To Accomplish Your Goals, Look At The Big Picture First
--
This blog post was going to be about how I learned to be better at drawing realistic portraits thanks to learning how to draw cartoons but surprisingly this actually taught me lessons about life in general which I’d like to share with you.
For those of you who don’t know, I’ve started to take drawing more seriously this year.
And my biggest project is to draw realistic portraits.
Realistic portraits are very detail-oriented and you really have to pay attention to everything that you see.
Sometimes this can be really tricky, especially when drawing hair… Hair is such a complex thing to draw! I still don’t understand how to do it… But I’m still doing it, whether I do it right or not because I just want to keep on learning.
But one thing that I also always wanted to learn how to do was cartoons.
Especially cartoon versions of real people.
So I recently started to draw cartoon versions of people even if I don’t quite know anything about it.
Drawing cartoons is quite different from realistic portraits because you don’t have to put as much details.
When you draw a cartoon, you look at your reference as a whole and you roughly draw what you see.
For cartoons, you only have to look at the big picture rather than the details. The only things that you pay attention to are the very distinct things that characterizes that person so that we can recognize that it’s the same person in the cartoon version.
That being said, drawing cartoons and putting less effort in the detailing have actually helped me in drawing better detailed realistic portraits.
This exercise of looking at the reference picture as a whole helped me to open up my eyes to the bigger picture.
Usually, I would sit and think for hours and hours about where I should start; what detail should I start with. And then, when I’d start, I’d concentrate on that detail for hours.
For instance, if I start with the eye, I’d do the eye and the detailing all at once.
Then I would move on to the other eye or the nose and focus on that. Sometimes this process would lead me to have one eye lower than the other or the nose kind of tilted or something just wouldn’t be quite right and the drawing would kind of look deformed (to me).
But thanks to drawing cartoons and to looking at the bigger picture first rather than focusing on the details, I have learned to do a quick rough sketch of the drawing to see the bigger picture first and then I would focus on detailing.
Seeing the bigger picture first just really helps you see the details better.
And that’s the life lesson for today.
Sometimes we are too focused on the details/steps. We organize every tiny little steps to make our dreams come true, which in a way is great, but it also prevents us from seeing that there are other steps that could be possible.
We just want things to go our way, step by step, so we focus on each and every step that we come up with.
But in doing so, we prevent other possibilities to come up because we are so focused on our steps/our details, the ones that we chose to follow.
What I mean by that is that we are closed off to other paths that we could take to make our dreams come true because we are so focused on that one path that we chose and all the little steps that we premeditated.
So instead of doing that, maybe we should reprogram ourselves to look at the bigger picture first and foremost — What is it that you want to accomplish? — Then, you are allowed to look for steps to follow but when you reprogram yourself to open your eyes to the bigger picture, you actually allow yourself to see other possibilities that you might not have thought about before.
So that’s my lesson for today.
Don’t just focus on the details. Things will happen one way or another. Never forget the big picture and be open for other possibilities, other than the ones that you already planned because nothing really goes as planned… So just really look at the big picture and let yourself be guided by life.
And also, work hard, fail a lot, try, continue, learn and repeat!
Let me know what you thought about this story by leaving a comment. Clicking the 👏 button is optional, but appreciated. Following me is required, if you want to read more stories by yours truly. And subscribing to my newsletter could be quite practical!
Thank you for stopping by, hope you’ve had a nice stay! ❤︎
