How To Identify Your Weaknesses And Improve Your Drawing
Do you feel like you’ve been drawing for a while, putting in the practice time, and still aren’t improving? Rather than practicing more, the answer is often practicing smarter!
To get better at drawing, you need to consciously identify your weaknesses. The way to do that is to critique your own drawing as if you were handing an art assignment in to yourself. Because if you keep drawing the same way, in the same style, without looking critically at your work, you’re essentially practicing your mistakes …you’re practicing your own bad habits.
How To Critique Your Own Work
Pick a drawing you’ve done recently. Lean back from it and take a good look. Are you happy with it? Chances are there’s something you think you could do better. Do you know what it is? To improve at something we need to be able to identify it.
Try not to just say “I don’t like this drawing” or “it’s bad”, because that’s not useful or helpful. Try to be objective, not emotional.
If you’re not sure how to identify what you need to work on, ask yourself each one of these questions about your drawing:
- Are there any problems with the proportions? Does anything look warped, too long or too short?
- Do you have a range of values from light to very dark? Or are your drawings all very light, all very dark, or mostly grey?
Did you spend time planning the drawing lightly and checking the shapes and angles?
Do you have a variety of textures or line qualities to create visual interest? For example, soft textures in the background and sharper, darker marks elsewhere.
How is the quality of your shading? Is it patchy or even? Is there smooth blending between light and dark areas where appropriate?
If you can identify one or more issues from the questions above, you’ve found something you can improve. If there are a bunch of issues, choose just one to start with.
Next Steps: How To Improve
Repeat The Same Drawing
This is something I often recommend to students in my online Sketch Club. Because the first time you draw something, you’re just starting to figure things out. There will be successes, but there will be failures within the drawing too.
The second time you draw the same thing, your brain has already had a practice run and is familiar with the subject. Now you have an opportunity to work on those failures. Repeating the same drawing is not super exciting, but it is a way to actively focus on improving the weaknesses you’ve indentified.
Practice With Awareness
If you see the same issue happening in multiple drawings, then you are really on to something. Now you can keep that weakness in mind as you draw and spend more time focusing on that skill. For example: If your proportions are always a bit out, use strict measuring techniques until you are really happy with the result. If your values are often all in the grey range, take time to mark out the areas you’ll leave white and focus on building up layers of shading from grey right through to black.
Summary
Improvement starts with looking honestly at your own work. Find one weakness, repeat the drawing, and keep that weakness in mind as you practice. Working on your weaknesses is not the most exciting part of learning to draw but it’s a surefire way way to take your drawing to the next level.
Check out this video for a walk-through of questions for critiquing your own drawings: Why Your Drawings Aren’t Improving And How To Fix It