I’ve been watching this video today, one of many, many quality videos by Sycra, and I’m feeling kind of pissed off that I didn’t learn this sooner.
I mean, sure, I “learned” this in art school, but I didn’t really get the “analyzing” part of it. It was basically “keep drawing and exploring solutions” but somehow to me that never meant to look critically at every drawing and focus on improving specific things. My approach was always more “cast a wide net and maybe you’ll get lucky and run across something that works/makes the teacher happy”.
I see so much advice given (especially to artists who are looking to improve) that they should always “draw more”, but hey, that’s really not that helpful on its own. It’s easier to improve if you explore the ways that things DON’T work so that you can understand when they DO work.
He’s got interesting things to say about using references too, and the way I’ve been using references could certainly be better (see: this blog). I want to use them as a shortcut to a finished drawing that I think looks good, whether or not I really learned a lot from just copying the reference.
So, I’m going to trying to work more on “iterative drawings” instead of being lazy and relying on so many references. Expect to see fewer polished works here in the future!