John Wooden died in 2009. But if you’re a basketball coach today, you’re still living in his shadow.
And for good reason. Wooden’s record as a basketball coach for UCLA remains unmatched. He was notorious for his attention to detail, down to training his players how to put on their socks and lace their shoes correctly. He wrote books that applied his winning formula on the court to life in general, and his TED talk of 2001, The Difference Between Winning and Succeeding, has over four million views.
His methods have been studied extensively by people who hope to replicate his success in other areas, but with mixed results. In fact, few manage to come close.
Why?
According the book Practice Perfect, most of Wooden’s imitators fail to recognise the most important factor that contributed to his amazing results:
His obsession with practice.
We’ve all heard the oft-quoted “10,000 hour” rule that Malcolm Gladwell borrowed from K. Anders Ericsson and then popularised in his book Outliers. If we want to get better at something, we need to do it a lot.
But that’s not even half the story.
Just doing something a lot will not guarantee improvement. Depending on the way that thing is done, it may actually have the opposite effect. Because the 10,000 rule, in the simplified form we usually find it in handy quotes in blog posts or on Facebook, misses the difference between performance and practice.
And that difference is key.
The difference between performance and practice
Performance is:
- The employment of a lot of different skills together, at the same time. If you’re painting, you’re having to think about values, brush control, colour, technique, composition, drawing – all together.
- Creating something finished. For us, that means a drawing, painting, or sculpture. That also means pressure, since we tend to judge ourselves by the results.
- Repeated mistakes. It’s too easy to fall into the same patterns, the same idiosyncrasies, when performing. Very often, that can mean repeatedly doing things in a way that doesn’t result in improvement at all. Think about drawing accuracy. If you repeatedly misjudge distances too large, but never check to see that you’re doing that, you will further ingrain the bad habit by doing it more often. You get better at doing something badly.
Practice is:
- Doing one thing at a time in a very focused way. Instead of trying to get the drawing and the colour right at the same time, you might be practising only judging distances by eye (which will improve your drawing accuracy), or mixing colour, or matching values.
- Done purely for the sake of improvement. The intended result is not a beautiful painting or drawing, it is improvement in the skills that the creation of a beautiful painting requires.
- Repeatedly doing it right. By using feedback to make sure that you correct habitual mistakes and practice doing things the right way, you ensure improvement over time.
Those short lists give us a good idea of the difference, but that’s not the whole story either. Because there are two ways to practice; one is extremely effective, the other much less so – but is the one most commonly done.
These approaches are scrimmage and drill.
The difference between scrimmage and drill
Scrimmage attempts as much as possible to replicate the conditions of performance, but under more controlled conditions. For painters, an example might be painting a small still life that you can complete quickly, or doing a block-in for a portrait.
But it’s not where you develop your skills. The big drawback of scrimmage is that, like performance, it allows you to persist in bad habits. Because, as with performance, you’re employing and integrating a lot of different skills at once. You don’t know what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong.
Drill, on the other hand, means isolating a specific skill – judging the distance between two points, say, or matching a perceived value as closely as you can – and practising it repeatedly, with feedback, so that you can see what you’re getting right and what you’re getting wrong.
If you practice matching values for a while, you’ll probably find – as I and many of the people I work with at Creative Triggers found – that you consistently estimate them too light. That’s a habit that you can correct, and that correction results in real improvement.
But drill isn’t popular. It’s widely seen as boring. Worse, there’s a body of opinion, especially in education, that considers it an ineffective way to practice. That’s a shame, because it’s the most effective way to build your skills.
Wooden used drill much more often, when his contemporaries were concentrating on scrimmage. Wooden only used scrimmage to evaluate the results of drill. So if you want to improve your painting, and you’re prepared to practice, you’d be well advised to eschew making paintings so much – even small, “practice” pieces – and drill instead.
But surely art is different?
You may be thinking that art is very different from sport, and Wooden’s example doesn’t travel well to our field. You might think that art springs from the soul, that you can’t practice inspiration, and that talent and practice are different things.
You’d be wrong. And unfortunately, you’d be preventing yourself from making progress with that mindset. I don’t want that for you. I want you to achieve your goals with your art, to realise your dreams, as much as I want to realise my own.
Practising drawing and painting obeys the same basic rules as every other human activity. Those rules are established by the way our brains work when we’re learning something new and developing our skills. Those rules are the same whether you’re learning to shoot hoops or create a beautiful composition.
