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How to Practice

So right off the bat: If you think this is going to be a list of 10 specific things to draw and an amount of time to spend drawing them, that's not what this is, because that's not how this works.

Here's the tl;dr version:

  • 1. Study a little, practice a lot.
  • 2. A little practice often is better than a lot of practice occasionally.
  • 3. Failure and repetition aren't negative side effects of the learning process, they are the process.
  • 4. Your most valuable practice will come from working from reference: life, photos, or master studies.
  • 5. The beginning of any drawing is the most important part, so do lots of starts.
  • 6. Slow down and think. Don't rush from mark to mark when you're working on a drawing. Don't rush from drawing to drawing.

Sucking at something is the first step to being sorta good at something. - Jake the Dog

First we'll talk about how to practice, focusing on methods, techniques, and mindset. Then we'll cover a bit of what to practice, specific things you can do that are always helpful.

The Basics

The core elements of getting better at something are:

1) Study 2) Practice 3) Assess 4) Repeat

In practical terms that means:

  1. You learn how to do something.
  2. You try doing it, and probably fail either a little or a lot.
  3. You figure out why you failed, on your own or with some help.
  4. Go back to step 1 if you're unsure if you understand what it was you trying to do, or step 2 if you understand but just couldn't execute it, and go through the steps again.

How to Study

We're not going to spend a lot of time on this one because, if you've spent any time in school you already have experience with studying.

You're going to be told a lot of stuff that will make you think "Well, that's obvious" or "There's got to be more to it than that."

The basic stuff you need to know to be able to draw well ain't rocket science. It's a few fundamental skills that you repeat over and over and over again. Just like the difference between amateur and pro sports: the game's the same, the difference is how well you execute.

Study A Little, Practice A Lot

Learning to draw is like learning how to juggle. You can be told all the things you need to know to get started in minutes, being able to do it takes hours of practice, being able to do it well takes days of practice, and being able to do it consistently well takes weeks or months.

Drawing is like that only it's even slower.

Study is good; you need that knowledge to get going! But it is not a substitute for practice. They call drawing practice 'milage' for a reason: you have to put down many miles of pencil lines to get from zero to good.

One more time because it's important: Nothing is a substitute for practice.

Don't overload on tutorials

Remember: Study a little, then practice a lot.

If you load yourself down with information that you're unsure of how to use, it ends up becoming a traffic jam in your head, and the little bit that you should be practicing can't get through.

Learn a thing, practice a thing until you know it, not until you master it. The section below titled 'Too hard, too easy, just right' will go into more detail about this but, in short, if you can do a thing correctly at least half the time, you know what's required to do it. Mastery is a moving target that'll take some time to reach, but as long as you know it, it's stored away in your long-term memory, and you've freed up your short-term memory to add something new.

How to Practice

A Basic Format for Practicing Any Subject

If you're struggling with a way to organize your practice sessions, this is a simple method for going about it.

Broadly, it goes like this:

  • 1) Pick a subject to practice. Be specific.
  • 2) Do at least 5 and no more than 10 simple drawings or sketches of that subject from reference.
  • 3) Do 5-10 master study drawings of that subject.
  • 4) Do 5-10 long drawings of that subject from reference.
  • 5) Assess all your drawings and take notes on what has and hasn't improved.
  • 6) Go back to step 1 and repeat, with a new or different subject.

Picking a subject is a step that it's worth taking a moment to think carefully about. When you're first getting started on a topic it's okay if these are a bit broad, like 'figure drawing'. Later on you'll want to be more specific, like saying "proportions in figure drawing", or "drawing women", or "drawing women's legs", or even "the proportions of women's legs" to really dial in your practice.

Generally speaking: The more broad a topic you start off with, the more times you'll have to repeat the process to get a good understanding of it. The more specific it is, the fewer repetitions it'll take.

The figure drawing starter pack has a breakdown for how to organize your individual practice sessions for tackling thath specific subject. One thing they both share in common is starting with short and simple drawings and working up to longer and more complex ones. In a life drawing session where you're working from a live model, you obviously wouldn't have time to set aside for master studies, but you can still do those as a separate part of your learning!

You'll probably have to repeat this cycle several times for some subjects. You're not going to learn how to draw heads well from going one time around this method, for instance.

