*This story was originally published on teensinprint.com. Teens in Print is an inclusive WriteBoston program created to amplify the marginalized voices of eighth to twelfth grade Boston students.
Ever since I was five years old, drawing has been a big part of my life. As someone who grew up watching tons of films from the Japanese to American region, I’ve always been accustomed to trying to draw fable characters such as Goku, Naruto, Ichigo, Sonic, and more. Early on, I only did the art for the enjoyment factor. I didn’t take art seriously in the eighth grade due to push back I received. I had many doubts, Internal conflicts, and social norms that made me. Being an artist nowadays is a very difficult task, especially with all the expectations. I’m sure that many artists deal with the internal struggle of not feeling ready to draw. That is where I come in! I’ve come not only to help newer artists but even nonartists looking to get started. Being a fairly new artist myself I can relate.
In this article I’m going to be expressing my thoughts as a young, growing artist and expressing it to the rest of you lovely artists so we can all improve as an artist family!
Without further ado, here are the five ways you can improve your art!
- Focus on a single skill
Most people start off drawing by wanting to learn multiple skills at the same time, such as Perspective, Shading, and Anatomy drawings. However, most art skills are very hard to learn and even harder to master, so, it is easy to stress out your first time drawing. You may start to believe drawing isn’t for you. I had that same problem back in seventh grade which stopped me from drawing for a while. During eighth grade, my art teacher taught me that I could never become the best if I didn’t have patience and practice 100 times over. Humans aren’t perfect and we will never be. However, all of us can improve.
This is why I started doing geometric shape shading to start off and get an understanding of drawing firsthand. Geometric shape shading might seem low, but it is not all that hard to understand. It also gives you a good understanding of light values and adds depth to the artwork. A few months later I started perspective drawing and just kept building up my skills. In the end, I end up better than I expected due to my patience and sheer determination.
In this photo I’m trying to get an understanding of shading and its effect on the shape of objects. Even when I focus on just this, it was incredibly difficult so imagine if I tried to multitask on other stuff!
This is an old photo of me practicing hatching over and over again. It got pretty boring and my hand started to agitate after a while, but no one said drawing was an easy task. Your conviction and willingness to improve are what’s going to determine if you’ll go far. I’m sure that all of you can succeed if you just put in the effort and don’t give up!
2. Give yourself breaks
The human mind is very similar to most electronics we see nowadays, needing a break every now and then to stop it from overheating and eventually breaking. Unlike phones, which can be replaced, you only get one body so we should make it count. It is very important to always consider yourself first while drawing because we can burn ourselves out really quickly. In my own experience, I tried to rush out a drawing that was supposed to take a week in only a day — just to challenge myself and ended up giving up on it due to how much effort I was putting in. It caused me to draw less frequently because it reminded me of the failure of a drawing that I poured my heart into. That is when I started to realize that with most things in life, it is healthy to take a break from it. So why not art? Rather than trying to burn out a project daily, I was starting to form them on a weekly basis. This way I could not only make them look the best but give me enough time not to stress myself. I would never commend myself for not making exactly what I want since I could always learn from my mistakes.
I am the subject of this piece. It was around the time I started to pace myself in art, but I was still rushing things. I stopped using guidelines and learned many details just so I can get to the finished product. Knowing that you can produce good work but failing because of little missteps is utterly tragic.
In this piece of artwork, I made it around four days after I made the one above. The only major difference between the one above and this one is the level of patience put into it.
3. Explore your environment
As artists there will always be a time when we may run out of ideas, or need a fresh model to drain ideas from. Now, this may be difficult but sometimes it is just a means to look at stuff in nature for inspiration. Even if it is just a simple stick on the ground on a sunny day, that can be what you start drawing. For example, when I first started shading I didn’t really understand the concepts of shadow, especially on paper. I got frustrated and most of my artwork didn’t make much sense. However, I started to look around and see that we see shadows everywhere! I started basing artwork on things I see in real life like shapes, Inanimate objects, light sources, and more. Although I do specialize in shading, let’s talk about something I was horrible at, eyes! When I first started drawing eyes I, unfortunately, tried to copy anime and cartoons rather than going through the basics and all my eyes looked horrible. However, after I explored my surroundings and spoke with my art teachers, I was able to realize where I went wrong and changed techniques to make it look better. All in all, to become better at art (and most things in life) You can not only trust in your own understanding of things but add outside resources to it.