Here’s an example a little closer to home.
How drilling composition improved my paintings
For five years, I didn’t paint.
There were a few reasons for that. We were about to adopt our first child (the first of two, as it turned out). The back bedroom in our small, two-bedroomed house just outside London that had served as my studio was surrendered to make room for the impending little one.
At the same time, my freelance work dried up and so did my wife’s. But the bills still needed paying.
So I went back to a full-time day job. I’d lost my working space and my painting time. The easel and paints were packed away, and we embarked on a wholly different journey. Three years later, just as the dust was beginning to settle, we adopted our second little boy.
The effect of all this on my painting was that I didn’t actually try to create paintings again until very recently – in fact, until I was made redundant last September from said day job and found myself with a little time on my hands. You could say that life has been interesting lately!
So I found myself with a little time to paint, and the living room now doubles as a studio space now and again. I’m back at the easel for the first time in over five years.
Can I still paint?
I expected to be very rusty when I first picked up a brush. I expected to struggle. But I was surprised to find that I paint just as well as I did before I stopped. In fact, I think I’m painting better. And I think I know why.
For the last five years, although I didn’t paint, I did get into a habit of drawing regularly. For much of that time, I was deliberately practising something very specific: composition. I was lucky enough to find a book that was filled with some very effective exercises designed to develop sensitivity to spacing, proportion and pattern – Composition, by Arthur Wesley Dow.
The Dow book exemplifies the concept of drill. Each exercise isolates a specific area of composition and places emphasis on practising repeatedly to develop skill at it. The exercises are simplified. For months on end, I did nothing but simple line drawings of plants, and then took crops of those drawings and repeatedly refined them by tracing. I’ve done literally hundreds of these simple little drawings. I credit this practice with developing my sensitivity to spacing and proportion.
I also did some practice with line quality and value design (which Dow calls notan). One way I did this was by redrawing the same simple picture of a lily 100 times, in two values.
That’s drill, not scrimmage. Here are the specific skills I was working on:
- Motor control skills. Quite a lot of the practice I did was with a Chinese brush and ink. If you haven’t tried it, I can tell you it’s a really challenging medium to work with – way harder than oils to control. Creative triggers members are often surprised at how tough it is even to draw a straight line with a Chinese brush and ink.
- Design. Before all this practice, I used to think that I spent quite a bit of time thinking about the design of my paintings – despite being disappointed when they often didn’t come out well! I thought that considering the design of a painting before painting it was enough. I’d paint a few thumbnails, think about the values. But I hadn’t done any of intensive practice that stretched the skill itself. I hadn’t done any drill.
Now I have. So when I think about starting a painting, my more developed “design” mental networks come into play before I even pick up a brush. And when I’m sitting at the easel and painting, I don’t have to devote quite so much brain power to brush control or value design or proportion as I go along, because some of that processing has become automatic for me.
The practice has changed my brain.
Here’s a few of the things that came off my easel since I got back to painting again:
I know I shouldn’t be surprised by the fact I can improve through drill. After all, that’s what the neuroscientists are telling us: That what we repeatedly do changes the wiring of our brains.
Still, when you see it happen, it is a little surprising. I haven’t been painting for 5 years. But in that time, I’ve developed my design skills to the point where I now think differently about picture making. And for the better. I’m not saying that I’m brilliant at either of these two things, by the way. Just that I’m better at them than I was five years ago.
What I hope you take from this:
The first thing I hope you take from this is that no matter whether you have the opportunity to devote all your time to your art or not, never stop drawing. Never stop. Because you don’t know when opportunity might find you again. And when it does, you’ll not only be ready for it, you’ll be further along.
The main point is this: If you want to get better, seriously better, try staying away from performance for a while. Constantly performing without ever practising is how amateurs approach things in other fields. Amateur golfers never drill, they just play. And being an amateur is fine. Painting for a hobby is fine.
But if you really want to improve, look at it like a professional. Even better, look at it like a professional sportsperson at the top of their game. They don’t just perform, they practice. They drill. And they know the difference.
When you’re thinking about practising, make sure you include these three things, and you won’t go far wrong:
- Isolate a specific skill.
- Incorporate a feedback mechanism. If you’re practising values, for example, practice matching local values and test your results. That will keep you from repeatedly practising doing something wrong.
- Drill more than scrimmage.
I’ve included the following quote in posts more than once before, and I’m including it again because it’s so true, and so relevant here. When in his senior years, world famous ‘cellist Pablo Casals was asked why he still practised every day. He said:
“Because I think I can see some improvement.”