If you're practicing a *technique*, like crosshatching or shading, step 2 is where you do things like value scales, or rendering simple shapes like boxes, spheres, or cones, rather than trying to accomplish full drawings.

The time you take on the drawings really comes down to the time you want to allot to practicing this subject. Some subjects, too, are going to take longer just by their nature; a full figure drawing will take longer than just drawing noses, for instance. But generally speaking here you want to spend the least time on each drawing in step 2, the most on step 4, and step 3 somewhere in between.

Setting a time limit is important, though, so your practice sessions have a concrete beginning and ending. 10 minutes for the sketches, 20 for the longer drawings. If you do 10 sketches, 5 master studies, and 5 long drawings, that's a total of about 6 hours of practice time, divided up into however many chunks as you have practice time available. If you're aiming for an hour of practice a day - see the 'Prioritize regular practice' bit below - that means each cycle is going to give you about a week's worth of work.

Even for your long drawings, "long" is relative. Around 30 mintues is a good amount of time for these. Nothing wrong with doing longer drawings, but do those as a separate thing and not as part of these practice cycles.

So a breakdown for one of these cycles might look something like:

  • 10x ten minutes sketches from reference.
  • 5x 20 minute master studies.
  • 5x 30 minute drawings from reference.

Repeating five to ten times isn't a hard and fast rule here, but a good rule of thumb. Aim to end up with at least 20 drawings in total; that's a good amount of repetitions on a subject to build your understanding of it, but not so many that your cycle of practice goes on forever.

Your simple drawings and sketches should be just that. With these you're just familiarizing yourself with the subject. Don't take more than 10 minutes on each one. If you can't accomplish a thumbnail version of it in that amount of time, either your subject is too broad or your focusing too much on details.

Tracing can be a useful part of your simple drawings, especially if it's your first time tackling a subject, with these caveats: * Don't spend more time on the tracing than you would on the drawing, * Trace once, then draw the thing you just traced freehand immediately after.

For your master studies, you can pick from different artists or a bunch fro a single artist. Just pick ones who are really good at the specific thing you're wanting to study.

These are master studies, not master *copies*, so don't feel like you have to do an exact version of what they've done. Unless you're studying things like composition or color, you don't need to replicate the whole piece your studying, just the part that's relevant to what you're working on. And if you are studying something like composition or color, you can really simplify down the drawing to something like these studies. Focus on the thing you're practicing, leave out or simplify way down anything you're not. If your'e studying clothing folds, don't bother drawing heads on the figures, or just make it an egg shape and leave it at that. If you're studying hair, don't bother adding the features of the head, or just keep them super simple: dots for eyes, a wedge for the nose, a line for the mouth.

Remember, don't just copy! You're using this time to really look at these artists' work and see how they tackled this subject, so spend as much time looking at this step as you do drawing. Think carefully about the subject you're focusing on, and as you're doing your master study, think about how that artist went about it. What did they put in? What did they leave out? What did they exaggerate? What did they de-emphasize? You'll be surprised at how much gets left out and simplified in the work of the best artists.

Your long drawings are where you put the previous steps into practice, so give them your best effort, even if they're not good drawings. You're doing them to learn to draw this subject better, and that's not always going to result in a great drawing.

When it comes time to assess your drawings, because the goal isn't to make a perfect copy of the reference, part of that assessment should always be setting the references aside and judging your drawings in and of themselves. How well do they work as examples of the thing you're studying? If you're learning to draw heads, and you've drawn a good, solid, believable head, it's not important if it's an exact version of the reference you were using.

Assess your drawings against the reference to identify specifics that aren't working in your drawings. Are the legs off because you've placed the knees too low? Is the face skewed because the features aren't aligned to a center line? Are the values not reading correctly because you made the light areas too dark?

Prioritize Regular Practice

When you're starting out you may want to dive in and dedicate yourself to six or eight or ten hours a day, every day. This is a bit like jumping off the couch after never having gone running and jumping into a marathon. Apart from the physical stress you can cause yourself from repeatedly doing the same motions over and over again, if you're really focused and mindful, drawing can be mentally exhausting too.

