Seek Art Critique for a Great Good

The idea of getting critique for your art can seem daunting. Having someone else look at what you’ve made feels scary! But it can be one of the most effective ways to fix mistakes and improve on your skills.

A common piece of art advice is to not practice alone, and to seek feedback as often as you can. And this is good advice! Having someone else skilled in art look at your practice can be a gigantic boost to your skills. But for many people just starting out, this can seem hard to do. Who do you ask? When is the right time?

This is one of those things where art school can prove useful: having access to skilled instructors with personalized advice can be very helpful in advancing your art skill. But don’t worry! This isn’t the only way to get critique. Many online art courses, free or paid, offer areas to get feedback on your studies, whether that is from the instructors or other students learning. So if you’re taking a course, start by looking there. “Study groups” are another term you can search for to find these places. On top of that, think about the kind of things that you want to draw. Fanart? Anime? Monsters? Furries? Chances are there are several communities of artists also learning to draw that kind of thing too, and you can likely find areas where artists help each other out through critique. Spend some time looking around! However, no matter where you get critique, there will be caveats.

Here’s the thing: communities of other beginner artists are likely to have others eager to help, but they might not have the right amount of experience to be effective with all of their critique. However, people of the same general skill level might be more skilled in one area that you’re not! Maybe you’re really skilled at constructive forms, but they know a lot more about shading and could still help you out. When seeking critique from communities of other artists, try to get multiple perspectives from different people and see what’s common between them. This can help you piece together tips that will really help you. Because many beginner artists, once they reach a certain point, will feel like they have mastered certain topics even if they still have much to learn. You will sometimes receive advice that isn’t going to be be helpful to you, and knowing how to filter that out is itself a skill you can build.

Even critique from a professional artist or instructor might not be right for you! Professionals will know a lot about how to build skills in the way that they’ve learned them, but everyone — EVERYONE — learns differently. I don’t just mean this to make you feel good. There are artists that learn through rough sketches as their foundation. There are those that learn with construction first. Some learn by painting forms instead of sketching, and sculpting out their art from there. Each of those starting points can change how you fundamentally think about art, and that influences what kind of advice can be useful to you.

Keep this in mind when you receive feedback. You might get critique that makes you feel bad about your art. Step back from the feedback for a bit, and come back to try to see how to apply that to your work. If their critique doesn’t make sense, it’s possible that they have a different perspective on how to learn that might not work for you. This is why it’s important to try to get multiple opinions when you’re starting out.

Also, sometimes people can be assholes for no reason and I’ve found that that can be the case in art. If you find someone like that, don’t take anything they say to heart. Find some other people to help. It’s easy to fall into a trap where you think that a big artist with a huge following knows how to help you, but don’t assume that popularity means skill. Don’t take shit from anyone.

You don’t need to seek critique for everything. But try to break away from the anxiety and give it a try once or twice, because it will help you out a lot more than you think! Especially early on in your practice. In a later video I’ll also go over how to give critique and how that can also help you improve your art skills! For now, look around a bit, and see if you can at least find a place where you could get critique, even if you’re not feeling ready for it yet. As always, I hope you have fun drawing this week, and I’ll see you back here real soon.