how to get good

Many people have the raw capability to become quite good artists but just don't, and it is a complex subject that has almost nothing to do with how bad you are in your first couple months of studying drawing.

Most people who fail to learn to draw, as well as people who fail to become great, have bad mindsets, and bad approaches to learning and artistic growth. They engage in magical thinking, they take bad advice from others, and are imbalanced artistically.

You've got the study guy who never makes original art, the original art guy who never studies the fundamentals, people who fear making bad art and failure, the sketch guy who never finishes anything, dunning kruger guys who try to learn something they're not ready for, and people who refuse to learn to think for themselves, people who refuse to learn to realize things on their own and need to have everything told to them... All these people are wasting so much potential.

Autodidactic learning requires self-awareness and balance. Most people, particularly beginners, are awful at this. This is why people who get mentored or taught directly improve much faster. Mentors can balance you out.

I can harp all day on the issues of self-awareness. People skip a kind of practice because they think they already can do it sufficiently (they can't). They skip stuff because it seems tedious and unnecessary (it's actually incredibly useful). They try to learn things they think they're ready for and that's a good use of their time (it isn't). They think they are still learning from some kind of practice they're doing (they aren't and they need to alter how they practice).

Magical thinking is particularly egregious. It is my own use of the term. It's when you think you'll "just" get better as long as you draw enough. You'll "just" improve as long as you do a study, or a copy, or copy anatomy diagrams.

No. No. No. "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."

This quote is worth it's weight in gold. Self-awareness and self-understanding is the #1 thing you must cultivate. You need to figure out what you can't do, what you can do, what you're bad at, where your knowledge of what you draw is lacking. When you know, you're able to do the work, analysis, or searching to identify a solution, or the knowledge to fill in a single gap and that clears away your misconception. Then you practice that knowledge or solution until it's no longer hard to do well.

You start with the most basic forms of knowledge and take inventory of yourself. For subject matter knowledge, that starts with the ability to draw something from the front and from the side view, unless the concept of front and side doesn't apply. 3/4 views come after. Then birds eye and worms eye (optional). (3/4 views comes after because it applies knowledge of the side and front view. This is something everybody good at drawing knows, but what beginners underestimate the importance of).

The solutions you use should fix a single issue in your drawing at a time and are based on your understanding of what is wrong.

You think to yourself "I don't really know how high the eyes should be on the face, or this height i've been drawing them at looks wrong." Okay, go analyze resources and references and find out where you should put them instead. Be specific! (e.g. The knowledge you need here is that eyes are placed at the middle of the head in real life on average, and goes lower for younger characters and stylized drawings. For anime drawings, often the eye shapes intersect with this line, or go completely under it, depending on the character design. You need to find out what works for you). And then practice it until it's no longer hard to do well.

"Oh, I don't really know how to draw highlights or the details of the eye all that well, I'm just like winging it every time." Okay, go do the same analysis, find out how to do it better, and then practice it until it's no longer hard to do well.

Tutorials, and books, can be good to find solutions to your problems. NOTE: Use them to solve issues you're aware of! Don't just go into it with no intent or reasoning.

Watch or read, and take notes and screenshots of everything that wasn't already fully apparent to you and that seems like it will solve issues of yours. One at a time, incorporate the information and solutions/techniques into your work. We use the same process as I've mentioned above, getting to the point eventually that it's no longer hard to do well. And for that reason, this takes a lot of practice to internalize a full tutorial. Many video tutorials for example on youtube have tooooo much information and you should just make out with a bandit after you've found a couple things to work on and then go back to practicing.

Eventually, you move on to more abstract ideas. You notice the posture of the characters you draw is weird, or they seem to be standing weird. You go to study action line and natural posture of characters. You treat each pose as it's individual subject, and you practice each until it's no longer hard to do well.

What do I mean by "practice until it's no longer hard to do well?" Day one, you learn something new and you're able to apply it to make your drawing better. Great. But it's still hard. We're not done. Tomorrow, we practice it again. But, we start drawing and we realize we've forgotten a bit. We re-learn and practice more.

The next day we don't practice it, but we come back to it a couple days later. We've retained mostly all of it, but it's still a little difficult and we have some relearning to do. A couple days later we try to do it again, and finally we've noticed we're doing it quite well and with little effort. This is maybe the 8th day after we first learned it.

This is spaced practice. You can look it up on the internet if you want, and it maximizes long-term improvement in exchange for more effort and difficulty in the short-term. The brain attaches and prioritizes experience that is done with high effort, although that is just one of the theories as to why spaced practice works better.

