Art Block 1: Art Motivation Q&A

It’s Q&A time! I’m calling this segment the art block. Like art… hour, but… (It’s a pun!)

I’m taking questions from people that have encountered trouble with motivation, are struggling with what to draw next, or just finding that space for art. Things we all encounter as artists. These will happen more regularly and I’ll post the form whenever I’m ready for another one. I wasn’t quite able to get to everyone, but there were some common themes in these. So if your question didn’t make it in, I hope you’ll watch too! You might get something out of it. Let’s dive right in.

Patchwork Weasel

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Patchwork Weasel writes:

Honestly, it’s almost always a time-management issue. And as I fail to put time into drawing, I feel upset at my own lack of progress.

This is a tricky loop to get out of. But everyone encounters this, not just at some point, but a lot and frequently as an artist. So you’re not alone, I guarantee it.

It’s hard for me to just say, “yeah, just do art because the more you do art, the more you’ll break out of that cycle”. Even if that is the thing that actually helps you. To stop worrying about progress. Just doing it over and over. But that’s not usually helpful in the short term.

A big thing to try to think about is that when you look at your progress, it’s very easy to think that you haven’t progressed anywhere because if you look at your drawings from a week ago, a month ago, sometimes even a year ago, you might be like, “oh, have I really done more since then?” And you absolutely have. It’s really hard to see that sometimes.

Maybe you weren’t practicing the things that were making your art different between some of those pieces, but you’ve practiced all sorts of other things in the meantime. It’s tough to see that sometimes until you’ve really gotten far away from it in certain circumstances.

I feel you a lot on the time management issue, though. Personally, I have a lot of work going on right now and between work and these videos, I actually don’t have a lot of time to draw myself, but I do intentionally set some time aside every day to still do it even if it’s just like five minutes. Try to convince yourself that you can spend that five minutes, and it doesn’t matter what you’re drawing. It can be simple circle, warm up exercises. It could be a small little study if you want to try that, but don’t feel like you have to do something difficult every day. Do something simple.

Over time, as you do that, you will start to get more comfortable with things and you will be able to do things that are a little more difficult each time. Then you can start to commit more time to specific things that you do want to draw and see some progress there.

Loek

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Loek says:

I absolutely love drawing and often was far impressed with what I make in the end, but now I am so afraid to not live up to the past after not drawing for a while. I’m a perfectionist by heart and it eats away at the joy I get from being creative.

So let’s see. You want to try to figure out what makes you feel like you are a perfectionist with drawing because we can always defeat that. We always tend to feel like we’re a perfectionist more than we are, especially with art because we want to get better, right? We want that art to look perfect. And then over time, it looks less perfect, but we we can get better.

Realizing that nothing will be perfect can kind of help defeat this a little bit, realizing that maybe you’re not actually a perfectionist. Maybe you do have some defects. And that’s fine. That’s how we improve and that’s how we figure out what we want to work on next. If you want to reapproach art and you know where you were and you want to get back to that, you’re going to be a little afraid of not being able to hit that level, right? Most of the time, though, when you get back into art, you’ll pick it back up pretty quickly. You might need a little bit of time to get back to it, depending on how long it’s been. But those skills, you never really lose them. You just need to warm them back up. That’s part of it.

Try to set aside some time, just small portions to draw a little bit. Don’t try to draw the original subjects you were drawing before. But you’ll get to it pretty quickly soon enough. When you’re just getting started and getting back to it, start with something small. Don’t try to do exactly what you were doing before, because you probably will get disappointed out of the gate. But you absolutely can get there and you’re not going to need to draw for years or whatever to get back to that point. Try doing some warm-ups. Try doing some small exercises, just a little bit.

Try doing this on paper that you’re intentionally going to throw away. Grab some scrap paper from somewhere. Just go ahead and get yourself ready to throw this away and draw something and then toss it. And then draw something again on another piece of paper and then toss it and draw something again… and if you actually actually like the thing that you drew, well, maybe keep that one. Once you’ve done enough of these and you can start to see what parts you feel good about in your art and what parts you want to work on, you can start to move on and and pick out what you want to practice. And you can get right back into that sketchbook at that point. It won’t take nearly as long as you think.

Pie

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From Pie:

I have a ton of ideas but don’t know how I should follow through with them. Where should I start when I start drawing and how do I focus on improving something from it?

