Six Ways to Better Drawing
When you're a beginner, usually you know it - you keep working and improving. When you want to be good at art and aren't, it's a big motivator! But then once you start to become more satisfied with your results, and feel that you're drawing well, it is easy to keep working in the same reliable way, not taking any risks. We want to do good art and so we stick with 'what works'. Sometimes that's okay, but it can also lead to stagnation. Here's some tips to help you really sharpen your skills and thinking, and be really, really good at drawing.
How do you challenge yourself without creating anxiety about your work? One solution is to have a regular 'lesson day'. Continue with your usual work most of the time, but set aside some regular time to troubleshoot your work, do exercises or try something different. You don't want to take a hyper-critical eye to your work every time you pick up a pencil, but make a regular habit of working on improvement. A structured drawing program can be useful. Rather than randomly cherrypicking lessons, try working progressively through a book such as Stanyer and Rosenberg's Foundation Course in Drawing or Nicolaides' Natural Way to Draw
A useful strategy is to pick one issue at a time. Don't try to fix everything at once - you'll just get frustrated and overwhelmed. Choose one area - such as your use of shading and value, or compositional design - and explore solutions and experiment with ideas. Look at how other artists use those elements in their work. Many art books and websites cover a broad range of topics; choose a range of exercises around your point of interest.
When we gain confidence in drawing, it enables us to focus on expressing our ideas and drawing the subjects that we are interested in. It's a great feeling having that creative freedom. When you've mastered a technique, it becomes fairly automatic, like driving a car - you don't think about changing gears or putting on an indicator. To develop your technique, spend some time reading about the mechanics of your medium - such as pencil shading or colored pencil application. Stick to a few favorite subjects, and remember that you're dong an exercise, not trying to create a finished, marketable piece.
It's no coincidence that many artists are known for their expertise in a single medium, whether it's the graphite pencil of Mike Sibley or colored pencil for Bet Borgeson. Take your technical focus to the next level by putting away all your other art supplies and focusing on just one medium. This can work for combinations of mediums, too - such as watercolor wash with ink or colored pencil. In this way all your creativity and ideas need to find their expression through one single approach - you aren't jumping around from pastel to ink to pencil. It can help you create some unity in your body of work, as well as forcing you to find ways to extend your technique to get the effects you want.
1. Have a Lesson Day
How do you challenge yourself without creating anxiety about your work? One solution is to have a regular 'lesson day'. Continue with your usual work most of the time, but set aside some regular time to troubleshoot your work, do exercises or try something different. You don't want to take a hyper-critical eye to your work every time you pick up a pencil, but make a regular habit of working on improvement. A structured drawing program can be useful. Rather than randomly cherrypicking lessons, try working progressively through a book such as Stanyer and Rosenberg's Foundation Course in Drawing or Nicolaides' Natural Way to Draw
2. Take a Course or Lesson
As your art skills develop, your need for good quality feedback increases. The well-meaning advice of friends or family who have no art training is unlikely to help identify subtle issues in observation or handling. They won't know whether the cause of a problem texture is the paper tooth or the pencil hardness, or whether the foreshortening issue is due to observation or rendering. If you can afford it, try to get a lesson with an expert - an experienced art teacher with good technical skills. Regular lessons are always great, but even just a couple of sessions or one-off consultation with a good teacher can help you know what to work on.3. One Thing At A Time
A useful strategy is to pick one issue at a time. Don't try to fix everything at once - you'll just get frustrated and overwhelmed. Choose one area - such as your use of shading and value, or compositional design - and explore solutions and experiment with ideas. Look at how other artists use those elements in their work. Many art books and websites cover a broad range of topics; choose a range of exercises around your point of interest.
4. Focus on Technique
When we gain confidence in drawing, it enables us to focus on expressing our ideas and drawing the subjects that we are interested in. It's a great feeling having that creative freedom. When you've mastered a technique, it becomes fairly automatic, like driving a car - you don't think about changing gears or putting on an indicator. To develop your technique, spend some time reading about the mechanics of your medium - such as pencil shading or colored pencil application. Stick to a few favorite subjects, and remember that you're dong an exercise, not trying to create a finished, marketable piece.
5. Focus on a Single Medium
It's no coincidence that many artists are known for their expertise in a single medium, whether it's the graphite pencil of Mike Sibley or colored pencil for Bet Borgeson. Take your technical focus to the next level by putting away all your other art supplies and focusing on just one medium. This can work for combinations of mediums, too - such as watercolor wash with ink or colored pencil. In this way all your creativity and ideas need to find their expression through one single approach - you aren't jumping around from pastel to ink to pencil. It can help you create some unity in your body of work, as well as forcing you to find ways to extend your technique to get the effects you want.