In other words, don't do a bunch of practice on a solution one day and then forget about it. Do maybe 10-15 minutes of practice on a single idea at a time, then do something else. Then come back to that thing, either later in the day, or on another day. Since you switch around what you're doing more, you don't allow yourself to zone out and get used to something in the short-term (we want to avoid this). Massed practice, where you grind a single, specific idea/solution for a long period of time is inefficient and also not really fun imo. Stop. Doing. It. 45 minutes at a time for something is probably the upper limit here, particularly for very complex solutions. It will be shorter for something inherently easier or smaller in scope. You want to switch to practicing something else when something is noticeably starting to bore you and you're just starting to follow the rhythm of what you're doing rather than being effortful and requiring your attention.

As you can probably guess if you've following everything so far, the learning and improvement process is not about learning to do things. It's about becoming able to do things easily, which builds up from spaced practice and also the organic usage of your skillset in organic situations (situations that aren't the training context you learned it in). Expertise comes about from piling on as much automatized things, understanding, and skill as possible. That piling up is unconscious, and it happens to us if we put in the right practice.

We need to practice until effortlessness because your mind only has room for a couple items that take effort. That is the limit of your cognitive capacity, your cognitive load limit. Great artists are supported behind the scenes by things they learned to do effortlessly. The mind has a tremendous ability to make use of skill that has been learned to effortlessness and interwoven into their drawing process.

And of course, all of what I've said so far is the cure to magical thinking. Practical thinking with the highest level of self-awareness that you can muster.
What are you bad at?
What are you trying to get out of your practice?
What are you trying to get better at,
and How are you intending to make that improvement happen?

The person who truly wastes their time is not the person who sits around doing nothing, it's the person that makes themselves busy without a sense of intent and understanding of why they're doing the things they do.

When you watch tutorials, instructional material, you need to identify concretely what you will try out to make your drawings better, how, and why. You keep a list of this handy, and you stop gouging out on learning material if you have 5 or more things to try. If you have 5 things to improve on, you don't need more information. You are not being productive by watching or reading more material. It's okay to waste time, we're all human after all, but you must not delude yourself into thinking you're spending your time wisely when you really aren't. (NOTE: This is almost a complete re-iteration of the information I wrote about using tutorials previously. Woops.).

If you're high-intermediate or a low-advanced artist reading this, much of this also applies to you, but you also face unique issues that people below your level can't relate with. Many of those issues aren't addressed by most educational material out there. Art instructors, by large, don't teach to the public with you as the intended audience.

What the high-intermediate or low-advanced artist is threatened by is boredom, lack of challenge, and lack of meaning. If you want to practice effectively, you need to practice in a way that sets your brain on fire once more.

Copying art, for example, makes me fall asleep. Absolute bore. Advanced artists need to re-ignite their mind. Here are some ways to do so.
1. Draw the art or reference from another angle.
2. Make your drawing better than the original. Change things around. Synthesize and make use of your skillset and knowledge when you draw, don't just draw what you see.
3. Analyze the hell out of your ref and create your ideas on why it's good.
4. Draw the reference from memory.
5. Make original art using the ref as inspiration.
6. Do studies where you change significant portions of the reference and insert your taste and intent into it.

As an advanced artist, if your practice is easy, unstimulating, you are only going to bore yourself and experience little to no improvement from it. This is why, I think, many of you stop doing practice and focus mainly on making art. Because, many practice methods out there are just so boring and unstimulating for you. But you can still practice. You just need to go beyond, towards genuinely challenging yourself and towards a direction that sets your mind alight. Other than that, study high-level thinking, expand your comfort zone, explore art you've never done before, and make more art. If you are not comfortable in your skin as an artist, make more art. And you must believe that you can become even better, that you're not at your limit. You can't give up on yourself.

To end off back at the original statements of this entire discussion, you need balance. A healthy balance looks something like this, in no particular order. A little bit of everything. At times, you will become imbalanced. That's okay. Shift back to balance. It's a back and forth.

1a. Make original art. If you're bad, make a lot of bad original art and get used to being bad. If you're good at art, get used to being bad again and draw what you're bad at. You cannot avoid this and you should not fear failure. Make art using references. Make art using little reference or from imagination, too. Make at least a little bit of original art every week. You're an artist, or an illustrator, or a designer, and it's not in balance to avoid doing what it is you're meant to do. Sometimes, you won't do any, but I urge you to return to it when you've gone astray. You must make art to learn about yourself and become comfortable in your skin as an artist. It cannot be skipped and should not be delayed to a point of higher skill.

1b. Briefly, I will discuss the subject of learning to make original artwork. Starting out as a beginner with no artistic experience, you're level zero. No real deep understanding of how things should look, and no real understanding of how other artists do things. Original artwork, plainly speaking, is just art that passes through you as a filter. It shows the way you like to interpret the things you see, the ways you like to solve specific drawing problems. Your particular aesthetic interests and whatnot. As a beginner, you can make original artwork by combining two different artist's styles together and trying to find a blend. By using reference and putting your interpretation and spin on it. Or you can combine how you know things to look with small things you see other artists doing that you want to try out. Either way, start slow, be patient with yourself, and don't expect miracles to happen over night. Buckle in.