You’ve probably thought of this yourself already, but you want to start with just one of those ideas. Go for it and try to convince yourself that you you’ll get to all the other ideas. It’s fine. If you still feel like you’re sort of in a decision paralysis with whatever ideas you want to try first, write them all down, put them all down on a sticky note or a piece of paper, scribble them out real fast. You can pause the video and do that right now if you want.

All right, you’re done? Okay. Now look at that note and draw the first thing on the list, just the first thing, that’s it. That’s the thing you’re gonna practice. If you wrote down shading, try a shading exercise. If you wrote down arms, try drawing some arms. Keep that note because you can look back at it and and draw the next thing. But for now, just draw the first thing. Don’t try to distract yourself by thinking that you have to learn all of these different things because maybe you need to know this one to know this other thing.. because you don’t. You can get by just by learning one thing at a time. That’s the most effective way to really practice a lot of this.

It’s very easy to get lost and distracted between all the things that you think you have to learn, but you really only need to practice one, maybe two things at a time. And you will absolutely get to all of them. I remember when I started, I wanted to practice general sketching, kinds of fluid poses and forms, but also I was like, oh, shoot, I need to learn anatomy, right? I also need to learn shading and I need to learn how to do paints and how to use digital programs and all this stuff. But I didn’t. I I’ve sort of learned a lot of those over time and I’ve got plenty more to learn, but I learned one thing at a time and I got to it all over time.

It’s nice when I look at that older art where I had one thing that I learned and went, oh, yeah, I actually got a lot of practice with it. And I got a little better at it and maybe my shading didn’t really improve, but hey, my fluidness and my poses got quite a lot better. And then maybe on a later time, my shading improves, but other things kind of stayed, and that’s fine. Something improved and that’s the thing you want to look for. So write those ideas down and do the first thing.

Fishystyxx

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Fishystyxx writes in:

Honestly, my main struggle is getting started/setting time aside to do art. I think it comes from me not knowing what to draw and having a hard time switching or starting tasks in general. Usually if i know EXACTLY what I’m going to do and how, I find stuff a lot easier to start. It’s that uncertainty that really gets me.

So this has been the case for me too, sometimes. I have a lot of things that I want to try and I’m not confident in drawing any of them, maybe. And I don’t know where to start, what to practice. Make a sticky note. Write down allllll the things you think you might want to try and then just do the first one. And if you look at that first one and go, oh, gosh, I don’t really want to do that. Do the second one. But do it.

If the idea of what to practice is sort of a vague notion of, “I don’t really know what I should be practicing”, then maybe it’s a good time to try something that you really don’t know about. So try finding an online lesson or course. There’s some free ones out there on both YouTube and Proko and all sorts of places. Something that you really don’t know anything about. Maybe you haven’t ever really thought about drawing landscapes before, but that could be a cool thing, right? And you’ll learn a lot of skills along the way doing that.

You might learn a lot about how paints mix digitally or traditionally. You might learn a lot about how things look far off in the distance if you’re doing landscapes or how certain colors might blend better to make a sky versus ones that you might normally expect. Alternatively, find some art that you like when browsing through socials and try some studies of them. Just look at their art, try drawing a little bit of that yourself, exactly as you see it. Not tracing, but drawing a study off to the side. Remember, now, if you’re studying this, it’s… not your work. You’re learning from it, and that’s perfectly okay. But try this with a few different pieces of art from different artists, so that you don’t accidentally take on someone else’s style, right? You want to try a bunch of different things.

And see if you can decompose other people’s art into how it was made. See if you can figure out what they did to make their lines, what they did with certain forms and see if you can spot where maybe there’s a sphere underneath this character here and there’s a cylindrical shape there and there’s some boxes here that kind of make up maybe the knees or something. See what they did, and if you can make those constructive shapes, or those different kinds of shading strategies, anything like that. Try it out.

Don’t pressure yourself at being perfect. Don’t pressure yourself in trying to do things the right way because there’s not really a single right way to do art. And even today, there’s many ways to learn art that we don’t really have documented, ways that might work for you. Your way that you learn art doesn’t have to be the way that everybody learns art. But what’s important is that you find a way to practice it in a way that fits you. And if you practice one skill and accidentally realize that you managed to practice a different one instead, hey, you still got some practice. You still learned a little bit. And you can use that to keep going.