In this piece I was forced to think outside of the room I usually draw in and kind of explore my surroundings. Seeing stuff like rocks and other things in nature inspired me to draw this piece. I was able to copy the sharp edges that rocks have, which I would have never been able to do if I just used my own knowledge of space.
4. The art of “copying”
You see, there’s a quote from well-renowned artist Pablo Picasso that says “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” You may wonder, “Isn’t plagiarism a horrible thing that no one should do?” And you’d be right, To take someone else’s art and pass it off as yours isn’t the right thing to do on any level. Although what I’m talking about is using other artists to elevate your own art. As artists, it will be impossible for us to always have our own creative ideas and that’s ok! There have been generations of artists before us so we aren’t expected to create something completely new. So rather than just trying to borrow a piece of art, it is ok to outright steal the artist’s ideas and then use them to form your own. Back when I started doing geometric shading, I would be very accustomed to going to many posts on r/drawing and straight up just drawing it out. Some of them may turn out the same or some may not but it never matters because, in the end, it all was practice. However, I must emphasize this, it is never ok to straight up take someone else’s drawing and post it as your own, there are severe consequences for doing an atrocity.
In the art piece below I copied off another artist’s piece to make the one you see below. I originally felt embarrassed to do this since I thought it made you seem like a bad artist, but it is not like I was doing this with malicious intent. All this did was improve my artistic expertise and gave me a great art piece.
This is an art piece that I based on the apple of another famous artist known as Art of Wei ‘ on YouTube. It’s not pinpoint accurate but your art will never look exactly like someone else’s.
5. Change your artistic approach
Nobody said that being an artist was gonna be an easy path. It might be frustrating trying to get a project down or learning a new technique but the way you approach it may change your experience overall. Just like in real life, if you go into something with a negative mentality, you probably won’t get far. It comes with a positive mindset, even if you fail your objective you’ll be in a positive enough state to get something out of your mistake. I’ve had enough experiences where my mind has changed my artwork for the better. An example of this is during my first time doing perspective artwork. I found it highly difficult due to my inability to understand the space in artwork, especially when it is bent. It caused me to distance myself away from perspective drawing, which hindered my ability to excel well in my artwork. This caused me to go down a very dark path of just running away from things that are difficult. But after a while, I realized my idiocy and looked at every other aspect of my life, like how I don’t run away from difficult things so why now? And since then I’ve gotten fairly well at perspective drawing and have been doing other types of work such as two-point perspective, perspective off the page, and others.
In the photos below I have a group of different art pieces from worse mood to best. In the first one, I had no confidence in my shading and began to move around without control because I stopped caring about my piece. The shadows don’t correlate well with the piece. The thing is, just like in life, you need to believe or care about your art pieces for them to look good. You can’t magically expect them to look perfect. In the art below I really wanted my piece to look good so I started to add different shading techniques I’ve never really used before such as cross-hatching and the shadows made more sense than the previous one.
This is an art piece I put more effort and love into, so the shadowing made more sense. Because of that fact, it looks better than the previous one. The same with the pyramid itself. As a matter of fact, I actually had fun making that pyramid because shading it felt so fluid and clean.
Art never had a singular interpretation throughout all of history. As is beauty is “In the eyes of the beholder.” What one man considers to be worthless, could be another man’s desires. Art has so much depth behind itself from the history, the time, the effort and the dedication that went into making it. Artwork is just a representation of you in the visual form whether you mean to or not
I consider poorly made art to be perfect for someone else. You can never go wrong or right in the art unless you believe you did, which is something that is just unseen in fiction.
Being an artist has really changed me as a person. It has given me a different perspective when it comes to my journey in life. Art increases your analytic skill and develops your writing and thinking creatively. Not only that but the joy you get from finishing an art piece you’re proud of can’t be matched. Although visual arts may seem like an almost impossible skill to master, it is not impossible to learn.