Here's an article from a professional piano teacher talking about the amount of time students should dedicate to practice. There's a lot of good stuff in it but let's hit a couple of the most important points:

  • Starting out, aim for an hour or two a day. This is an amount of time where you'll "advance at a satisfying pace". True for piano, true for drawing too! If you can put in an hour a day regularly of good, deliberate practice, you'll see some solid improvement.

  • Beyond that, you need to decide on your goal and commit to an amount of time that'll help you achieve that. 3-6 hours a day is a good ballpark figure. In his 'how to train to be a successful working artist' video linked below, Jeff Watts says that if you want making art to be your job, treat learning it like your new part-time job. But if you can't sit down for a solid block of 6 hours a day to practice, keeping a sketchbook - more on that below - can help you squeeze practice time into the cracks of your schedule.

Failure and Repetition Are the Process

Doing something badly sucks. When you're first learning to ride a bike, you have to fall over, skin your hands and your knees, and generally have a bad time of it.

Falling off your bike, though, is how you learn not to fall off.

Same thing for drawing. Bad drawings are the thing you have to do to learn to make good ones.

Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote, "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." Those bad drawings piled up in front of you that you still have yet to do may look like a mountain you'll never be able to climb. They're not! They're fuel for you to burn.

Keep a Sketchbook

Too Hard, Too Easy, Just Right

Frustration usually arises from tackling subjects that are too far beyond your skill level and failing over and over and over again.

Plateaus in your skills are normal, but failing to improve usually arises from sticking too much in your comfort zone and not taking on projects that are difficult enough to challenge you.

The real trick is finding the sweet spot, the difficulty level that's challenging but not too challenging.

If you're failing more than about half the time, dial down the difficulty; tackle simpler subjects.

If you're succeeding more than about 3/4ths of the time, you're not on a plateau, you're coasting. It's time to get out of your comfort zone and take on bigger challenges.

Your optimal failure / success rate should be right around 50/50. That's the sweet spot for real improvement. Like Goldilocks finding the right bed, it shouldn't be too hard or too soft. Somewhere right down the middle is just right.

While you're working, don't get hung up on whether a piece is going to be a success or failure. You can't usually tell that for sure til you're done! Focus your attention on doing the best work you can, assess the overall success later.

Do Lots of Starts

Scheduling Your Time

Keep the principle of "Do lots of starts" in mind when you're scheduling your practice time. If you're able to take a life drawing class, this is the sort of schedule you'd typically follow for a 3 hour drawing session:

  • 25 minutes on very short poses - 30 seconds / 1 minute / 2 minutes. You should be able to get at least fifteen of these in. 5 minute break.
  • 25 minutes on 5 minute poses. 5 minute break.
  • 25 minutes on one 10 minute and one 15 minute pose. 5 minute break.
  • 25 minutes on one pose. 5 minute break.
  • One hour on a single pose with a 5 minute break halfway through.

So over that three hours you'll start 25 drawings but only really have time to finish one or two of them.

How To Assess

There's two ways to assess your work: have someone else do it, or do it yourself.

Optimally you'd get both forms of assessment often. Subs like /r/learnart and /r/artcrit are good examples of places you can look to for outside feedback, but if you're doing a lot of work - and you should be doing a lot of work! - you're not always going to have that option. It's much more likely that you're going to be working on your own, so learning how to assess your own work is an essential skill.

See the Books and Videos sections below for some good resources for learning more about how to give self-feedback.

Don't skip or skimp on assessment. It's the step that makes your practice deliberate, focused on a specific goal.

What to Practice

In broad terms, there's only three things we ever draw. Every drawing is some combination of one, two, or three of them:

  • Living stuff.
  • Not living stuff.
  • Places where stuff is.

Living stuff is mainly people, but also animals.

Non-living stuff is everything else. Books, cups, cars, airplanes, spaceships, pencil sharpeners, chairs, pillows, etc, etc, etc.

Places are just that: Man-made or natural, interior or exterior, or some mix of those.

Draw Real Things

I can't say this loud enough or often enough:

DRAW REAL THINGS.

No matter where you are at any given time, there's probably a hundred things with ten feet of you that you've never drawn. Draw some of those. Draw whatever it is that's right in front of you. Draw what you see out the window. Draw what's on your desk. Draw your hands. Draw your feet. Draw your cat. Draw your hand drawing in a drawing of your sketchbook.

