redmaneartstudies

[redmaneartstudies]

I’m teaching myself art - Mindset

Something important that we should go through is the mindset I'm trying to keep while learning art. Unfortunately, I have a lot of experience in failed projects, and I know that these projects suffered a lot because of toxic mindsets I had. Keep in mind that you don't have to agree with or follow any of this. You decide your own path and I'm here merely to provide you with my own story. What you'll read here is advice I got from other, more experienced, artists, and things I learned from my own experience.

Only if you practice, you'll know what you need to do next. So don't spend more time planning than doing it. Don't expect that you'll be able to predict how much time you'll spend on each thing, use the time you need as long as you actually do it.

Don't treat your drawings/paintings as precious things. Chances are, tomorrow you'll be better than today. Don't let the feeling that you don't want to ruin a drawing stop you from doing what you should do. And, if it does go wrong...

Remember you can always do it again. Chances are that it'll look better because you improve through repetition and learning from your mistakes. You've got experience from the failed drawing and know where to improve.

The purpose of practice is to improve a specific skill, it doesn't need to look good. When doing a study, start a drawing with a purpose in mind. Then try to focus on that purpose, even if the rest doesn't look that good. If you're doing a study to improve your skill with proportions, don't be bothered about the rendering.

'Fail faster' & 'Quantity over quality'. When you're a beginner, there's only so much you can do, even if you put a lot of effort into it. You can use that time to do lots of bad drawings and see which mistakes keep coming up, then improving on them. Spending a lot of time refining a drawing when you don't have enough skill to make it look good will only frustrate you.

When in doubt, draw 100. The only way to get used to drawing difficult things is by drawing them. Whenever I feel I'm avoiding to draw something because it's hard, I'll prove myself I can do it by studying it until I get it right consistently. Can't draw hands? Draw 100 hands. Still hard? Draw 100 more. (ok maybe not literally 100 but you get the point)

Use fear as a guide, by confronting it. Same reasoning as above. If you're scared of something, it's probably because it's high stakes and it'll be hard work. If I confront this fear, I'm sure I'll come out on the other side better than I was before, because at least I didn't let irrational fear conquer my mind.

Every method has something to offer. It's easy to point the finger to some methods and say that these methods are 'cheating' and whatnot. But they can be useful and you can learn from them if you use them right. Even tracing and copying can help you improve (and I'm not talking about stealing art here). You just have to remember that...

You're only as good as what you practice. If you only copy other artist's work: you're only a worse version of that artist. If you only trace pictures or drawings, you're only getting good at tracing.  If you want to draw from real life or from imagination, copy/tracing will not give you the ability you want. Use your practice to challenge yourself, to take you where you want to go.

Keep exploration in mind. You can't improve if you're stuck inside your comfort zone. Exploration can be intimidating, but you can always learn something new from it.

Learning should be holistic and recursive. Don't fool yourself thinking that you'll learn about something now and be done with it for the rest of your life. To really understand that piece of information, you need to consider the whole. What I mean by that is that you'll learn things at the beginning of your journey that will make a lot more sense later, when you already have some experience and you're learned new things. You'll not be able to grasp the full idea because you need more context. So you'll need to come back to those fundamentals to discover what you missed. I see professional artists mentioning all the time that they're back to studying fundamentals to improve their art.

That’s it for now. I hope you’re as excited about your journey as I am about mine. 

Read the whole series: My plans |  Aspirations, Career, and Style |  Mindset

[redmaneartstudies]

I’m teaching myself art - Aspirations, Career, and Style

Aspirations

learn to draw from imagination. My ultimate goal is to be able to draw from imagination (not like Kim Jung Gi, mind you, I'm not that ambitious), that means that I need to invest a lot of time in constructive drawing and expanding my visual library. 

experiment with each drawing method. tracing, copying, observational drawing, constructive drawing - each has its own value, pros and cons. I want to get the most value out of them. 

experiment with different styles. I'm interested in a wide range of styles, from realistic to cartoon. I want to explore them until I find which ones resonate the most with me. I do know that I want to be able to be flexible with my drawing style.

experiment with different media. I want to learn both traditional and digital art. I've already bought a drawing tablet - mine is the Wacom Intuos (2018) Small. For traditional media, I'm interested in experimenting with watercolors, gouache, acrylics, ink, pencil, charcoal, and markers.

