Not giving up. Now that helped me improve a lot. You start out an amateur, so of course you will have good days and bad days. There’s a different way to phrase “not giving up”: keep failing.
I have heaps of drawings that I want to rip apart and never look at again. Today that happened again. I wanted to draw some fairies and horses for my sister. My first attempt was a mess.
Okay, I thought, let’s try again. The second time I drew slowly, using my first sketch as an example. I looked at horse pictures and tried out ideas on a different page.
Failed again.
I ripped the pages out of my sketchbook. I’ll draw something else. At least I tried, right?
But I realized what I was telling myself: give up, just draw something easier. I liked the idea of elves playing with horses. Why did my drawings fail? I can draw horses. I can draw figures. So why couldn’t I draw figures on horses?
I looked at the sketches… the horses were fine. The elves were too big, and their body language was weird… Hey, I could draw the elves a bit smaller. I acted out the poses of the elves. Oh, this kind of pose feels more natural. Maybe add trees to give it a composition?
Okay, one last attempt. And this time, I was happy with the result.
The idea was the same. Heck, it was almost identical to my first sketch. It just looked ten times better. I took the time to think about my previous drawing, decided what wasn’t working and drew it again without the early mistakes. Practice makes perfect, right? Well… If I had drawn it fifteen times without stopping to think why it came out ugly, I would have failed over and over again.
This is the kind of failure that teaches me the most. It always comes down to “why”. Why did I fail? Not because I’m a bad drawer. Not because it’s too difficult. No, just small parts: change the gesture, ditch the dogs and fix the proportions.
And just like that, I improved from this to that in one evening:
I love this quote:
“If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.” – Thomas Watson
That’s exactly what I did! I failed and failed again, and then my third attempt was a success. Three times is the charm 🙂
If it isn’t working, try again. If it still doesn’t work: find out why. Ask in a critique forum, compare to a tutorial, or just pause and think. If you find the answer, you’ll be able to fix it.
What if you can’t figure out what’s wrong? Move on to the next drawing. As you grow as an artist, you will learn. The answers will come to you. Next year this could be the “before” picture of your improvement chart! 🙂
Are you going to give today’s drawing a second pass? Happy drawing!
– Iris