What an incredible year of change it's been for the Line of Action community! Thanks to your support we're on a shiny new website, and for the first time in years, regular updates have been coming to our tools every few weeks. I so look forward to continuing that trend in 2019! I can't even put into words how appreciative I am for all of you.
But of course, fancy new practice tools are only helpful if you actually put the time in to consistent, focused practice.
How to design a better practice goal
If your main goal is "improve at drawing," you're setting yourself up for failure. You might make a little progress, but there's just too many things to pay attention to, to improve on, to learn, that your brain wil become overwhelmed and retain much less from practice -- unless you give yourself a very specific focus for every practice session.
Some examples of better goals:
- Draw more recognizeable faces
- Improve the proportions of my hands and feet in relation to the rest of the body
- Use more confident, less "sketchy" lines for my contour drawings
Some examples of GREAT goals:
- Understand the different planes of the face, with a focus on how shading the cheekbones changes depending on the subject's age.
- Experiment with choosing the most essential shapes to build horses, with a focus on correctly portraying their special leg anatomy.
- Capture the essential elements of each pose using only 10 lines or less.
These goals are better because they tell you exactly what to focus on. A good goal also makes it easier to tell whether you are doing "better" or not.
Keep your hyper-specific goal for a few days or weeks, and then switch to something else. You can rotate through your hyper-specific goals to keep making big progress and avoid plateus.
Come up with 5 - 10 hyper-specific goals for yourself, and then schedule when you'll practice each of them. Maybe you'll do one goal per week. Maybe you'll rotate through your different goals every day. Know how often you'll switch up your goal, what days you will practice on, and for how long.
Remember to update your Line of Action goals to match, to help you track your progress!
What practice goals and plans do you have for 2019? Please, share them in the comments of this post, so others can be inspired, expand and refine their plans, and create measurable goals.
凡事尘心 (unregistered visitor)
我是一个艺术工作者