ShUwUba

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ShUwUba (oh my god that name) says:

I am currently a B.A. C.S. major in university and I am beginning to question if it’s possible for me to continue being here. I have struggled through for a year and I realized that I actually wanted to do art instead. However, I don’t KNOW if I really want to do art, as in I don’t know if I’m capable of learning what I need before burning out or something disastrous like that. How could I find out?

So here’s the thing. The art industry is rather tough; it’s pretty competitive and there’s a lot to learn, and if you want to do art in university instead of computer science, you could. You could probably find some success with it, but it is a big risk and you’ll want to think about that one a lot. If I was in your shoes, honestly, I would probably stick with CS and do some art on the side. The art can help you get a little fulfillment in your life and a CS degree is honestly, some goob job security. You can still practice loads of art and see how you like it, you don’t have to wait as long as I did to try it out.

I have a CS degree. I, granted, was pretty interested in computers in university and made that my job for a long time, but I think back on, you know, whether I make the right decision when I did that? Because I really want to do art right now. I want to be a cool artist, right? But thinking back on it, I do not regret my choice of sticking with CS then. I enjoyed it at the time and it would have been fun to do art as well and I would have found some happiness too, but CS has helped me find a nice job and have a pretty decent life with that, and I have some room to do art on the side. (Little plug: I was on a friend’s podcast recently and I talk about this a lot! I’ll link it in the description and in these YouTube annotation thingies.)

Remember that art does not have to be your main job to be an artist. You can be a really skilled artist and not have art as your main career. Most of the artists that I know, really, it’s not their full-time job. The ones where it is their full-time job, hey, that’s great too. I’m kind of jealous of that in a way. But for you, don’t feel like you’re locked in because you’re not doing that for your degree. And if you do want to switch to doing another degree, again, you can. But it’s a change of some consequence and you want to be really sure you’re committed to that because it could frankly be expensive. If you’re uncertain, nothing wrong with sticking with CS. It’s pretty cool, actually. You can learn a bunch of things about how games, for example, are made and that’s an area that ends up being quite art heavy. And if you end up being the artsy person amongst your technical peers, you will go even farther.

SentoHvn

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SentoHvn writes:

I struggle picking up the pen and sketchbook and just drawing, sometimes I subconsciously realise I could be drawing while doing something else like watching YouTube but my brain just picks the easiest thing to do that gives me more dopamine and I keep denying art day after day.

Yeah, that happens a lot if you are of the type that gets distracted or procrastinates. That’s me too. The way that I ultimately ended up solving that ended up being an ADHD diagnosis and medication because… well, that’s who I am. But I can’t diagnose people. Separately from that: There are plenty of strategies that you can try to help motivate you to going to the pencil as a way to satisfy a craving instead of something to avoid. So what you want to try is thinking about ways to make drawing exciting for you.

Think about times where maybe you’ve drawn something and you got really excited about what it was because it looked really good or you managed to do something that you haven’t done before. Think about those times when you want to draw. I know that when I think about drawing, I always think about all the other things that I need to do first but in reality drawing is kind of an important thing to me and drawing is one of the things that I should do first because it helps my mental health and it actually helps me focus on other tasks.

And if I can convince myself that I can spend at least five, maybe ten minutes on drawing, then it’ll actually make the rest of my day better. But… just telling yourself that might work on some days, it might not work on others and you might need to try several strategies. Because I know it’s easy for me to say that and harder to do it. It’s a tough problem to solve. But you can help yourself by coming up with strategies like that. Maybe it’s writing reminders on a sticky note by your computer. Maybe it is putting something on your calendar to try to give yourself reminders in a place that you check often that you won’t sort of glaze over. And it’s key to remind yourself that the drawing helps you do the other stuff in the day. It isn’t a lower priority thing.

What is a lower priority thing is drawing for an extended period of time. It’s okay to have that lower in your list. But if you at least get yourself drawing a little bit as a high priority item in your head, you’ll help establish a pattern for yourself. On top of that try to make sure you’re not making yourself feel guilty for not drawing because that will make you not want to draw even more. If you haven’t drawn for a week or a month even, that’s okay. You can still go right to those five minutes of drawing and try it out. It’s a new you today.

