Which is easier to do: Writing or Drawing?

Phlakes

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As someone who's done both since the beginning of time, writing. Writing is a lot more flexible. The threshold of "good" art is very unforgiving.
 

Signa

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I suck at drawing. It doesn't take much to impress me with a drawn figure. I actually have written some pretty decent works in the past, when I had English projects give me the right inspiration. My my experience, I can wholeheartedly say that writing is the easier skill.

However, I think looking at this as objectively as possible, I'm going to saw drawing in the easier skill. Anything you want to draw will have a real-world equivalent for you to look at as an example. The skill of getting that onto paper might be a bit of a trick, but you can just keep looking and adjusting the technique. Now with writing, anyone can talk about a guy walking down the street, but it takes a master to describe the gloomy, oppressive rain that is soaking his jacket, and the joyous feelings of psychotic glee his dark figure is concealing. As a writer, you have to learn how to communicate with your audience, and that is something that can't be done with simple trial and error.
 

Uzi-Bazooka

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As a maker of comics, I actually do both, and for me, writing has always been easier. Now, I think that for the most part, that's a personal thing - I've been writing for a long time, and coming up with stories isn't the problem so much as deciding which stories NOT to tell. Drawing, on the other hand, is something which I added more recently.

In a more general sense, though, I think that drawing is harder. Any fool can write "three guys sat on a bench". But when you're drawing, you have to design the outfits and unique character designs for the the three guys, and you have to make the bench big enough for them to sit on, and you have to draw everything in proportion, and you'll probably have to draw the bench in perspective, and if you're any good you'll add a background, so you have to decide: are they at the park? The beach? The inner city?
 

PunkyMcGee

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Apr 5, 2010
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they are both hard. but i play the drums. so my talents are completely unsuited of this discussion.

EDIT: honestly, drawing bad can be a "style". but spalling an grammer is hrad.
 

ADDLibrarian

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May 25, 2008
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I'm an ok writer. I suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck at drawing. Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. My dad was an artist. I did not inherit that particular gene. :p
 

Frission

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Is the question how to do either of those things WELL?

Because they both require different skill sets.
 

DrunkenMonkey

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I'd say writing because you actually have to have creativity to make brand new ideas and then attempt to put those ideas on paper accurately. Creativity isn't something learned in the classroom unlike brush strokes, techniques, etc. Same argument could be used for drawing I guess.

So it ultimately depends on the person
 

C F

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Jan 10, 2012
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"Depends on the person"
Been said before, will probably be said again.

For me, I'm better at writing, since I'm the logical type.
I don't write, at least not as a hobby, but I think I could if I ever felt like it. Granted, I might have to work on a more ideal writing style; as a bit of self-criticism, I'd have to say my current one is rather awkward.

Drawing, while fun, is a much steeper curve for me. I'd probably be dead at the bottom if it weren't for three things:
<img src="http://i838.photobucket.com/albums/zz304/Tau_Rho_lambda/EscapistCF01.png" width="200" /img>Pictured: Me doing something.
I'm not exactly sure what, or why.
This is what happens when I space
out at the tablet.

>My sister is the artistic type. She's the opposite of me: capable of casually spinning out a masterpiece while sitting at her laptop with stylus in hand and holding a conversation with me (I've seen her do it), but she has little beyond a high-school education in the way of writing (I still correct the grammatical errors of hers that Firefox's spell-check fails to catch). I went through a Drawing with Photoshop 101 crash course on my curiosity and her whim, and learned a few pointers.

>Which leads to my next point: I have access to Photoshop CS5 and a tablet.

>Finally, I went through a crazy and arbitrary (and later self-imposed since I was the only one to finish) challenge known as The Year of the Bad Comics. I had to draw one bad comic, every day for 365 days, and upload it to a thread in another forum. This started in the beginning of 2011. The rules stated the comic had to be bad, but that wasn't a problem for two reasons. One: I was pretty much the only one doing them consistently after a while, and two: "bad" is a completely subjective measure of quality. So, I took the liberty of pushing my admittedly feeble limits, and ended up improving my art style that way. For a bad art style that was supposed to be bad and had no obligation to be anything other than bad, it ended up not half bad. Suck it.

So, yeah. I can write, and I can draw. Being left-brained, it is easier for me to write though. I've got a long way to go if I want to be a serious artist. Thankfully I don't.

I'll stick with my crazy self-indulgent hobbyist style.
 