Best wishes and thanks for reading,
Paul
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Wonderful. Just the sort of thing I needed to hear right now. Just commenced a serious effort at improving my drawing.
Great article.
Merry Christmas
That’s great to hear Trev, good luck! Merry Christmas to you too 🙂
Great article and OH SO TRUE! Thank you Paul. It’s a reminder that I need to “drill” more and “scrimmage” less…..
Thanks Madeline. If you fancy some composition drill, the Dow book is a great place to start!
Thank you. Enjoyed the article n hope to follow the advice. Merry Christmas!
Thanks Ujwala, and great to hear from you again! Merry Christmas to you too 🙂
I enjoyed reading the passion you display when writing about art. Thank you for your insight.
Wishing you and your family , “A Veryy Happy Christmas”.
Christopher Heaphy.
And to you and yours Christopher, thanks 🙂
Merry Christmas Paul! Great article with excellent advice. I enjoy all of your posts. Thank you for taking the time to write and share.
You’re very welcome Marsha. And thank you. I hope you have a great Christmas too.
Excellent article and advice. I’m sure a lot of artists are asking-okay where do I start? Which skills first? Also, can I practice more than one skill at a time in isolation? I think the second question is important because of time. Let’s say if we pick two or three specific skills and practice each one separately each day, would that produce the same results? Would love to know your thoughts about these questions.
Excellent questions Deborah. I’ll take them one at a time:
Which skills first? That depends on what your goals are, I think. It’s common for us to look for weak points and to practise those, but I think there’s also much to be gained from practising to strengthen our strengths. If you want to produce highly realistic-looking work, I would say practice drawing accuracy and values mostly, since I believe they contribute most to a convincing illusion of reality. But that depends on where your strengths are. If you’re mostly moved by beauty of design, then it would make sense to concentrate on that. So, what are your goals? What would you like to achieve? Reply here and I’ll try to give some direction and ideas for practice if I can.
Can I practice more than one skill at a time? I see no reason why not, as long as you don’t mix them together too much. I tend to concentrate on one thing at a time, personally. But that’s me. I can’t see any good reason why you couldn’t practice value matching one day, and drawing accuracy the next.
I truly appreciate both of your answers. I know my strengths and weaknesses and agree to practice both. I teach so my questions were aimed at addressing a curriculum for teaching. I have used the Bargue plates but my students quickly get bored. Accurate drawing is crucial and I am creating a diverse series of exercises to keep out the boredom. That’s why the second question. You have given me a lot to think about. Thanks
You’re welcome Deborah. I found that challenge of knowing what will help develop skills with keeping exercises interesting enough to keep people engaged myself. If you wouldn’t mind sharing, I’d love to hear something bout the exercises you’re putting together.
I’ve been doing some sight size drawings of leaves and other little pieces of nature that I find effective fro training observation and accuracy without being such a big commitment as a Bargue drawing.
Paul is impressive in his dedication to art instruction, and his passion is evident .
My wish, and I’ve communicated that to him, is to produce a video series from painting 101 …….to wherever he wants to take us.
Best wishes of the season to you Paul
Norm Chevrier , Canada
What a lovely thing to say Norman, thank you.
Actually, I’m working on that instruction now and will be launching a still life painting course in the new year – probably late January or early February. It will include exercises designed to teach specific concepts, with drill exercises supplied to stretch the relevant skills at each stage. Part of the course will be monthly feedback sessions, and it will culminate in a final still life painting and an individual “practice plan” to take away and work with.
It’s going to be quite intensive, and will run for a few months. The goal is for each student to be able to paint a more realistic still life than they thought possible by the end of the course. There will be modules for drawing accuracy (sight size), values, edge handling and natural colour – core skills, so they will be applicable in other genres apart from still life.
I admit I’m pretty excited about it 🙂 I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time. I going to put in all the most useful ideas I’ve learned over my own journey learning to paint realistically, so that people will be able to get to the same point much more quickly – without all the thrashing around and trial and error I had to go through!
I hope you have a great holiday too, Norm, and all the best for 2016.
Thank you for this wonderful article. I hope you are thinking about putting all this together in a book! You are a wonderful teacher!!
Thank you Paul and I would like to wish you and your family a very MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A SUCCESSFUL NEW YEAR.
