Practice! You gotta do stuff a bunch in order to get good at it. Part of this mean making sure you hold the dicipline to regularly do it, but also to practice with intention. My art journey took me a long time in order to get to where i wanted to be, and along the way i learned how to learn better! Here's a few thoughts about that process, that might help you!
practice means getting your body used to doing what you want. This means repeatedly doing an action, and critiquing, and correcting your body's output. You have to learn how to tell your body what to do!
practice means reenforcing things you are good at, so you can do them better, but also exploring areas you are not as good at so they can be reenforced as well.
every piece meant for practice should have a technique/skill to focus on experimenting and improving.
successful practice requires an ecosystem of more than just the skill being used
Take care of your body so you can feel comfortable spending time drawing
take care of your mind so you can focus,learn and ingest the fruits of the labor. this means...
good sleep!
noticing and predicting your mind and its idiosycracies, in order to maintain focus.
practice takes time, and results should not be expected immedeatly.
you have to be intentional while practicing. Use references, or studies, or examples of what you want to accomplish.
why do you think they did it that way?
what does each line do to communicate.
how do these lines and colors work in relation to each other? What is the design language? This is where style lives
how could more detail be added with this style, how could more detail be simplified?
regularity can give a sense of anticipation and motivation
making practice a social activity can give it a reward, and make it more natural
Old Art
As part of practicing, its fun to look back at old art, and get a sense of reflection and progression. Thankfully i was able to recover my old deviantArt library before they turned into an absolute wasteland of squandered potential. Here's a mini gallery of some of it!
Whale and Petunias. (HHGTTG reference)
Some super old OC's of mine.
My very first attempt at 3d. I didnt quite have any idea what i was doing here.
some fanart. I used to do a lot of my drawing in flash!
Me trying to lean into my sketchy mess of a line art for a pirahna plant.
I've always felt my ability to do technical drawing was passable.
Sometimes, my doodling would take up the whole page.
Some early drawings of Jeran. Technically, the one where he weilds a shovel is from an early iteration of Landwalkers where i had Jeran in there as a placeholder character. He later became Juris!
Some More earlier figure drawings. .
Goat. This is is probably the start of me starting to like my own art, and taking more time with my doodles.
