You know how important it is to draw every day, if you want to improve as an artist. But more importantly, you need to keep a forward momentum and draw the hard stuff.
A lot of artists share daily sketches on Twitter and Facebook. While that’s a perfectly valid thing to do, I see one common problem with most of these sketches – they are all very good! The problem here is that the artist has sat down with a blank piece of paper and drew whatever he felt like, whatever image he had in his mind.
Let’s imagine you were to do the same. Wonder what image would pop up?
I’ll take a wild guess: Character shot.
Whether it’s a macho superhero, a funny animal or a sexy robot, the problem with that image is exactly that it came from inside your head. And let’s face it: not much new comes from inside your head.
I used to only draw muscular guys with swords and dragons. While I did get slightly better at drawing guys with swords and dragons, this daily exercise didn’t help me get better at drawing. Not by a long shot.
What DID make me better, was being forced to draw stuff I didn’t already know how to draw, the “boring” stuff like flowers in a vase, and the hard stuff, like a street full of houses and cars and trees and people .
Unless you push yourself and draw from life, study and copy from photo reference and other artwork, you’ll only be maintaining your drawing muscle, not improving it. When it’s really hard and frustrating – THAT’S when you’re on your way to getting better.
Imagination is overrated. You need input to produce output – even original, fresh and innovative output!
Sketching daily only works if you push yourself to draw the stuff you can’t.