Haha, thank you Bronwen! A book would be great, but I’m going to start with a course, as I just said in reply to Norm’s comment above. Maybe a book will come further down the line. I’m thinking seriously about an eBook full of practice exercises for next year, but I’m terrible for getting excited and taking on too much at once. I think the course will be keeping me busy enough!
I hope you have a wonderful Christmas and new year too 🙂
Thank you Paul! The redundancy of habit is just that, isolating and relearning
in a conscious way those deeply worn tracks of unconscious habit, makes it
within reach to change and grow as an artist. Thank You!
You’re welcome Jeff. It absolutely is within reach, for all of us. Practice makes permanent 🙂
Thank you for your inspiration Paul. I would like to get in the habit every day to draw something but I get stuck not knowing what to draw and end up doing nothing.
You’re very welcome Sandy.
Not knowing what to draw can be a huge barrier to getting started. There’s a few ideas for you in this post:
https://www.learning-to-see.co.uk/six-simple-drawing-projects
If you like design, you might also try some of this:
https://www.learning-to-see.co.uk/may-drawing-practice-mandalas
And I have a video here of a webinar I did a little while ago about getting into a regular drawing habit. It includes ideas for a few exercises:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgS_wZhv7Uo
There you go, lots of ideas to keep you busy next year 🙂
Thanks I needed that.
Merry Christmas. Ron
Merry Christmas to you too Ron 🙂 Have a great 2016.
You put things so simply and you’re so right – I never quite got why practising would automatically have to mean you get better at something, and now I see why I questioned it – it’s about NOT repeating the same old mistakes. As you say often, it’s about establishing habits and from those repetitions new neural pathways are formed. Thank you Paul! It makes sense now.
That sounds like a penny dropping moment Caroline 🙂 Great to hear. The key is feedback, finding a way to test whether you’re getting better or not. If you can get that figured out, then you know if you’re practising well or badly.
Good luck!
Great stuff, as always, Paul. Lovely to see your paintings again. Inspiring! Lovely Christmas to you all. Looking forward to Luc’s interpretations… xx
Thanks Merle. Luc is producing some wild stuff at the moment, mostly dinosaur themed! I must remember to share some on FB.
You have a great holiday and I’ll see you next year 🙂
Great article!!! thanks
You’re welcome Pamela, thanks for taking the time to let me know you liked it.
I love your work Paul and find your conversation about it very encouraging. It makes sense to me.
I’m very glad to hear it Vivie 🙂 Now to put it into practice – new year’s resolution?
Thanks Paul, that’s what I needed to read right now, and your work is beautiful… Really inspiring
Thanks you so much Rachel, I’m really glad you like the paintings. More to come next year 🙂
Thank you Paul not only for spurring us on to drill the proper way, but especially for contributing immensely to making the practice of art what it once was. All those painters of yore that we rever had none of our modern day interruptions (tv, internet, movies, dining out, etc) and guess what they did: practice over & over again the same things. For instance they were able to draw all the tree shapes and their leaves and fruits by heart. Why ? Because they focused on the small stuff first before moving on to more complex shapes, objects, people.
This was the atelier method. To start with the basics, and move up only once you had internalized, acquired, digested the fundamentals.
Today people want to skip over the basics in order to get to the fun part, painting. I see & hear it over and over again: people not only cringe at drawing, they refuse to draw the same model twice with a derogatory “I already did that”.
(My silent answer: yes but you did it all wrong, you’d benefit from doing it over … and over again, you’d discover more from doing it again in a different manner ….).
What you are demonstrating is the value, the necessity not only of drawing, but particularly of repeating the same exercices in order to master the skills, so that it becomes ingrained, stamped, written upon your brain, part of your make-up. In pedagogy we call it appropriation.
I believe the practice of art today is shifting towards what it once was thanks to a phletora of excellent classical style art schools. And people like you who ponder about representational process, investigate, search & practice, and most importantly generously share the successful outcome of their journey. And also people who put to practice such useful exercices and reap the benefits as they see improvement in their art.
I join everyone here in thanking and commanding you on such excellent posts. Keep them coming !
Thanks coach !
Happy New Year ! ⛄
Dominique
Thank you Dominique!
You know, I used to hear a lot a few years back about how much knowledge about representational painting had been lost. Whilst that may be true, I suspect that something more important has been lost – or very nearly lost – and that’s the approach to practice and building skills that you describe so eloquently. And I think that approach has been lost in many fields, not just art.
On the plus side, though, the Internet now gives us access to incredible amounts of useful information that those artists never had. The challenge I think is sifting the good from the bad, and putting it to good use!
