Learning to draw at the level of what Stable Diffusion can generate would take thousands of hours of practice, and the individual drawings would take hours.
But if you do learn, you can then render photorealistic image with nothing but pencil and paper instead of being reliant on a beefy computer running a blackbox model trained at enormous cost :)
SD will never compare to the power of pencil and paper imo. Drawing is an essential skill for any visual artist not just for mechanics but for developing style, taste, and true understanding of the world around you visually.
I recommend Freehand Figure Drawing for Illustrators as a good starting point (along with some beginner art lessons). It won't take 1k hours before you see results. It's also fun!
> But if you do learn, you can then render photorealistic image with nothing but pencil and paper instead of being reliant on a beefy computer running a blackbox model trained at enormous cost :)
Why do I want to avoid that reliance, other than to be smug to the nerds? And as far as general self-satisfaction, let's assume I would rather master a different skill with the time it would take.
Especially because that training cost only has to be done once, so on a per-person basis it beats learning to draw by a lot.
If you said something about flexibility and specificity of what you can create I could get behind that, but I think the arguments you're making are very unconvincing.
