3 year gesture after, Please critique

Hello everyone, happy new year!

I'm back on the forum, because today is my third year trying to learn drawing. So, I want to thank everyone who has helped me in my great journey, you are an amazing forum and I hope all the aspirants like me achieve their goal.

I would like you to strongly criticize my progress, I have noticed a small improvement in terms of the time it takes me to draw the body, but again I feel stuck and feel that it is not attractive enough.

On the other hand, I am having serious problems with painting, I have done a lot of research and practiced, but I am not making any progress.

I would really appreciate it if you could give me some recommendations to keep improving especially related to painting, as I feel that is where the difference between amateur and professional is made.

1 year

2 year

I share my practice and a finished work.

Greatest works on your march of progress in your 3rd year, Laitochris, and way to go. What I like specifically is how much you've gotten better in your boldest lines of action and rhythm in your quickest sketches, and am I so in love with your Red Riding Hood character illustration. Nicest job on taking most of your time with solidifying of the forms, tones, colors and lines.

However, I'm still not totally getting enough of your strongest and cartooniest and simplest lines of rhythm and tempo, and the most powerful caricatures in your shapes and forces. Would you like to take yet another whack of doing the 1 hour 30 minutes of 30 second quickest poses of real life poses, anime, and manga characters? As a result, your forces will be the least rigidest and blandest, and the most boldest, gutsiest, and powerful in your cartoon illustrations. If you're totally curious about cartoon sketching, would you care to look into the Action Cartooning book by Ben Caldwell, the 2 Walt Stanchfield PDFs, the Vilppu Drawing Manual PDF, and last but not least, my Pinterest link here. These have tons of influences and inspirations I've collected, then go help yourself out on downloading them all.

Hope these things have been marvelously helpful and useful.

Hey there Laitochris, I'm Siv, a beginner to art, so make sure to take everything I saw with a grain of salt.

There's a lot I don't know about you, and there will be things I may suggest that you are unwilling / unable to do, or even already practice. Please don't let this discourage you. Keep pushing forward with your art, and you WILL improve. There is no such thing as wasted effort.

It looks to me like you started off a few years back with traditional graphite + paper, and you now work digitally. Of course, I'm only seeing a tiny snapshot of your practice, but I do have a few suggestions:

1: Try to draw every day. It doesn't have to be a lot, and it's not a do or die thing (certainly missing a day or 2 is not a valid excuse to quit drawing) but make an effort to improve yourself a little each day.

2: Split your practice time into three portions: One to gain information (watch instructional videos, find advice, exercises, new ways to practice, etc), one to improve (Do a some of these exercises, I try to mix them up so I'm not doing the same thing every day) and one to have fun (work on something you enjoy, I like to do short, stylized comic strips, but you could work on your finished pieces, or whatever it is that brings you joy). I would split these in 20%, 40%, and 40% periods respectively, with short breaks in between. Having a bit of structure like this allows you to be more intentional with your practice, which tends to lead to faster improvement.

3: Incorporate as much variety as possible into your methods of practice. This will help you become a well rounded artist. Try out different drawing styles, different mediums, different references / inspiration, even different places, or postures to draw in. Mix and match these, and see what you like. Don't worry about being 'right' or 'wrong', whatever makes you enjoy your art the most, do more of that.

4: Set long and short term goals. Your long term goal should help set your overall direction, and should probably be able to answer the question 'why do I want to learn art'. Your short term goal should be a specific thing you want to improve, over a specific period. These would include the goals built into this site, but there are many more, for example you could say I want to learn how to draw hands, and then focus on hands for a month (remember to mix it up though, you don't want to get immediately burnt out on your goal). Then, after a month, go back and look at your previous work, and ask yourself, 'have I improved? Can I draw hands better now?' and speaking of your previous work...

5: Save your work. An easy trap to fall into, especially in digital art, is to draw things for practice, and then delete them. This leaves you with no reference for your improvement. It is important to go back over your work and look for your mistakes. This is especially helpful if you let them sit for a while, long enough for your brain to forget actually making the image. This will allow you to get more of a 'first impression' of it, and you may see things that you missed before, because you were looking at specific details you remembered. I would highly recommend starting a sketchbook / sketch journal.

A few side notes:

One exercise you may want to try out to improve your memory, as well as your imagination / improvisation, is an exercise I call quick look. Take your reference, and quickly scan over it. (I usually spend about 5 seconds) Note the major features, and then try to draw it from memory. Of course, you won't be able to remember everything, so you'll have to improvise a bit. That improvisation is what will help push you towards drawing from imagination, allowing you to become more confident in drawing your own characters.

You may also want to try to find / participate in more communities. You seem to be doing sort of a yearly checkin here, but I don't see much activity outside of that. I would try to find a community where you check in a bit more often, maybe once a week or so, and develop some connections with people. You can even try to find a local art club to participate in.

Best of luck, and props for making it this far, Stay Creative

--Siv