2. Do quick sketch drawings from photographs of figures, in 30 seconds/1 minute if you're quite good. 2-3 minutes if you're still learning. Keeps the mind sharp and agile. A fast, agile mind and hand can accomplish more. 30 minutes practice a day max, this is for staying fast and practicing thinking fast more than learning anything else. If your observational drawing ability is weak, focus on that before doing this. Do this 2-3 times a week or so, or more if you find it helpful to do so.

3. Draw from photographs or from life, method or drawing style doesn't matter. Get inspired by things you've never seen before. Don't rely on experiencing the visuals of the world through the eyes of other artists. If you have to always rely on other artists interpreting reality for you, that's a weakness. High level artists, do this in a way that doesn't bore you.

4. Traditional 2d-shape focused observational drawing, from photographs or artwork, is useful for developing your observational abilities (some intuition for what looks good and muscle memory can also develop from it over time). Though I want to stress that it is not a effective practice for directly improving your original art, because the kind of thinking used is too far separated from real art making mental processes. These should take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours per drawing, though people have different ideas on how long you should do these for. Less important for high-intermediate and not really important at all for low-advanced artists or higher. If you can't draw what you see, it's harder to make clear analysis of it, which is why developing observational abilities is pretty much the first thing people sink time into. Note, usage of form-drawing and perspective knowledge can come into play for higher skilled artists, and so it's not necessarily restricted to 2-D thinking.

5a. Meaning-focused studies of photographs and artwork. Not copies. These should be done in order to inform the original art you want to make. This can incredibly useful before you want to draw something, or after you've identified some issues with your art, and sometimes even while you're still working on an original artwork. Analyze your reference, and put your analysis on the page with your drawings. See a study of mine, this is what I'm talking about, you don't need to do it exactly like me but you should focus on analysis and understanding the meaning behind what you see: https://i.imgur.com/rEkSW02.jpg

5b. Meaning-focused copies that focus on style. Try to imagine their work process, mindset, and mimic it. Make your work look like theirs. Understand the way their work feels and try to find out how it connects directly to the way they draw different things.

Anyways, style is, to put it briefly, the minimization and exaggeration of reality, and the application or lack of application of particular fundamentals (i.e. lighting). You need to connect the dots and understand the stylistic recipe that a artist uses if you want to really start to draw like them. How do their drawings differ from reality. How do their drawings differ from how you draw and what you know. When you figure out their recipe, or an ingredient of their work, it's another possible ingredient for shaping your style. Do this kind of study when you feel like it, like when you're inspired by an artist's artwork or w/e. Or when you're still dissatisfied with the stylistic aspects of your work, such as when your original art style is still developing.

6. Working on practicing solutions to your weaknesses and knowledge gaps as discussed previously. This is more abstract in nature and connects back with the other areas on this numbered list, and threads through almost every activity that you do with the intent to practice and improve. Find where to fit it in.

7. Study the fundamentals mindfully and do not crowd out your other activities completely with it. Perspective (both formal linear perspective and the organic construction of objects with basic forms), accurate 2D shape drawing methods (observational drawing), anatomy and proportions, color/light, composition/shape design, design thinking/storytelling. I won't tell you what to learn from and where because it's based on your goals, but you should work around your immediate needs and interests. Learn color and light only if you have a serious intention to start making colored works. Learn things about composition when it's the biggest issue with your work. Don't learn intricate anatomy endlessly, learn the specific anatomy details that you want to learn to draw and that you need to make your art. This is what I mean.

Take your time learning these fundamentals, don't be in a rush, it will take way longer than you think it will, and focus on what's relevant for you right now. Study of fundamentals alone will not make you good at them, nor will doing so make you a good artist. Fundamental skills get improved and practiced incidentally as well, for example, whenever you try to draw something from a different angle you see it in or when you analyze the form of what you see.

As you can see, there's a lot here. There's a lot to balance. This is why it takes a long time to become a good artist for most people, and is also why many artists stagnate. Because they are imbalanced. You can't do just one thing and expect good results. Look at art school curriculum - there is a reason art students do a variety of things in one day.

Good mindsets, and a good blend of art activities, is not an easy thing for most people to figure out or carry out on their own. Magical thinking persists in some people despite them being pretty okay at art. When you're in a good environment, a lot of this stuff can be observed in those around you, but some things are not really talked about enough, such as cultivating intent in what you do.

If you want to learn from what I've written in this document, I urge you to take a piece of paper and write down what you remember from this discussion. Consider your own artistic history, too. What have you done, what have you done. What speaks to you. What is your opinion of what I've stated. Really write out your thoughts and consider what I've written. Then give this another read the next day, and consider what you're going to do differently from now on.

P.S. I'm sorry this isn't a short document. But if this could have been explained meaningfully and persuasively in shorter form, I probably wouldn't have needed to write this myself and more people wouldn't fail or stagnate.