I hope you have a great 2016 🙂
Thank You, Paul for caring and all your sharing. Your thoughtful guidance always goes deep to the soul of the artist’s dilemma. I do love your flower portraits. Are any for sale? Blessings to you and your family,Cerise
You’re welcome, Cerise, and thanks for the kind words.
I’ll drop you an email about the flower paintings – yes, they are for sale. The small rose one is with a gallery in Denmark, though.
Dear Paul,
Great article!Hope to fallow.
Wish you Happy Christmas and Happy new year!
Hi Kiran, great to hear from you! Glad you like the post. I hope you have a great 2016 🙂
What a nice, and motivating article, Paul! I will be sure to re-read this one. Merry Christmas to you and your loved ones. (I’m the one who suggested not using John Wooden as an example of doing things the right way, lol)
LOL thanks Thomas. As long as the point gets home I guess it doesn’t matter too much who the example is 🙂 Merry Christmas to you too.
Excellent analysis, instruction, and beautiful art all in one go. I personally relate to a lot of what you mentioned in your post. It always helps when you know others are facing similar imperfect circumstances and constraints and still finding a way to make it happen.
P.S I’ve already got acetate sheets, oils, and brushes ready. Now for some courage and ‘doing’.
Wishing you and the family a Merry Christmas and a Happy and Prosperous New Year, Paul 🙂
Thanks Nasreen, and great to hear from you! So your’e planning a little colour matching? Let me know how it goes. I wish you a wonderful 2016 too.
When i studied Wing Chun in my 20s we were taught to do drills as the great masters did.
They would train ONE single move from within a form (having say 108 moves), 200 times slowly without any mistakes . If the move was done incorrectly, you started the count again.
Applying this ideology Ive taken up your suggestion Paul and I am attempting 200 drawings of a single bargue plate! (currently at 21 copies)
Its mind numbingly tedious, yet it is teaching me discipline, focus and patience.
Have a great xmas Paul, looking forward to your instructional video coming out!
That’s amazing. even 21 is impressive. I wish I knew your name. Which Bargue drawing have you chosen?
Hi Paul,
This is Phil.
Just to clear up i havent done 21 in one sitting, that would be madness lol
I attempt two copies each time i sit down.
To be honest 18 of the 21 ive attempted look horrible (to me anyways).
Attempting the side view of faces (plate 3). It holds enough interest for a repetitive exercise yet still simple enough to start with.
I often wonder how long past masters and students of the great academies had to work on these plates before moving on to painting. months? years?
Than you dear Paul for your useful post, and I wish you one day you can write in detail about drawing in perspective and its relevance to the 2-D format and depth of field in composition. wishing you a very happy Christmas and New Y.ear
Hi Araseber, you’re welcome, I’m glad you liked it.
Perspective isn’t something I find I’m asked about much, so I don’t tend to write about it I’m afraid. Personally, I see perspective as largely conceptual information that, once learned and internalised, doesn’t really require a lot of practice.
That view may be mistaken, I had the good fortune to take technical drawing at ‘O’ level in the UK, which included a lot of drawing of sections in perspective, and also had some good basic training in two and three point perspective on my foundation year at art college. So it may just be that it was one of the few areas of art that I was lucky enough to get some decent training on, so take for granted.
I’ve seen “perspective made easy” by Norling mentioned often as a good book on perspective. You might try that one if you want to get further with it. I hope that helps.
Thank you Paul,
I see myself in some of your comments, I am also a self taught artista, I agree, práctica, more practise and Felipe are the ,way but your comments and sugetions/guidance are great Help, my best to you and thank you once again, Mundo
Love the paintings. the last is my favorite (may the second) maybe oh don’t make me pick. Merry xmas.
You are quite on the mark about drills. my goal for the 2016 is to draw straighter lines so as to improve my perspective work. every 2 to 4 years i pick something.
first it was values then sight size. then eye training to recognize shapes with out knowing what the picture is before (there is an american logic puzzle that helped with is) Now I am on to straight lines started in july. My drill was just a line book that i threw into my walker. when I have a free moment i would draw lines. But now I have come up with a better drill for the new year. I generally buy a date book with pages of appt lines boxes of todo lists note pages expense boxes of lines, monthly/weekly calendars and the like. This year i got 2 hard cover 192 thick almost water weight paper and selected all my yearly, monthly, weekly, daily and other special pages and i am drawing them in. Lots and lots of wait for it, yes lines. Its great i completed my yearly pages and am starting monthly. Hope the finish Jan by new years day. So now i have lines with meaningful useful drills. My hope is that by june 2016 i will be on my way to mastering the straight line. look out perspective views without the slight wobble.
enjoy thew holiday eden
Dear Paul,
what you do is beautiful! Not only painting. I am 65 and doing various things including painting – sometimes. However, I think, I will never be able to excercise every day or write about it. But reading your posts and seeing your works usually makes my day. Being part of this electronic community means something special to me and so, please let me thank you for your work and wish you all the best for the comming year.
