Practice is not easy

Hi everyone! I thought I'd share what I've been working on for the past few days or rather reflecting on.

Sometimes people get stuck in a loop where they know they need to improve things, yet it's hard to see where it would be best to start from. Or they know exactly what needs to be improved, yet again it's difficult to know from which side it would be best to tackle this problem or where to find material to help along the way. Or even know which material is good which is bad?

Practice, practice, practice...we hear this a lot in all kinds of skills, from art to writing, speaking, or sports. Yet blindly practicing is not good. If I keep writing without reading my progress will be painfull and most likely I will not get better at all. Yet I get stuck in a loop where I begin practicing blindly over and over again.

If I want to get better at drawing I should draw more! And it's true but...

I sketched a bit for the past few day, I was drawing characters out of my mind and it was really difficult. Maybe it's just a bad day for me? Or maybe I was rushing to much again? Noo...

I forgot a very important thing, that practice is not just constantly drawing out of your mind and execting to improve. I have to pick up a book once in a while, watch an informative video and most importantly draw from life, observe what is around me and try to understand how stuff works.

I do feel like a fool for forgeting a thing so obvious over and over and over again. But I have noticed it is now just me, quite a lot of people try to improve doing the same thing over and over again, putting a lot of time into practice, yet not seeking out information that could speed up things so much more.

But I understand. A lot of time simply practising is simpler than seeking out information, it is hard to find a good book on skills you need to improve, it is hard to find references and informative videos that would help you so much.

That is me with drawing characters or hopefully that was me. I do create some good pieces once in a while, but I create so much more terrible pieces, this needs to improve. And the road to victory is actually studying and looking at my subject not just blindly drawing all the time. But finding good refence pictures, especially figure drawing poses is so hard.... And then I remembered this great site - the line of action !

Hopefully my road to improving once again starts here!

This site is really handy for learning to draw people, portraits, animals and I only found out they have a new feature - landspaces. I have been using this site before and I definately have seen a big improvement at my skills at the time. So here is how it works :

You have a bunch of refenece pictures that they give you and you have a time limit in which you have to draw certain things. The first few pictures are there to warm you up and you only see them for a few seconds (30 or 15). And the little skecthes of these look like this :

Just a bunch of stickmans to warm up. As you keep drawing you keep getting more and more time and you detail your drawing accordingly.

These were 5 minute sketches.

And this last one a 25 minute sketch.

These are not amazing sketches by far but I was really happy making them, I would never ever think of drawing poses like these on my own, I simply wouldn't know where things should go :D I am especially happy with the last one, because it the proportions look goood and that's rare for me :D

So that was a little upade on what I have been up to, if you like to draw, go take a look at that site! I sure will be using that site a lot for the next few days and we'll see, maybe my improvement will be very visible.

See you next time! When I will have a lot more drawing to show and maybe some common wisdom that I forgot to share :D