by Airwalker
Posted 2007-07-24
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Practice Makes Perfect!
I’m sure that if any of you are like me, you have gigabytes of artistic Jpegs and art books lining your shelves of your favorite artwork from many different artists all over the world. That is good. As your imagination takes off on its own course, it’s great to know what you like. That is inspiration for tomorrow.
A great exercise when you want to doodle, or perhaps build into a habit, is to go through different photographs, paintings, drawings, or any form of artwork. While flipping through various pictures, focus in on parts you struggle with, or what parts of the composition you love.
If you are having trouble creating the perfect eye, for instance, look through pictures and focus in on the eyes. If one in particular catches your attention, take a minute to draw it. Set the eye up as if you were drawing it from scratch using your source of inspiration as a reference. Perhaps you’ll make changes as you see fit—that’s a great sign of uniqueness. Just don’t trace! You won’t learn much by tracing.
And who doesn’t, at some point, have trouble with hands? Knowing how to treat each finger and thumb while in different positions can take quite some time. So, flip through pictures and focus on hands and make quick sketches.
This type of practice can even be applied to more broad topics such as poses. You can make a sketch of a wire-frame skeleton (ie, a detailed, proportionally-correct stick figure) of certain characters posing in different ways.
This method can be applied to practically everything.
There are many ways to hone your skills—copying others may not fit your style, even if you’re not taking credit for yourself.
Just remember: Practice makes perfect! Or at the very least, it can get you where you want to go.
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