Soizic Mouton

I feel like people don't necessarily understand what they are doing "wrong" when they try to draw. Learning from drawing isn't just drawing over and over again hoping something will eventually click and build you into this amazing artist. Practice is key to learning to draw don't get me wrong, but you also have to critique your own work. If your first thousand pieces of art make you step back and say "It looks like shit", don't just leave it at that, find your strengths and find your weaknesses. People develop style by finding what they are good at and exaggerating it over the weaknesses. I'm excellent at making gestures, but terrible at rendering, so I use perspective to exaggerate a gesture and keep the shading to a simple shading. Style is grown from this way of thinking. So instead of saying: "It is shit", ask "why do I think it is shit? What is causing it to be shit? What can I do as an artist to prevent these overlaying symptoms from ruining the whole piece?"

This is why having and listening to an art teacher is extremely helpful early on. More than any other skill, they will teach you how to constructively self-critique so you learn to improve on your own. People shouldn't mix up a self-critique with self deprivation. Just because a drawing is looked at critically (either by the artist or another party) doesn't mean that it's a judgement call on the artist themselves, rather just that there's ways to improve on an art piece for the next time, which is why lots of artists practice and present with thumbnails and preliminary sketches or various concept art that gets turned down a billion times, until there's a piece that's settled on. Awareness and self-control of an artists' mind-space can be half the battle, it just takes some self-assessment and mindfulness techniques to help.

I was once a programmer doing it for a living, and we're taught that you start small and build your way up so you can fix stuff that's funky before your program gets huge and it becomes impossible to determine the problem. Try to draw the minimum possible drawing that illustrates your problems. This makes it way easier to determine your problem and fix it, i.e., if you can't draw eyes (still trying), which part are you struggling at? An eye is made of several components, so we can further isolate each component, and repeat this breaking down for each component. Then we say, OK, this thing is bad. Then we fix it. Then we work on combining everything together into the "parent" component. And so on. If you just keep doing the same thing over and over, you won't be able to identify the problem. You need to break it down to fix it.

Vide https://manuelaantao.blogspot.com/2020/02/fixing-errors-how-to-draw-object.html fore an example I sketched.… (altro)