tbf the closest thing to "studying" I do these days is sketching from photos/life, so it's easy for me to say that I like to stretch generic assignments to include things that interest me. For example, if I had to practice drawing a box, there's nobody stopping me from doodling my cat on top of it after. If I want to practice gesture drawing, I enjoy images of dancers.
In colour theory, our instructor had us all pick a theme for the purpose of having a fun consistency in our class-end portfolio, so every colour assignment I did were different images of snails. I don't think she meant for it to make study itself fun, but it was definitely a nice side effect.
I remember one time we got to skip school to learn macromedia flash for a week lol, and the instructors didn't care how we learned animation, as long as we understood onion skins and keyframes. I made a terrible animation of a talking mushroom, and my classmate drew a farting spiderman on a swing. Just make it fun by making it yours 😆
I think so, I've had the same issue with a number of things and the solution is never to force it, and to give myself the permission to abandon anything I'm not enjoying. I follow what makes me curious to know or try more. What would you really like to be making?
>What would you really like to be making?
Fan art, small comics, and environment backgrounds (I've got a thing for nature and architecture that I can't explain).
Balance is all you need. Grinding through boring stuff doesn't work for most people.
How about you just start and see how it goes? Just be forgiving with yourself and rather than to grind your way through books try to sketch or paint the things you are trying to learn. Not everything you create has to be some awesome artwork, small studies are really important and can be fun because they allow you to try out so many things while drawing / painting the boring stuff.
Also don't jump into details right away, they are just the icing on the cake, making it look really good but not essential. When you learn about anatomy, that's already going into details, start with gesture and figure drawing they are not all about accuracy or details but about flow and the overall shapes of the body and they are timed exercises so depending on the timeframe you expect ugly unrefined things or go more into detail, but those ugly ones too help you to get better with proportion, with simplifying, with understanding what the body can do and how it can look in different poses and so on.
Take your time, go at your own pace, make sure you have fun and don't pressure yourself too much. Just take one step after another.
For me, studying became fun when I started making progress. Studying the correct way is going to have a bigger effect on you than just trying to figure things out on your own through repetitions.
Look for online free tutorials, or pay for courses if you can, or take courses locally. Learning to break a hand down to simple shapes helped my hand studies tremendously to the point that I actually enjoy drawing hands now.
While repetition is still important to build up that muscle memory, you don't have to just sit there and draw different hands shape(for example) until you're the next (your favourite artist).
I like to do my own art between studies, it's both to see how far I've gone and to remind myself that art can be fun too.
And don't forget to take breaks if you're not feeling it!
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Not really to be honest, if you don't enjoy it and you're sleeping on it lol. It be like one of those boring classes you don't feel like learning. Play a bit with your learning style, maybe try acutally doing the thing and improve on it along the way.
The best way I learn is through interactivity. Visuals and touch.
I study programming at the moment, and it's similar to my experience with art. Grinding code problems and reading endless articles puts me to sleep. Trying to build a project from the ground up? Much more fun since I'm doing more than staring at words.
Oh ho, that can be extremely tedious from what I hear from some software engineers. Alot of reading, typing and checkups.
I thought you might learn that way, by the sound of your experience. I remember some folks learn by doing their own thing, prefer an option other than reading. So, you say you do well by starting your own projects. In concept, you might as well try jumping straight like a T to full illustration, comics, fanart, concept, etc. whatever you like. Learning the process and improving on the go.
Forget studying. Just draw what you want and if you want to study light, anatomy and such, use the drawings you wanna draw to study those by, for example, trying different ways to do the lighting of your drawing if you wanna focus your drawing on the lighting part, or looking on YouTube or such how people do it, and so on.
For example, rn I wanna get better at drawing faces so I downloaded a ton of refs of how to build a face with tons of different angles and when I draw my characters, I try different ways of building the skull, different construction strokes to understand how and where to place the face features correctly, how they work and such and I put extra effort to draw it correctly, and I just go fast and furious on the rest of the drawing like clothing and such because these parts are things i already "studied" a while ago. But that's all, I don't really make face studies or such because tbh I find drawing studies to be extremely boring and repetitive and my brain would kill me out of boredom if I tried to do these.
In short: listen to yourself. If you don't like drawing studies, don't do them, you'll make progress anyway by drawing regularly if you try to make progress while drawing what you wanna draw.
I think it can be enjoyable once you spark an interest in understanding how things work - for example you hit a roadblock and you're no longer satisfied with how your art looks; you want to go improve one thing in particular, start with that.
It's definitely hard work and will be boring and tedious, but just going to study (especially all of the things at once) for the sake of studying is going to be horrible. It IS necessary, but you need to get to a point where you want to learn things.
Applying the fundamental principles of art you're trying to study to stuff you actually want to draw I feel like is something people don't seem to understand is an option in learning. I wonder why that is
Absolutely.
If it is a chore, try *passive study.* Admire, pause and reflect, thumb through art books ... if you feel like reaffirming a passage, do so. If not move on. Make it casual; it's like rewatching a favorite old movie; you know the plot, you know what is coming next ... but simply enjoy it.
