Designing better drawing resolutions for 2019

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.

 

Comments

凡事尘心 (unregistered visitor)

我是一个艺术工作者

Mx. Abi

In 2017 I conquered my fear of oil painting.
It was something I always wanted to try and never was courageous enough to try it. I also felt it was out of my ability because of the cost and the lack of well ventilated spaces. But I discovered water soluble oil and that CHANGED EVERYTHING!
In 2018 I embraced routine. I got out of my funk and into doing art on a regular basis.
Now it's 2019 and my goal is to lean into what is hard.

The new section of reference photos is perfect for me, because I have avoided backgrounds, scenery, landscape, buildings, etc . . . I avoid it because it is hard and I flail like a child being asked to eat their vegetables.

But over the past few years doing what is hard has made me a much better artist.
Drawing hands and feet, is all proportion and foreshortening and makes for better figure drawing. I got better at portraits by doing entire class modes of just mouths.
Drawing animals makes my people better because I don't have the same easy movements that let me render a human figure in a few lines.

I don't know what I will learn from this new challenge.
I do know that I will get better. Because I am going to lean into what is difficult.

Kim - Site admin

This is a very inspiring collection of completed resolutions! I can't wait to see what happens with your environment drawings this year.

candyangelo_drawws (unregistered visitor)

I want to understand animal anatomy and structure better - particularly on legs for dogs, equine and feline. And I also want to understand how to draw avian creatures better, focusing entirely on the legs and wings

Also, faces. I recently got ahold of some Loomis/Bridgman textbooks and will study them in-depth to get a better understanding on where I'm trying to go with simplifying shapes.

I think I want to overcome the fear of posting my work - while I don't mind constructive criticism, I have this bad habit of deleting my illustrations and drawings from my blogs whenever I notice small mistakes.

Also, I want to stop comparing myself to other artists - I see so many people that draw well and it immediately makes me feel insignificant. I'm hoping to change this by putting more work out there without relying on validation from other artists.

Overall. I just want to really push myself to draw the things I'm afraid of. I have the tools and resources and I don't want to waste them

Kim - Site admin

Oooh. please do post your drawings here, with or without the critique turned on! If you do, you'll be able to look back at the end of the year and see how far you've come. :) I'm even working on a feature where the site will automatically send you your first and last drawings of the year to show you your progress.

Carlos manuel (unregistered visitor)

Aprender a dibujar y en tender la figura humana

Kim - Site admin

Good luck! :)

Arishoks

Main goal is to better grasp composition, mostly with singular bodies in a space, and multiple bodies as well! Smaller goals are to be able to practice figures multiple times a week to try and get anatomy down, and also drawing better facial expressions.

Carlos (unregistered visitor)

Para aprender a dibujar bien el gesture

AY7xb

I've always had trouble with anatomy so that's one focus for this year. Aside from that, finding a 'place' in the broader online art eco-system &, as someone mentioned above, to stop comparing myself to other artists!

Enjoy the journey!

Olivia (unregistered visitor)

Llegar a dibujar 8 horas diarias jaja :´)

Torrilin

Make sure to get good use out of my museum card. There’s a good dozen museums I can visit for free, and I think I’ve only visited about 3. Have already made a start on this one tho I completely forgot about the original reason for my trip. Museum time is a chance to draw things I wouldn’t encounter in daily life. I may not draw them well but it’s usually a fun time. Feed my brain.

Get back on the wagon with drawing. My partner was very sick towards the end of the year and I didn’t have a lot of energy left over for creative stuff. I drew a bit but a lot of what I did was mindless cross hatching or circle drill. I was usually too tired to even turn the circles into faces.

And put some time in on analyzing my current favorite oh my god what drawing so I have put in some thought about how to place masses and actually support both characters. The artist has been dead for centuries but I’m pretty sure gravity still worked back then... it’s not the part that seems to stick out to anyone but it’s the part that bugs me most. The sense that the characters don’t have weight or mass. It’s not something people comment on much in general, but a lot of interesting poses are interesting because of the tension with gravity and the sense of weight.

Polyvios Animations

Hi, Line of Action. My goal is to make drawings of hands and feet precisely without any rough preparation. Just completed my first 6 hour class, and now I'm still back at my next 3 hour class. Period.
Thank you all for asking.

Joshua (unregistered visitor)

I want to improve my drawing fundamentals, specifically perspective and even more specific how to draw human anatomy in relation to a 3D environment. One thing I’m focusing right now is anatomy by practicing drawing different poses from references.

Away drawing (unregistered visitor)

We are providing free best drawing sketching art away drawing
https://awaydrawing.blogspot.com/

Geninha

Eu quero melhorar meus fundamentos do desenho, como desenho de corpo inteiro, e rostos em perspectivas diferentes, e conseguir desenvolver meu próprio estilo de desenho.
outro objetivo, também é melhorar meu desenho digital, tanto no computador, como no tablet.
e o terceiro, mas não menos importante, é conseguir trabalhar melhor meus planos de fundo, e trabalhar com a perspectiva em si.

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