How To Improve Your Sketching Skills: Perfect Your Best Skills Or Diminish Your Shortcomings?

By Author: Ruediger Schmidt
Total Articles: 35
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Even if you are retired like most of my students, you've solely limited free hours and energy for your sketching hobby. And if you're creating art professionally then hours and energy may be even more limited and valuable to you!

And so you may be asking yourself: what ought I concentrate on when drafting? You could work on increasing your potentialsor you could put time in eliminating your shortcomings.

Rather a tricky decision. It's important to spend some thoughts on the decision into what to invest your energy.

On the one side you could center on your best skills. Let us say for example that you're outstanding in drafting seamless and realistic looking shadings. So you could invest a lot of your efforts in further improvement of these strengths. Some more time and energy will get your skill-level from "great" to "superb".

On the other hand you could put your efforts in fixing your weaker skills. Let us take for granted you need a lot of added practice in drawing perspective and proportions more accurately. With some effort you can increase your abilities in this area to at least intermediate ...
... levels.

But hang on! If you center solely on removing your shortcomings, you will put many effort to change these weaknesses into solely mediocre skills. In the long run that implies you may wind up with virtually only mediocre abilities, the consequence is only mediocrity.

You understand there are both rewards and disfavors to both choices be it building upon your existing strengths or be it countering your shortcomings.

A lot of artists try to tell you: leave the shortcomings and concentrate on your strengths. That's a good advice but as you will see only half the truth.

So what to do?

First of all it is important you recognize your shortcomings and you ought to understand how often your shortcomings harm your drawings. An example: If you are creating many pencil pictures, weak skills in proportions and perspective will impede you much more than missing experience in the use of colours. Actually these abilities are utterly useless as long as you remain sketching black and white pencil drawings.

And that's the significant thing: only forget these shortcomings that do not affect your drawing results and sketches. But invest a fair part of your time and energy into those shortcomings that keep you from getting better drawings and sketches. Work on compensating these shortcomings - and exclusively these!

So you should have a lot of hours left to work on improving your strengths even farther. And that's what you should do, also. If you comply to this strategy you will get the best results achievable for your efforts.

One last addition: these advices may sound a little like those efficiency stuff taught in business schools. And yes it is very similar. But it is not for pressing the last drip of creative thinking out of you and your time! It's only for doing the right things in the right order to help you improve your drawing skills most.

And naturally please do not ignore the entertaining part of sketching. So if you like to essay a new technique as it is entertaining then just do it! (and do not think about whether it will help you or not ...)
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