Getting Organized

The aim of this post is to help you organize your schedule when practicing. Even when learning technical details, there's so much to learn.still life studies, gesture drawings, live sketches, master studies and the list goes and it can be overwhelming that you just feel terrified of starting.

I've decided on where to start but there's so much to do.

If this is what is going through your head right now then this post is meant for you. Before I begin let me just share one piece of advice.

"You can do anything but you can't do everything"

This is so important and I personally fail to follow this. What I did was I planned a different exercise for each day thinking it would help me with all around improvement so I made schedules. Monday would be anatomy day, Tuesday would be still life day and so on but I soon found out I would procrastinate because of the wide variety of things I was doing and eventually lost interest. Also when you try to focus on so many things at once your progress slows down as well.. cause if you're practicing anatomy only one day a week you probably won't see any improvement even after 3 weeks have passed since basically you've only practiced 3 days.

So what I currently do is I focus on just one area , for example my human figures are great until the torso ends beyond that point it just looks wrong. So what I focus on is that particular area when doing anatomy studies. And until I get better at it or feel content about the progress I don't deviate to any other practice.

This is called Deliberate Practice. It is the best way to improve your skills. It requires you to focus on one area that you want to improve on, the more specific the area the more you'll see progress and then just working on it until you see results. What's IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER is just drawing everyday will not make it deliberate practice, that's iterative practice and what that does is build muscle memory but we need to go deeper than that. As soon as you finish a 30 min practice session go back and check on your drawings. See where it is you made a mistake. Compare your drawing to the reference . This link leads you to a well written post by Proko who tells you how to identify your mistakes and what to do with them. He speaks about human anatomy but you can use his tips and apply it to whichever field you're practicing in. However, if you feel like you still don't get it drop me a comment and I'll try and help you out by either linking you to the right resources or sharing my experience.

Summarizing up

Focus on the area that you want to improve on. Work on that specific area until you start seeing progress or feel happy with where you've reached. Consistency more important than quantity. If you can only do one sketch per day then make sure you do one practice sketch each day. Analyse. See where you went wrong. Ask yourself how you can fix it. Get Feedback. Post the study sketches onto active forums or with artists you know who can help you. Move onto the next area you want to work on as soon as you feel the progress satisfactory

Resources

Line of Action : This is a site where you can practice figure drawing, animal drawing, expressions, hands and feet. Its got an active forum where you'll find lots of people willing to help and share their experiences

Aaron Blaise : Want to learn how to draw animals. Learn from one of the industry experts. Aaron Blaise's youtube channel is filled with all kinds of tutorials to help solve all your problems

Monika Zagrobelna : Another inspiring artist who posts a lot of animal tutorials. Both real life animals and imaginary creatures

Proko : When it comes to human anatomy I haven't seen any other youtube channel that goes so in depth into understanding the figure

Well that's it for this post. Don't forget to give me feedback on my content so that I can get better and provide more value for you guys. Subscribe to this blog so that you don't miss a post!

#art #creativity #productivity #drawing #sketching #challenge #timemanagement #organization