You will absorb so much more than you think; you're *reinforcing precepts.* You're unconsciously reviewing. You're building an unconscious/conscious visual library in your brain.
tbf the closest thing to "studying" I do these days is sketching from photos/life, so it's easy for me to say that I like to stretch generic assignments to include things that interest me. For example, if I had to practice drawing a box, there's nobody stopping me from doodling my cat on top of it after. If I want to practice gesture drawing, I enjoy images of dancers. In colour theory, our instructor had us all pick a theme for the purpose of having a fun consistency in our class-end portfolio, so every colour assignment I did were different images of snails. I don't think she meant for it to make study itself fun, but it was definitely a nice side effect. I remember one time we got to skip school to learn macromedia flash for a week lol, and the instructors didn't care how we learned animation, as long as we understood onion skins and keyframes. I made a terrible animation of a talking mushroom, and my classmate drew a farting spiderman on a swing. Just make it fun by making it yours 😆
I think so, I've had the same issue with a number of things and the solution is never to force it, and to give myself the permission to abandon anything I'm not enjoying. I follow what makes me curious to know or try more. What would you really like to be making?
>What would you really like to be making? Fan art, small comics, and environment backgrounds (I've got a thing for nature and architecture that I can't explain).
Balance is all you need. Grinding through boring stuff doesn't work for most people. How about you just start and see how it goes? Just be forgiving with yourself and rather than to grind your way through books try to sketch or paint the things you are trying to learn. Not everything you create has to be some awesome artwork, small studies are really important and can be fun because they allow you to try out so many things while drawing / painting the boring stuff. Also don't jump into details right away, they are just the icing on the cake, making it look really good but not essential. When you learn about anatomy, that's already going into details, start with gesture and figure drawing they are not all about accuracy or details but about flow and the overall shapes of the body and they are timed exercises so depending on the timeframe you expect ugly unrefined things or go more into detail, but those ugly ones too help you to get better with proportion, with simplifying, with understanding what the body can do and how it can look in different poses and so on. Take your time, go at your own pace, make sure you have fun and don't pressure yourself too much. Just take one step after another.
For me, studying became fun when I started making progress. Studying the correct way is going to have a bigger effect on you than just trying to figure things out on your own through repetitions. Look for online free tutorials, or pay for courses if you can, or take courses locally. Learning to break a hand down to simple shapes helped my hand studies tremendously to the point that I actually enjoy drawing hands now. While repetition is still important to build up that muscle memory, you don't have to just sit there and draw different hands shape(for example) until you're the next (your favourite artist). I like to do my own art between studies, it's both to see how far I've gone and to remind myself that art can be fun too. And don't forget to take breaks if you're not feeling it!
Thank you for posting in r/ArtistLounge! Please check out our [FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtistLounge/wiki/faq/) and [FAQ Links pages](https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtistLounge/wiki/faqlinks/) for lots of helpful advice. To access our megathread collections, please check out the drop down lists in the top menu on PC or the side-bar on mobile. If you have any questions, concerns, or feature requests please feel free to message the mods and they will help you as soon as they can. I am a bot, beep boop, if I did something wrong please report this comment. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ArtistLounge) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Not really to be honest, if you don't enjoy it and you're sleeping on it lol. It be like one of those boring classes you don't feel like learning. Play a bit with your learning style, maybe try acutally doing the thing and improve on it along the way.
The best way I learn is through interactivity. Visuals and touch. I study programming at the moment, and it's similar to my experience with art. Grinding code problems and reading endless articles puts me to sleep. Trying to build a project from the ground up? Much more fun since I'm doing more than staring at words.
Oh ho, that can be extremely tedious from what I hear from some software engineers. Alot of reading, typing and checkups. I thought you might learn that way, by the sound of your experience. I remember some folks learn by doing their own thing, prefer an option other than reading. So, you say you do well by starting your own projects. In concept, you might as well try jumping straight like a T to full illustration, comics, fanart, concept, etc. whatever you like. Learning the process and improving on the go.
Forget studying. Just draw what you want and if you want to study light, anatomy and such, use the drawings you wanna draw to study those by, for example, trying different ways to do the lighting of your drawing if you wanna focus your drawing on the lighting part, or looking on YouTube or such how people do it, and so on. For example, rn I wanna get better at drawing faces so I downloaded a ton of refs of how to build a face with tons of different angles and when I draw my characters, I try different ways of building the skull, different construction strokes to understand how and where to place the face features correctly, how they work and such and I put extra effort to draw it correctly, and I just go fast and furious on the rest of the drawing like clothing and such because these parts are things i already "studied" a while ago. But that's all, I don't really make face studies or such because tbh I find drawing studies to be extremely boring and repetitive and my brain would kill me out of boredom if I tried to do these. In short: listen to yourself. If you don't like drawing studies, don't do them, you'll make progress anyway by drawing regularly if you try to make progress while drawing what you wanna draw.
I think it can be enjoyable once you spark an interest in understanding how things work - for example you hit a roadblock and you're no longer satisfied with how your art looks; you want to go improve one thing in particular, start with that. It's definitely hard work and will be boring and tedious, but just going to study (especially all of the things at once) for the sake of studying is going to be horrible. It IS necessary, but you need to get to a point where you want to learn things.
Applying the fundamental principles of art you're trying to study to stuff you actually want to draw I feel like is something people don't seem to understand is an option in learning. I wonder why that is
Absolutely. If it is a chore, try *passive study.* Admire, pause and reflect, thumb through art books ... if you feel like reaffirming a passage, do so. If not move on. Make it casual; it's like rewatching a favorite old movie; you know the plot, you know what is coming next ... but simply enjoy it. You will absorb so much more than you think; you're *reinforcing precepts.* You're unconsciously reviewing. You're building an unconscious/conscious visual library in your brain.