you use black on, when done, just switch over to white, click the purple, and huzzah, clean lineart.
• 5. those who prefer to "paint under" the lineart should at least follow this partway through
• 6. Learn to work with layers, have at least two layers with your lineart, the one above what you're coloring, whether flood fill or painting, should always be set to "multiply"
• 7. if you're painting underneath, have a color fill underneath your flat colors of some color that you don't plan on using, preferably something reasonably contrasting so you don't miss a spot.
• another little trick i used to do back in the day, was to take the sketch, scan it in, then on a new layer, put either a blue or a red over the sketch layer, set to screen (therefore making the sketch blue/red), print it out, then ink over that by hand. then scan it in as one would do something that was previously sketched in by a photo blue pencil

How you color is largely up to you, so's shading and whatnot, there's tons of tutorials out there that show folks one way or another, read them, know them, and again, refine your google-fu.

Onward! to the fun parts!
Digital Techniques
So you have a shiny graphics tablet, eh? for the most part it's a glorified mouse, it can make one's coloring efforts far easier, the tricky part comes when you want to really use it, and DRAW something.
I heartily suggest you actually learn to do the basics first (see above), before you even THINK about shelling out tons of dough for what might be a very expensive item.

People often make the mistake of:

• Thinking it'll make them awesome art art: Look folks, just because some can use it real good and it's a digital interface tool, doesn't mean that it'll make you good too, it's a tool like any other, it requires skill to use. thinking otherwise just makes you look the fool.
• It's so smooth... It's a completely different beast to drawing on paper. Hence why you SHOULD have the basics covered before you try and use one.
• Get a really tiny one: i know some folks are operating on a limited budget, but generally it's better to be patient and save up for one that's bigger than a slice of bread. It's an investment, not a toy.  

now, with digital inking one should have a fairly steady hand, and try for even strokes, again, no sketching... unless you are sketching. There's oodles of programs that can do digital sketching/inking/coloring, your choice is up to you, hopefully you'll have the basics down enough to figure out what you wanna do.
that's all i have for now, if anybody has any questions, feel free to ask.

Edit: some minor caveats; basically the idea here is to learn something, but to not learn from one source. Learn from as many resources as you can plausibly get your hands on, the above should not be taken as gospel truth, but rather a point of view, and folks should learn from more than one point of view.
Really what i've said is just the opinion and conjecture of a tired old curmudgeon artist who draws a webcomic from time to time.
It's what i've learnt over the years, and i'll prolly keep learning as i go along. Don't stop learning, folks.  

edit: Also, here's a couple of tutorials i've dug up to help folks along the way.
http://www.foxprints.com/tracy/misc/tutorial/char_drawing.html
http://machall.comicgenesis.com/info/art.html

The Machall Tutorial is how i started to pick up the basics (and still use a modified technique to this day), and definitely worth a look.