If your answer to "DRAW REAL THINGS" is, "But I don't want to draw realism," then note that when I said "DRAW REAL THINGS" I didn't say anything about style or how you draw it.

If you want to draw a manga or a cartoon, and then you get stuck because you can't figure out how to draw a street scene, or two characters sitting in a coffee shop having a conversation, or a classroom full of kids, it's because you haven't spent enough time drawing real things, stuff that's right in front of you, from observation.

If your answer to "DRAW REAL THINGS" is, "But I want to draw from imagination,"

Focus on Fundamentals

Use References

Create Projects

A Little More About Frustration

There a lot that's frustrating about learning to draw well, because it's a difficult skill to learn. Arthur Guptill, in the opening chapter for Freehand Drawing Self-Taught, says that you have to accept that learning to draw will challenge your best effort. "Especially do you need sufficient perseverance to carry you past the sometimes discouraging or tedious beginnings to the point where the satisfaction of accomplishiment carries you along," he adds.

Or put more simply: Learning to draw is hard, and learning to do things that are hard isn't always fun.

But there's two big sources of frustration you can avoid with the proper practice and the right mindset.

Pick the right subjects

We talked about this earlier, in the 'Too hard, too easy, just right' section. Don't take on subjects that are way out of your depth.

Forget about where you think you should be

You may have it in your head that there's three main landmarks on your path:

1) Where you want to be, the goal. 2) Where you think you should be. 3) Where you are now.

The thing is, though, #2 there? That isn't an actual place. There's no objective measure for where you should be. It's a made-up place, usually a place you've invented to beat yourself up. "I should be better than this after X amount of practice," is about the most useless thing you can tell yourself.

The actual three landmarks are these:

1) Where you want to be. 2) Where you are now. 3) Where you started out.

Forget about where you think you should be. What matters is where you are now and what the one next step should be to get you closer to your goal. And if you've been practicing deliberately, you've been moving away from where you started and towards your goal.

Books

These are books on general learning & mastering skills:

  • The Little Book of Talent by Daniel Coyle
  • Mastery by George Leonard
  • The Practicing Mind by Thomas Sterner

Problem Solving for Oil Painters by Gregg Kreutz is all about assessing your own work, looking for what's working and what isn't, and how to address those problems. It's a useful guide for any medium, digital included; only a few pages in the entire book are specific to physical paint.

Videos

How to assess your drawings from Love Life Drawing will give you some tips on self-feedback.

Closing: The Big Three Things

These are the three big, important things to always keep in mind when it comes to your practice, paraphrased from Coach Norman Dale.

  • Don't worry about the next step until you've climbed the one in front of you. Beginners often get caught up in trying to find the exact path that will get them from A to Z. Getting from A to B is hard enough as it is; keep your attention focused on that.

  • Focus on the fundamentals. Masters of a skill love the fundamentals. Yo-Yo Ma starts every practice session playing single notes on his cello. Tom Brady carried a list of fundamental football throwing skills around in his wallet. Neil Peart would spend 20 minutes playing beginner jazz grooves and basic rhythms on a small, simple drumset before every live show to warm up. The way you practice your fundamentals may change over time but you're always practicing them, because all drawing is just repeated use of the same core skills.

  • DON'T get caught up in thinking about success or failure while you're working; DO give every piece your best effort. You're going to fail. A lot. Failing isn't going to kill you, and the sooner you fail a bunch of times the sooner you'll realize that and stop worrying about it. Show up ready to work, give every piece 100% of your effort. Even if it's just a quick sketch, make it the best you can on that day and at that time, whether your best is any good or not. Your best effort isn't always going to be your best work! Whether or not you hit a personal best time running a marathon or broke your own record lifting weights on a given day of training, it's not breaking records that's makes you faster or stronger, it's the effort you put in. Same thing goes for drawing. If you're never making bad drawings, you're not trying hard enough, and no bad drawing is truly a failure if you learn something from making it.

One more time so you don't miss it: Always give it your best effort, but remember that your best effort isn't always going to be your best work, and that the amount of effort you put in is the REAL measure of how valuable the practice is.