If you are an already experienced artist or just a beginner, it doesn’t matter, when it comes to art there is always room for improvement and room for just experimenting, trying new things, and enhancing your skills.
There are many signs that your art isn’t improving and it’s probably annoying you, as improvement doesn’t come overnight there are still some tips that can help you improve quickly or fight off the so-called “Art Block”.
You can read about that an Art Block Is A Myth, Overcome It here.
The main problem of art not improving can be that we are actively avoiding doing art or bringing ourselves down. Saying “ I can never draw like this,” or “ I don’t know where to start or how to draw this” will only hold back your improvement. Drawing constantly and failing is the process of learning that is crucial for improvement. We cannot make any progress without making mistakes or trying.
I will now list some of the most important things to do when you want to improve that also helped me to draw better.
PRACTICE, PRACTICE, AND MORE PRACTICE
Yes, I know. It sounds boring, but how do you expect to get those skills without any practice? A lot of people say that they don’t have any particular talent for art and that they could never draw like other artists. They are missing that all artists are where they are now with just a lot of practice. Of course, some people are improving and adjusting a faster way but I can reassure you that we all started out drawing stick figures. What got us here is practice, and I mean a lot of it.
Now, this can also be tricky if you are a beginner and you don’t know what to focus on because if you are practicing drawing certain things wrong there is most likely to be a negative improvement as well. If you are planning to follow on steps and want to draw realistic portraits or even design your own characters there are a few things you must also learn so that you can polish the skills even furthermore. As practice is really important, knowledge of what are you trying to draw is also more important than you think.
SHAPES ARE IMPORTANT
-Everything in nature has its shape and everything you see can be broken into ones. Shapes are one of the most important parts when it comes to drawing, sculpting, or painting. Even the most complex things that you think are way too hard or out of your league can become easy once you break them into shapes. It will also help you to understand the structure of the subject as well. A good practice is just to grab your pen and paper and everything you see draw in circles, squares, triangles, etc. The shape is used to create two and three-dimensional objects, with that you can also practice some more complex things like shadows and lighting by also giving them shapes and breaking them into geometric structures.
The human body itself is made out of cubes, cylinders, spheres, cones… Just learning its structure and understanding how shapes work will save you lots of time and make you improve. There are also tons of videos on youtube that can help with that.
ANATOMY, BONES, AND MUSCLES
This is a more serious matter that we did in an art school which will help you a lot if you are interested in figures, realism, portraits, or character design.
Anatomy is important because if fundamentals and basics aren’t known it won’t be able for a person to improve or experiment with styles. It is crucial to know how our body works or a body of an animal that we are planning to draw, even if we do replicate it there are keen to be some parts done wrong as we didn’t notice the things we did wrong because knowledge about anatomy was thin. Now, I am not saying to study like a medical student all the bones, muscles and how they connect with each other, but practicing anatomy once or twice a week for an hour can be a good thing. Again, watching videos on youtube can be a huge help, or buying books about it and figuring it out yourself.
People who tend to do more stylized art, like me for example, tend to avoid anatomy with the excuse that they are doing illustrations and cartoons and that those don’t really need anatomy. First off, WRONG! If you are planning to draw stylized characters, you need to know what are you basing them on so that they don’t look like badly misplaced pieces on a toy with broken knees and elbows.
COLOR THEORY
An important thing for all of those who want to paint, be designers of any sort or even marketers is a color theory.
We learned that the color wheel is made out of primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. Now you don’t need to study the whole history of color unless it is something that interests you, the only thing you need is to understand the relationships between the colors and how they affect the perceiver.
Understanding what colors you can use takes a bit of time to learn and to build a habit and a sense so that you can start experimenting and using them on your own. However, there are some common combinations that can help you throughout the journey.
COMPLEMENTARY
If it helps you to understand better, just opening a color wheel and searching for a color right across the one you are using should be its complementary partner. (for example, if I use warm skin tone colors I will use a blue across the color wheel for shading.)
Complementary colors are used to give accents to one another
ANALOGOUS
colors are the 3 colors standing next to each other, usually of the same tone that are giving a relaxing, harmonious feeling to the drawing. One of the painters of the Impressionistic era, Claude Monet used this method to create his artworks. Selecting one color to be dominant, and the other two as an accent.
Split-Complementary
This is the best color theory for the starters to use and to practice as it is the easiest to maintain and to achieve big results.
This is a variation of the complementary color scheme. In addition to the dominant base color, there are two complementary adjacent colors.
Color also has its own psychology behind it and can be used to wake up certain emotions in us, but that’s going to be the talk for another time.
CHALLENGE YOUR SKILLS IN A DIFFERENT MEDIUM
For me personally, it has been a big glow-up when I switched from traditional to digital art, or when I started painting more often. Switching to a different medium can give you new struggles and new perspectives on art and the mistakes that you are making.
Switching from a pen to charcoal or to paintbrush, or even pastels is challenging and it helps your brain work and try to solve all new problems. All of us have preferred media and a little comfort zone that we enjoy doing in art, but switching it up and trying something new may be good for both our inspiration and skills. In the end, who knows, maybe you grew to like some of the media you try out.
In the end, don’t forget to treat yourself when you improve, and enjoy the process!
