I see a lot of posts on here about beginner artists (and it may be ironic that I’m talking about them, being that my art is nowhere near good but I wouldn’t call myself a beginner in any sense, anyways;) needing to learn to just practice, and while I do definitely agree I don’t think they’re necessarily taking the right approach.
Practice, practice, practice and saying nothing but that is only going to help motivate a certain group of people, and I wouldn’t say most beginner artists. I think there needs to be more posts about mindsets and ways to make practicing fun and take some of the repetition out of it, rather than just telling them to deal with it. Why aren’t there more posts about things to do to help practice, or etc;? I’m somewhat doubting that there’s a high amount of people who think they can get better without practice, they just need something to help keep the practice interesting.
Just my two (unwanted) cents, ahaha.I guess cos its relatively easy to say practice since it simplifies it. It never helped me a lot to just have that because I have issues with self direction and I feel like I’m not doing things right because after ten years, my work is still generally unambitious and flukey. the practice is the baseline part, only knowing you’ll get better if you keep at it but its miserable to just know you’ll eventually be better and not see improvements in the meantime; you can’t see how big the storm is from the middle of it.
what I’d say is draw fast, draw often, and don’t care how bad it looks at any particular time when you’re not on the clock as it were. just do not give a shit about how bad it looks because you will only hurt. you will hurt sometimes anyway even if you’re trying not to care. justify the fact it looks kinda eh because you’re going fast. know that the next picture will be a little better. draw stupid things that make you happy, even if its just laughing at how bad you’re doing. draw your own characters a thousand times because you know their shapes best from the model-sheet you hold in your head. draw faces. draw hands. draw circles. draw squiggles. draw bad and fast and be excited even if you don’t think you’re drawing well.
And then, if you want to do more than that, if you feel up to it… Erase. Hammer Ctrl Z. Delete, discard, redraw. Anything can be destroyed. Everything can be torn apart. Hell, don’t even do that - just draw over it. Ink it in, scribble the lines over til they’re solid blocks, pick your favourite curves and edges. And don’t feel bad. You’ve done it before and starting is always the hardest part. You’ve cut a path through the thicket as fast and as hard as you could and its as rough as shit but you know if that path is worth taking, if you’re happy with where it’s going, you can pick up a shovel and start laying down the road. Draw fast and bad and as excited as you can be and fix it when you feel like it.
Also, study a bit, even if just to see how things look. Take other peoples work and trace shapes over it, see what other people are using as their building blocks. Style is personal answers to questions of how do I do this in art and we pick it up handy solutions from everyone we know and everything we see. If a particular answer isn’t working for you, if its gone as far as you feel it could, find out someone else answer - look at artists work, look up tutorials or just talk to other artists. For ages, I used dodge and burn in photoshop. It looked like ass; it gave muddy colours because I didn’t really know anything about brush settings or how to keep colour, effectively, inside lines - until I found out you could lock brushes to existing pixels on a layer and I started to paint manually. Experiment too - manually blocking colours in was a drag, but then I found out about the magic wand tool. Then I could select areas inside my inking if they were closed up. Then one day I realised I could select the OUTSIDE of my inking, hit Inverse Selection and bam, whole thing selected. The time it took to work dropped even lower and the faster it got, the more I could do, and the more bad drawings I could get out of my way to getting to where I wanted to be.
Oh and life drawing is a bit helpful but looking up photo reference material so you can see how people pose is good, too. I still haven’t figured out how to draw someone sitting down cos fuckin’ foreshortening but it helps still!
I want to chime in the key nuance those kinds of comics miss is that it isn’t enough to just practice. Yes, as a rule of thumb, putting in your metaphorical 10,000 hours will improve your skillset but that’s not the complete picture. What these comics fail to mention is focused practice. The quickest way to improve any skill, whether it’s drawing, learning a language, or what have you is to pick a focus and target that for a while. Do your research, and then get to work practicing your approach. Same goes for any artistic subskill. For example:
Vague goal: “I want to get better at art”
Better, more defined goal: “I want to improve controlling my line weights when inking” is much better. It’s clear and straight to the point. Now make a game plan around it and dedicate some time every day to practice that.
This is why art school students usually improve within the 4 or so years they study by the way. They’re not doing anything you can’t do on your own, but their professors guide them and hold them accountable to produce results that demonstrate they learned the lessons well. Good art professors will define the class rubric and dedicate chunks of time (or an entire class) to a specific skill and the students have to do it. A self learning artist just needs to take it into their own hands and do it themselves. It’s a bit harder, but totally do-able!
TL;DR: Practice is good, focused practice with specific and well defined goals is even better.
If it helps, I found this concise article to be helpful
As for staying focused and motivated during sessions, I’m quite a fan of the Pomodoro Technique
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