Twilight

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Twilight sends in:

I just don’t feel like my drawings have volume. I also don’t know how make a good pose that doesn’t look stiff. I’m also very inconsistent on what kind of style I draw. I think its just because I’m new to drawing and haven’t got enough experience (I started 2 months ago).

Hey, if you started two months ago and this is your latest drawing, that’s pretty damn good. I don’t think mine started looking that cohesive then and you have a good sense of drawing backgrounds, for example. And you’ve tried a really tough angle with that one in particular. Finding a good pose that doesn’t look stiff is quite difficult. When you see people that do really dynamic looking poses, they have either been doing it a very long time, or they’re using reference images, and it’s totally okay to use references as long as you’re not, you know, straight up copying it and calling it your own work. There are tons of reference packs out there that you can buy, but also there are plenty of references where you can just Google image search for people doing leaps and jumps and flips and all that. It can help a lot.

When you’re using these references, try to force yourself to exaggerate them beyond what you think would be possible. Like if someone’s crouched down, draw them even further crouched, if you can. Because your brain naturally wants to stiffen things up and not make things dynamic. And you want to try to break yourself out of that because it will make things look more animated and alive. Even if it seems like it’s not a pose that would be possible, hey, it’s art, if it looks fun and you like it, it’s great. In general, studies are the thing that will help with this.

Something else you might want to practice if you want to keep trying some of these close perspective things is specifically references where the camera is really close to a subject, because those will also help you get that wide field of view which is a tough perspective challenge that you can probably benefit from. Honestly, though, if you are two months in and this is where you’re at, you’re doing pretty good. Keep it up.

Izaise

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From Izaise:

I always wanted to draw and now I want to more than ever, but I never know what to draw, sometimes I draw a lot in a single day and the next day I don’t know what to do, I’m trying to study perspective but it always looks weird and I don’t know what to do with it and I just think “Well, maybe I’m not made for this”, or sometimes even things like “It’s a lot of things to do I don’t think I can do it”.

So, for one perspective is very hard, and unfortunately, it’s the thing that you sort of learn first in drawing, right? Like if you want things to look realistic, you got to kind of get perspective down and it takes a lot of practice. This is sort of why courses like drawbox have gotten pretty popular. Because they teach basically just perspective up front and how to capture that with construction. Construction is a good way to tackle perspective by breaking things down into smaller shapes and building on top of that because you don’t have to get it all right with each stroke. You feel it out, see how that looks in perspective and give it a shot.

Studying perspective is where things will absolutely look wrong a lot, and it’s involved in pretty much every piece of art. When I often tell people, go and make bad art, the thing that often looks bad to people is perspective. You have to just keep practicing it and let it be bad sometimes and let the effect of your bad art being learning from it. So when you make something and it looks bad and you go, oh, yeah, the perspective feels wrong, try comparing it to a reference image that you might have used or a source or something.

See what’s different about it. Did you maybe draw an ear too far off to the side or the eyes misaligned? See what it is and try to do it again. Try it with smaller thumbnails so that you’re not spending too much time making little fixes. But just experiment a little bit with this. Maybe even make little marks with a different color pencil so that you can sort of grade your own work. And then try it again. Don’t make yourself commit too much to this. Just try a little bits and make little adjustments.

You absolutely can be cut out for art. It is just a skill that you learn – but it does feel really tough when you are having trouble with things like perspective because it’s one of the hardest skills and everyone has to learn it. And it makes you feel bad when you get it wrong, but if you can really cherish the fact that each time you get it wrong, you’ve learned just a little bit, you will start to feel a lot better about it.

PhilFox

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PhilFox says:

I feel like I’m taking way too long on some images, and am not sure how to relax more and allow myself to be messy and not focus too much on little details. This image took over 21 hours of actual pen to screen time!

All right, so first of all, looking at this picture, goddamn, that’s pretty dang good. I hope you’re proud of yourself for the quality of this because I can tell that you did spend a lot of time on it, this honestly does look like a 21 hour kind of thing. That actually seems like a pretty good time for something like this. There’s a lot of nice detail in not just the line work, but the shading. There’s a lot of differentiation in dark areas with a scene that’s just very moody. And you did that well.