King of Asgaard

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Oct 31, 2011
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Writers have it easy, because their art is far more simple to practise, and corrections are only the push of a few keys away. Artists need far more materials, time and a different skill set to be good, while writers only need a firm grip on the language they're writing in.
 

lunavixen

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For me, it is writing, I've actually written several short pieces and am in the process of writing a short novel. My drawing skills are very limited, I can draw, but it is a lot harder for me to do.
 

Erttheking

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Drawing is defiantly harder, though maybe I'm just saying that because I'm a decent writer and god awful at drawing.
 

Matt Dellar

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Jun 26, 2011
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Honestly, I think they're exactly the same difficulty. Both of them take years to get to the point where it's not painful to look at and decades upon decades upon decades to master.
 

thesilentman

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Jun 14, 2012
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LobsterFeng said:
EDIT: Silly me, I meant to say writing is easier than drawing because trying to self teach yourself to draw is so haaaaaaard. (currently trying.)
Just find tutorials on deviantArt and ignore all of the stuff on there that can't be unseen. It's where I find my tutorials. I would show you my improvement but that's on my desk waiting to be finished.
 

Shadow flame master

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Hard to say.

I can draw/sketch some simple pictures pretty good, I just mess up when I'm adding shading or any small details. I can't seem to get perfect symmetry either, sometimes one eye is a little lower than the other and that annoys me.

With writing, I can jot some something down relatively quickly, but stories take longer than a essay due in two days. Espeacially if I can't get a good story going. Short stories: yes. Long over-arching stories: no.
 

LobsterFeng

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thesilentman said:
LobsterFeng said:
EDIT: Silly me, I meant to say writing is easier than drawing because trying to self teach yourself to draw is so haaaaaaard. (currently trying.)
Just find tutorials on deviantArt and ignore all of the stuff on there that can't be unseen. It's where I find my tutorials. I would show you my improvement but that's on my desk waiting to be finished.
Didn't realize there were tutorials on deviantArt. I'm currently learning from this guy:

http://www.youtube.com/user/markcrilley?feature=g-u-u

And a couple of other Youtube video tutorials.
 

Twilight_guy

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Nov 24, 2008
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I think drawing is harder, depending on the type of drawing. It requires a lot of time and effort. Writing mostly requires time and effort during proofreading.
 

DeltaEdge

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I think that it varies per person. I'd say drawing is harder in my case. Writing comes pretty well to me, and drawing does, to an extent. I'd say that the hardest part about drawing is coming up with unique drawings. Drawing things like nature and portraits and such is by no means just easy, but it still gives you some guidelines. You know exactly what you are drawing, you just need to know how to draw it. On the other hand, drawing something completely unique is more difficult, because you don't know what exactly you want to draw, or how exactly to draw it. You have to pull ideas from the clouds and then cement them on paper, often times without anything to go on besides "it's a human" or "it's an animal".
On the subject of writing, writing can be simple in terms of just listing information or writing an essay, but when it comes to something like writing a story, it can become nearly impossible for people without the skill. You have to imagine a setting, and work out all of the rules and kinks in the rules, then come up with the characters, and story, make the motivations realistic, and more. Then there are aspects like imagery. Crucial to most stories, you need to be able to accurately depict what is going on in a way that gives people a fairly clear visual, but of course you don't get to use picture. You are now tasked with describing actions, images, and emotions solely through words, and you tread a thin line between being highly descriptive and captivating, or using too much "artsy" overly descriptive language thus making what ever you write sound like a 12 year old fan-fiction.
TL;DR I have no fucking idea which is generally/statistically harder for people, but most of my personal difficulties lie with my art.
 

thesilentman

What this
Jun 14, 2012
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LobsterFeng said:
thesilentman said:
LobsterFeng said:
EDIT: Silly me, I meant to say writing is easier than drawing because trying to self teach yourself to draw is so haaaaaaard. (currently trying.)
Just find tutorials on deviantArt and ignore all of the stuff on there that can't be unseen. It's where I find my tutorials. I would show you my improvement but that's on my desk waiting to be finished.
Didn't realize there were tutorials on deviantArt. I'm currently learning from this guy:

http://www.youtube.com/user/markcrilley?feature=g-u-u

And a couple of other Youtube video tutorials.
The reason that I like deviantArt is that some people have some really good anatomy tutorials there. Drawing isn't that hard, you just need to force what you're visualizing out of your head. [sub]Though how the hell you do that well is anyone's guess.[/sub] Now writing something good is the really hard part.