Reworking the basics is the key to improvement. Reworking the basics means starting over. Starting over is hard, but worthwhile. The trick to starting over is to know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. If you take a picture of a tree, can you write down how to draw that tree? If not, then you’ve got some reworking to do.
I have some ideas about how we can better learn, teach, and practice art. You can find them at my blog, Reworking the Basics . I also post there about drawing and art in general, and sometimes about other stuff too.
The purpose of this article is to present a series of ways to improve your drawings. These tips are geared towards artists who have had some training, but can be useful for a beginner as well.
A lot of time is often spent on the fundamentals of art, learning and practicing skills that appear easy. However, these basics can be the hardest to master. Often they are learned skills that require more time than others and take careful practice over and over again to perfect them in your own style. These are things like perspective, shading, and composition. As artists, we all know about these things already so I will not go into much detail about them here. Instead, this article will focus on ways to rework the basics by starting over from scratch.
Most of the time it’s enviable to be able to start over. But sometimes it can be a curse. Sometimes you run into a situation where your work is so tangled up that you can’t move forward without first starting over. Sometimes you just have to rework the basics and redesign yourself.
This blog is a record of those times, and my attempts to come out of them with something new.
I’ve been using this technique for several years now, and have found that once I get through the initial phases (which are always frustrating), a healthy new approach invariably emerges. This blog is a way to share my mistakes as well as successes so that others might benefit from them.
I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of work done on improving the “basics” for beginners. That is, better ways to approach anatomy, perspective and lighting. And I don’t have a problem with this. In fact, I think it’s really important for people who are just starting out to get a solid grounding in the basics.
But I’m also curious about something else: what happens when you try to apply these techniques to more advanced subjects? To do that, you need to be able to draw well enough that you can actually see what’s going on in your drawings. It seems like it would be possible to start with the basics and then move up through increasingly complex details. But I haven’t seen anyone do this systematically yet.
If you want to improve your drawings, it’s best to work on the easiest stuff first.
It is a dark art. The student who has seen the best work of the masters, and then never strays from that path, is doomed to create work that looks like it was done by a student who has seen the best work of the masters.
When you look at genius, you see something which appears effortless. And when you try to imitate that genius, you find yourself trying to make your own work look effortless.
But there is one difference between your drawing and the master’s: his is better than yours. That’s not because he was born with innate talent. It’s because he worked harder.
To learn to draw well, you need to make choices different from those of a master. You must choose a different path; one which leads to increased difficulty and increased struggle. Then your drawing will be a reflection of your own personality, not someone else’s.
First, always use the same brand of pencil. It doesn’t matter if it’s number two or four, HB or B. They are all graphite and will do the same thing on paper. But your hand will get used to that pencil, so you will get better results with it.