But you’re not here for compliments. You’re here to figure out how to do this faster, right? So here’s my suggestion. Take this or any other piece that you’ve done recently where you feel like you’ve spent a bunch of time. Give yourself maybe 10 or 20 minutes and do a quick resketch using your own art as a study – but set the time limit. Maybe not even the whole thing. Maybe just a small portion of it or just a character or something. Try to see how much you can draw in just that span of time. Normally, you don’t want to study your own art because you know, you’re not necessarily improving on it that much because you’re studying your own skills. But if you want to improve on speed, this might actually be a way the way to go about it.

If you give yourself a time limit and you just do the sketch or maybe just the line work, or maybe some light coloring and shading, see how far you can get with it. When you’re done, does it look nice? Let it be messy. You can tell yourself that you’re gonna throw this away when you’re done. If you decide you like it later and you want to share it, that’s fine, but for now it’s a throwaway strategy to help you learn not to make a finished piece. A lot of times things that you might feel look incomplete or even wrong might actually look really good to other folks. You might notice that on social media, a lot of folks just post sketches a lot of the time. And sketches themselves have a nice quality to them because they’re nice and messy and free and lively as opposed to being cleaned up.

So there’s some positive qualities to having unclean, unfinished artwork. I’ve seen plenty of pieces of art where it looks like a super clean rendering. But if you zoom in, you actually do see a real sketchiness to it, a real messiness, and it is amazing. Not only does that take less time, but sometimes it can even help preserve some of the life of a drawing. So you can use that to your own advantage to motivate yourself to actually stopping work a little earlier.

Now, granted, if you try this and you decide you do still want to finish things up and you do want to spend the time, that’s fantastic. Do that. But if you do want to help convince yourself to do things more quickly, give yourself time limits and try some studies and see where you go. Get yourself used to a messiness, a sketchiness. Because it can be pretty fun.

This question was kind of fun for me because I actually come from the opposite angle where I started to learn art from the aspect of speed as opposed to quality. And I actually have trouble spending a lot of time on a drawing because I want to just do things fast. I want to have a fast sketch. I want to color it quickly. I want to do quick shading. And I want sort of that messiness to it. But sometimes I actually want the quality and I have trouble actually focusing on that for a long time. So it’s interesting to have this from the other angle.

Saphy

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Saphy writes:

Drawing sometimes feels like a monumental task for me. One of my biggest blocks that prevents me from drawing is the fear of failure- as in I’ll be unhappy with the result or with my skill level. Do you have any tips for getting over these and drawing anyways?

I did a video about this a good bit ago where there’s sort of a variance in your ability to see versus make art, and at any given time chances are they’re not going to be equal. There will be moments where your ability to create art has actually gone past your ability to see good art, and you’ll feel like all your art looks fantastic, but then those will flip over over time and you’ll look back at your art and you’ll be like, oh no, that didn’t actually look that good. It just means that you got better. That’s how we change.

And it’s actually good for that to happen in a way because it drives us to do better. And on that flip it helps us have our happy moments. But it also helps us have our moments where we want to improve. It’s never failure in art. Try to get yourself out of the idea of making bad art is a failure. It’s just a part of how you learn. I’ve mentioned this in the past, but I’ve seen the private sketchbooks of some artists that I have looked up to and that I think make really great art. And some of their recent sketches where they’re doing warm-ups like look kinda bad – and I think that’s that’s amazing to see because it shows that even someone with so much skill still has to warm up for the day, still has to practice. (To those artists: this is a compliment: don’t take that the wrong way! You have the confidence to practice and improve and do great things.)

You can’t most of the time just draw something perfect right up front. It’s a continuous learning process both on a daily level and long term. If you do want to make something and actually get it ready to share intentionally, try starting with a lot of thumbnails, draw it a lot at a very small size so that you can’t spend too much time on it. And then find one that you feel looks good. Expect that you’ll probably have to do five or six of these before you find a little thumbnail that starts to look like something nice. But don’t feel like you have to start each piece of art as a thing that you’re going to share with others. A lot of art is just going to be art for you or art that you’re using to practice. And that’s it. I think there’s a lot of fun in learning to draw and I love to look through my sketchbook and see my my bad pieces and remember how I learned from them. They all contribute to your skill.

Thank you all for your questions! I have a lot of fun doing these. I’m going to aim to do these a lot more regularly along with my usual stuff. See ya for the next!