MagneticScrolls Sketchbook - Starting from the beginning again

[MagneticScrolls]

Truth talk now. Forget the 'grind' for a moment.

I suspect you are impatient to improve, stressed about doing so and think you must rush in order to beat some clock and meet some imaginary success in the future. The only problem with this is, everything. The act of creativity happens now, not in some future.. If you cannot even enjoy the simple process of sketching for fun, without obsessing over how it turns out, you're heading fast towards burnout and quitting the whole thing, or years of inefficient grinding.

Stop rushing everything. Rushing only makes you inefficient and less able to hold onto learning.

Stop grinding studies , purely for the sake of it alone. Even one careful, slow, considered patient study is better than 50 stressed  rushed ones. I have seen people do thousands of studies of the same thing year in and out with little improvement. it's quite common. volume is no substitute if quality of study isn't there.

Practice drawing and sketching for FUN every day for a short time with NO judgements. Watch your thoughts. If they start trying to be harshly critical, acknowledge them but then just ignore them. When a drawing is done, let it alone. It's done, it's not perfect, it's finished. Repeat this daily until you loosen up and start enjoying the ACTUAL process. If you give importance and focus on the frustration everytime, you are actually training yourself to feel frustrated with art! It's natural to be frustrated with not producing what you envisioned, and this will diminish as you get better, but if you don't address this attitude and mental grinder loop you are in now, it will become abigger issue in the future guaranteed. I have seen too many people esp on this forum locked for many many years in this cycle of desperation driven practice and it doesn't always end well as the habit gets harder and harder to break the more you let it be in control.

There are multiple reasons why I want to get better at this faster. One of the biggest is the fact that I've been at this for so long and it still feels as if I have very, very little control over the outcome of my drawings.
I'm going to try to make it a habit to have fun with this at least once a day.

The process of art is very important, but it's overlooked because everyone including artists gets so focused on the outcome. Take time to slow down and do your studies well. Amit is right. You're in a very common place for artists, and it'll be good to check some of your tendencies now rather than later.

So "How to Draw" wasn't the first perspective book I've looked at, but I still hit a brick wall where it really got into ellipses.  I beat my head over it so hard, not letting myself do much else until I got through it, and was so miserable that I gave up drawing for a while!  

I wouldn't recommend that approach!

Sometimes if something is a brick wall, try changing tack.  This is what I did when I came back to art.
Try the free lessons on drawabox for a while (more perspective), or ctrlpaint (the traditional drawing lessons are awesome), or proko (for figure or anatomy), or loomis, or whatever.

Once you've had some space and different practice, come back to the thing that was vexing you.  A lot of the perspective stuff from How to Draw actually started making more sense to me when I took a break from it and started studying anatomy and drawing still lifes!  

On using a ruler: I would use a ruler if a perspective exercise was giving me problems. Once I understood the exercise, I'd switch back to freehand.

In any case, keep it up.  It does get easier.  Or rather, you will get better!

Fair enough, I have seem to have hit a brick wall with perspective. I obsess over it because I have heard perspective is the key to everything in drawing; if you can draw boxes properly, it is much easier to draw everything else properly.

Well I was using a ruler to draw out the grids. Not sure where else to use it. The organic shapes seem to be giving me trouble when I need to distort them to the 3 dimensional portion.

Also, don't stress if you don't progress up the learning curve in a nice efficient manner.  It's not a smooth progression.  

Learning to learn art is also a skill.  

It's okay if you "spent to much time on this" at the beginning, or "too little time on that," or "tried way to hard to do stuff that was beyond your skills," or whatever.  We've all done it.

Well sometimes I feel like it takes me significantly longer to do things than it does for other people (even those of my skill level). I just wonder if I'm not pushing myself hard enough or if I'm going in the right direction.



Attempted some more of Peter Han's exercises.









Using 1000 frames of Hitchcock as my source for these images.

I've tried using thumbnails as a general guide for how to draw the portrait. However it takes a ton of time just to do one even remotely recognizable. A lot of the portraits I'm drawing really don't look 3 dimesional no matter how much time I pour into them. They're flat and inaccurate. I often fail to capture the look of the person or the emotion they're expressing.