explore and challenge myself. I'm not locking myself into a strict, elaborate schedule. I need this process to be fun and interesting. If I decide I want to learn to draw something specific that's out of my plans, I'll just do it. The most important thing is that I spend a lot more time actually drawing than reading books and watching tutorials. 

help others to learn. I want to share everything I learned so other people will get inspired to learn it too. Career & style

I'm avoiding to think too much about career and planing the future, although I did mentioned about the stages plan, I'm trying to use my career aspirations only as a guide to help me find the best way to learn. 

As a beginner, it's normal to suffer from I-want-to-do-all-the-things. Art is huge. There's traditional and digital, 2D and 3D, illustration, animation, concept art, fine arts, comics, storyboard, and so much more. There are a lot of places one can end up and so many paths possible to follow. Personally, I'm interested in illustration, concept art, and fine arts. As for style, I can't yet distinguish what I like to see and what I want to do. My references folder has a wide range of styles and I'm honestly just going to wait and see what happens. However, I know that I want to learn to paint and draw realistically, and that I want to learn to draw in a more abstract stylized cartoony style too. For now, my mind is set in exploring and not worrying about finding my style.

Read next: I’m teaching myself art - Mindset

Read the whole series: My plans |  Aspirations, Career, and Style |  Mindset

[redmaneartstudies]

I’m teaching myself art - My plans

Hey there, I'm Natasha Redmane, welcome to my the beginning of my journey. I never expected I would want to become an artist someday. My whole life I was driven into STEM and thought that art wasn't for me. I didn't know how to draw and didn't think of myself as a creative. Now I'm 24 years old, I realized how much I really wanted to try and learn it. I've already started learning to draw a few months ago, but nothing serious, just a few practices here and there. I'll show you all about my journey in this series.

My Plan Now, teaching myself art... how exactly I'm going to do that? I've been researching and thinking a lot about it, and I've come up with a plan... kinda. Right now I can't afford paying for courses or mentorships, but that's fine, there's plenty of resources available on the internet for free or cheap and what matters the most is how much time I spend actually practicing the skill.

I've been getting inspiration from the curriculum of art schools that focus on the entertainment industry like CGMA, Brainstorm school, and FZD School of Design, not to replicate what they learn there but just to give me some direction. And I'm also paying attention to what artists say about their own journey, what they did that worked and what didn't work, what they would change if they were to start from the beginning again. From that, I decided to divide this project in 3 stages:

Stage 1: Learning to draw. This stage's focus is on learning the skill and not thinking about the business of art. I'm starting with learning to capture accurate proportions and anatomy, basics of rendering, perspective, how to draw things in 3D space using the draw-through method, and lots of sketching studies from references to expand my visual library. I also want to learn about design principles: composition, proportions, balance, thumbnails, etc. I'll use free or cheap resources to teach myself all of this and I'll be sharing everything I used and how I used it. I can't tell you everything I'll do beforehand because I'm not creating a study plan longer than two weeks ahead of time. I'll have to find out what I'll need to practice as I'm studying. But as soon as I'm done with a week of studies, I'll publish my schedule and studies.  Once I feel secure about my foundations, I'll move to the next stage.

theory > assignment > project. I'm using this structure in my studies, although I'm not sure how, yet. I'll learn about a new subject, then I'll get assignments to apply the new knowledge, and at the end, I'll do a project to see how it improved my general skill.

Stage 2: Learning to work. This stage's focus is on learning to deal with projects, learning what I'd like to work with, and taking my skill to the next level. I'll start looking for mentorships, start learning how to make the process more efficient, and improve the quality of my work to a professional level. I’ll start learning more about how to price my work, how to deal with clients,

Stage 3: Building a portfolio. This stage's focus is to work on projects that will compose my portfolio, get it reviewed and improve whatever it is that it needs to be improved.I'm not putting deadlines in any of these stages because I can't possibly predict how much time it'll take. They exist just to give me some direction and are not at all plans set in stone.

Read next:  I’m teaching myself art - Aspirations, Career, and Style

Read the whole series: My plans |  Aspirations, Career, and Style |  Mindset