Your Art is not Getting Worse, Your Eye is Getting Better

Art skill plateaued? Frustrated? Well let’s fix it!

Something you’ll probably run in to, or maybe already have, is a time when you feel like your art is not improving with practice. Or maybe you even feel like it’s getting worse! It’s a feeling that really sucks and can make a lot of people demotivated with their art practice. But don’t worry! What’s happening is nothing like that, and can be explained with some reasoning about how you learn.

There’s a really popular way to explain this, using a graph of technical skill versus your perceptual skill at art. Both of these skills work together to help you make art, but often artists are only actively aware of the technical skill. Your perceptual skill is how well you’ve gotten at identifying art, seeing how it was made, and being able to see proper perspective, forms, and more. In other words, your two skills are “doing” and “seeing”. This applies outside of art too: any skill you learn has your knowledge vs practice at that skill.

So anyway! The graph. Here we have your progress over time going to the right, and going up is your ability. I’ve colored “doing” with this orange line, and “seeing” with the blue line. Just because these are the best colors, no bias. In art, these two skills work together as you learn, but they will get out of sync.

There will be moments where your technical skill, the “doing” line, gets better than your “seeing” skill. When this happens, you’ll feel pretty good – and you should! You’ve improved, you’re making good art, and it’s just a nice feeling to have.

But… the opposite happens just as much. It’s the frustrating feeling that everyone struggles with: your perceptual skill, your “seeing”, has surpassed your “doing”. Your standards have gotten higher, you start to notice more mistakes, and you feel like you’re stuck in art block. I get it! This feeling sucks! But remember this: you aren’t getting worse, and you aren’t stalling out. It’s just your perception’s turn to improve in skill. This happens passively in the background without you even trying. You need this to happen to get better at art! Be sure to remind yourself of this: when you feel stuck in your art progress, you’re not really stuck, you’re training your skill at “seeing”.

You’ll especially notice this if you’re returning to art after a bit of a break. During that time, your skill at seeing art has probably been improving, but you haven’t been practicing your technical skills. No problem, just means that it’s time to practice.

It’s a tough thought to master. But if you manage to catch this happening, you can power through it and focus your energy differently. It’s natural to get upset when it happens; the key is how you manage these emotions and reminding yourself that improvement is right around the corner.

Your art is a lot better than you think! You’ll keep improving quickly. Keep the practice up! You got this.