there’s always gonna be someone better than you. try to work less on comparing yourself to their work and instead learning from them and turning envy into a personal challenge for your own stuff. i know its hard, trust me.
the best way to get better at art is to practice. there is no special trick to improving, no secret method. practice makes perfect is a tired old saying that im sure you dont want to hear but unfortunately, its true.
draw as much as you are able to. i wont say draw every day!!! because i know that there are folks that dont have this sort of luxury, whether it be because of physical or mental restrictions, or simply because they dont have time. draw whenever you can and have the strength to. try not to be too upset if you miss a day or a week or even months. shit happens, do the best you are able to.
if you get bored or stuck, try another way. change mediums if you can, flip the canvas, do something weird that you wouldnt normally do. sometimes this is the best way to un-stick yourself from art block.
dont be afraid to ask for help. this is so important! its ok to ask for assistance from other artists you admire (given that they have time to give pointers.) even if asking for help is straight up asking for a redline of your work, its ok to ask for it. improvement doesnt come without outside assistance, more often than not.
references are 100% a legitimate resource. i’m not really sure where the idea came from that real artists dont use references, but its not true. every renaissance painter used references in the form of in-house models. disney artists use references of animals and people to correctly model and then correctly exaggerate their designs. you cant learn to draw the world around you without actually studying it. use references, even if its just google searching.
your art is not an island. you will pick up styles from other people like tape picks up pet hair. its inevitable, and its not something that should be seen as a negative. artists inspire other artists. use your discretion, and study what you like about another artist’s work. every artist’s style is a mashup of a hundred other artists. its ok, experiment.
youre not going to make masterpieces all the time. youre gonna suck more often than not. but youre putting effort into something you enjoy and in the process you are getting better, slowly but surely. you arent going to see your stuff improve overnight, be patient.
please be kind to yourself. you are making a unique form of artistic expression, regardless whether you see it that way or not. youre doing fine, please keep going and pat yourself on the back for getting this far.
Anonymous: Hello, Martina. In your perspective tutorial you mentioned people should exercise to fix common errors. Would it be possible for you to reference what types of exercises there are and how to practice them? Obviously, the type of exercise depends on the type of perspective but I'd like to know ALL the perspective exercises to practice.
Ok, the only way to exercise perspective is to draw perspective and backgrounds. The more you draw the better. You should try different approaches, making drawings both with rulers and without.
While you should definitely always use rulers in final works because it’ll show if your lines don’t reach the vanishing points it is a very good exercise to make sketches just by hand. I usually help myself with a sketched grid and then go from there. I do this an awful lot when working on storyboards for example
This is a good and fast tutorial that explains how to do this.
Anyway the problem with finding what kind of exercises to do lies pretty much in the fact that the first things we always draw are usually streets surrounded by box-like buildings. Those becomes boring and frankly do not help at all in my opinion. What you have to understand is that perspective is another tool in your box to help you narrate something, either you are doing illustration or comics or other kinds of art you are creating a mood and an atmosphere and the background of your image needs to have a personality as well. The best kind of exercise I found was given to me the first week of art school and I still do it now after several years:
You take a character, decide all her/his/their tastes, personality, job, all the most important facts and THEN you start to draw their bedroom, or another room in their house. without the character in it. EVERYTHING in that house need to make the viewer understand who is inhabiting it.
Something like: Single mom with 2 yo girl. She has a close relationship with her own mother, works two jobs.
And then you go from there.
Think about their situations, are they poor or rich, where would they live? In a house or in an apartment in the city? Would they have old furniture or new shiny design things? Are they neat or do they have clothes on the floor and things all over the room? Do they read a lot or they have just a few books on a shelf? What kind of bed would they have? What kind of room could they afford? What sort of personal items could be found around? What are their passions? Are they living in the present or is it a character from the past or from the future? In what country do they live? Those are all characters questions that can be translated visually in your image, you can delineate an entire personality just from the environment they live in.
If you don’t want to think about the characters you can take your favorite fictional character and go from there. Or with historical figures. Or you could invent some alternative universe or modern stetting. What would Elizabeth Bennet’s room look like if she lived now? And MrDarcy’s? What about their house after they marry? Which personality can be seen in which part of the house? For example I published a couple of exercises here with Katniss and Effie’s rooms
And then you go on, adding details, drawing furniture and adding stuff and giving your ambient a character. At least it’s a lot more entertaining than drawing boring boxes.
The rest of the various types of perspective don’t really matter, approach the exercise with a “I need to draw this thing, what kind of perspective works best” instead of the other way around “I need to exercise with 3 points perspective, what should I draw”, because that way it becomes a chore, and you’ll get bored really soon and start hating it. Even if you end up drawing 35 consecutive times a 2 point perspective and just once a 3 point perspective it doesn’t matter, what it matters is that you’re keeping doing it.
