Hello my friends, welcome to another Tuesday of tutorial,
and Happy New Year!
I am Leonardo Pereznieto and since I can imagine that many have as a New Year´s
goal to draw better,
I decided to dedicate this 1st. tutorial to tips on ¨How to improve your drawings
fast¨
I hope these tips are helpful.
While I talk to you, I´ll be drawing and sometimes, showing you some
slides, so you don’t need to look at my face the whole time [laugher].
I´ll be drawing a bald eagle´s head.
Ok!
We all know that to become very good at something, we need
a lot of practice.
However, not all the ways in which we can practice, are equal
there are ways in which we can practice that can be detrimental and create
bad habits.
I´ll talk to you about that in a minute.
There are others which most of us know as regular practice,
like drawing drawings [laughter] for pratice.
This brings improvements but it can be slow, and then there is ¨Focused Practice¨
this is the 3rd. point to improve fast.
The reason making drawings to improve is slow, is because you employ most of your
time on things that you don’t necessarily need to practice.
To explain you better let me give you an analogy:
if you wanted to play basketball better, and you knew that your main problem,
the thing to improve was your ability to shoot balls,
to throw the ball into the basket,
then, if you try to improve by playing games, your progress may be a bit slow because
95% the time of the game you are not shooting, most of the time you don’t even have the ball.
You would be there for nearly an hour
and make 10 or 20 throws, maybe.
While if you went to the basketball court to practice smartly and made one throw
after the other, you could probably make about 200 throws in half an hour,
so in half the time you could get so much more improvement than in a game,
that’s smart practice!
And once you had your shooting ability resolved, then you would focus on the next task to improve,
let’s say on dribbling, (dribbling is when you bounce
the ball rapidly on the ground.)
And again, playing games to improve your dribbling is very slow, because most of the time
you don’t have the ball, you would improve much faster if you dribble that ball
down the hallways, around objects, up and down the stairs [laughter]
everywhere, and of course while running.
If you focus your energy and time on your main point of weakness,
you can improve very rapidly!
So identify your main weakness in drawing…
is it your linework, or when your draw people is it the noses or the hands… what is it?
And then focus on that
drawing a lot of them!
like a lot of noses, and a lot doesn´t mean three [laughter], it means probably hundreds.
The order of magnitude of the amount of practice needed, maybe greater
than what we usually think of.
However, working with extreme focus, it can be done fairly rapidly.
So focus on one thing at a time.
The 2nd. point is to ¨Break it down to smaller pieces¨
nothing is too difficult to draw if you break it down enough.
We already touched into this when talking about focus, because in order to focus
on something, we had to first break it down a bit.
But I wanted to take up this separately because if you are having trouble with drawing
something and are getting frustrated
you can probably solve it by breaking it down in little pieces.
Let’s say that you are having trouble drawing people, that’s very difficult
because it has a lot of elements.
If you break it down and take-up a face, it may still be too difficult,
if you break it further and draw one eye, it may be a little bit better but still hard
but if you just take, let’s say the lower line
of the upper eyelid
I’m sure with some practice
you can handle that!
and then reverse the action, take more and more
like the whole upper lid. Then the lower eyelid,
then maybe the whole eye.
Do this for every feature and then, put it all together.
In this way, you will be able to master anything!
And we got the number 1 which is ¨Learn from the best¨
Toward the beginning of the video I mentioned that there is a wrong way
to practice, a detrimental one, that can bring you bad habits.
What I was referring to is that let’s say that you want to become better and
want to practice a lot,
you want to improve drawing faces, but you don’t know how to make the features,
so you practice a lot, each time making the features wrong.
What will happen is that this will become a habit
and then afterwards you will always do things wrong
and as this is a habit, it will be very hard to correct.
So, the first thing you need to do, even before practicing is know how to do things correctly
so that you can practice correctly and get it right
so, learn from the best!
The good news is that today, with technology, you can learn
from the best fairly easily, one thing that you can do
is copy the drawings from the old masters…
such as Leonardo, Raphael, Rembrandt or more recently, Charles Dana Gibson
or even from living masters, just don’t publish your drawings since they are copies
and you don’t have the rights,
you are making them just to learn, or if you publish something
always give credit to the original artist.
Studying the drawings of the masters will teach you a lot on how they handled
things and it cost you nothing, but learning to do things right is so important
than my last advice on ¨how to improve your drawings fast¨ is to invest
as much in time in money as you can afford in your tuition. If you can´t spend any money
at all, that’s fine, copy from the masters and learn
from good YouTube channels, such as this one [laughter].
If you are on a budget but you can afford let’s say $8 or $10 dollars a month,
there are some great learning sites such as SkillShare
where you can take more in depth courses on how to draw different things.
I have taken several courses there, which have helped me a lot!
And some good news, if you use the link below that I give in the description
of the video, and you subscribe with it, you will get two free months of the Premium
membership.
That means that you can take all the courses in the site you want, for free, for two months.
Now, if you are very serious about learning professionally and have a budget that is a little
bit bigger than to Skillshare…
what I recommend is to subscribe to the New Masters Academy,
that it is a website dedicated to professional art training, online and it has
some of the best art teachers in the world.
I´m personally a subscriber and I’m taking courses there.
If you want to draw people really well, you have to learn anatomy for artists,
and the best resource I know for that
is the Proko anatomy course,
I have paid for it myself, and I love it!
And finally, if the budget is not a problem and you can move, then go in person
and attend a top school such as the continuing education program at the New York
Academy of Art.
If you take an intensive drawing course there, there is no way you can avoid getting
better at drawing fast! [laughter].
So there are definite ways you can improve fast, no matter what your budget is right now.
I really hope these tips were helpful to you.
The links for all these resources are in the description below the video.
Please in the comments let me know what you think, and let me know any other
tips you may have that may help the community. And if you enjoyed the video please give it a LIKE!
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and I will see you on Tuesday ;)
Subtitled by Grethel Trejo