Happy holiday,
Luba
Missed the post before Christmas but in time to wish you a Happy New Year Paul.
As you know, we’ve faced the similar ‘challenge’ of redundancy and the resulting turbulence that causes with life changes, what with moving house added into the mix for good measure. Disruptive elements that transpire against that regulated practice and (re)forming that creative trigger habit.
Whilst I’ve still yet to get back into it properly I’m fairly relaxed about the situation because I’m still doing this…. “The first thing I hope you take from this is that no matter whether you have the opportunity to devote all your time to your art or not, never stop drawing. Never stop. Because you don’t know when opportunity might find you again.”
I haven’t stopped drawing, even if it’s just some rubbishy lines on a scrap of paper. Every day it’s important to me to get some marks down, purely on the basis that the opportunity will arise when I get my schedule back, get some focussed practice back and maybe one day get to place when I can try some painting.
Off to eBay now to find a new Chinese brush and ink as those are still packed away (or lost) from the house move – but I can’t wait any longer to start making those brush marks 😀
Wishing you all the best for the year ahead for you and your family Paul.
I think a great deal of your site, your experience, which includes your drawings and paintings plus the advice you graciously share.
After many many years of going around in circles and experiencing many detours primarily self imposed, I am once again at the beginning. But it is because of your site that I approach this task with confidence and willingness to try once again. It’s still scary though!
Thank you Theresa, that’s wonderful to hear. Yes it can be a little scary. Just concentrate on the next small step and the big scary picture will take care of itself.
Thank you so much. I just finished a 4 day workshop with Carlo Russo and he kept stressing drawing, drawing, drawing, and practice, practice, practice. Then someone sent me this blogpost so the Universe is really trying to tell me something! Thank you. Excellent article and thanks for the Composition book link; have downloaded.
Thanks Elizabeth. I am in complete agreement with Carlo 🙂
Hope you like the book, it’s my favourite art instruction book ever, very practical!
I wondered how you rated Harold Speeds 1913 book “The Practice and Science of Drawing” compared to Arthur Dow.
I think Speed’s book is excellent, actually my favourite book on drawing, it taught me a huge amount. A very different perspective to Dow’s, but no less useful.
I had an interesting process during lockdown where I attempted to draw a wood Pigeon with coloured pencils. I didn’t spend too long on it but thought it wasn’t too bad. Whilst drawing it I was thinking about the idea of breaking the bird down into shapes and getting the realtive sizing correct.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/2u1BrvYrmYgdgcYt8
I hadn’t attempted to properly draw something in maybe 10 years and this was great it my mind. I doubled down on the ‘shapes and alignment’ model and thought it might be cool to show some of the lines in the drawing itself. I came up with this…
https://photos.app.goo.gl/7o4nLRwheaR8RV8i6
A bit crappy to be honest. I liked the idea but didn’t come out. Also decided I was no good with colouring.
Next attempt was to concentrate on proportion but try to lightly shade everything. I really liked this one…
https://photos.app.goo.gl/xqhvPkiEkJzLu25c6
I took a lot of care to draw the outline and shapes that make up the form of the bird and then slowely go through and copy the shading and trexture. I was aware that subtlety in shading and having big contrast between light and dark shading looked really cool.
I tried another two pics. Again, taking time on the form and shading contrast. This one may be my fave…
https://photos.app.goo.gl/S85mUmBJi6vJn1c27
and then this one. Not too bad
https://photos.app.goo.gl/EFQBoDeUH221b1XJ7
And then finally this one…
https://photos.app.goo.gl/gZv4QZo6K7cvjzZh9
I havn’t continued drawing but I was blown away by how quickly the qualoty of my drawings improved over literally 6 attempts! Not sure what the trick was but what I have described was basically what was going through my head. It feels like drastically improved by just thinking about my approach rather than practicing.
Thanks.