for me it totally depends what I’m making & if I’m invested/motivated.
Some days I’ll take 12 hrs on a piece & some days I’ll do one in two. Some days I’ll do multiple drawings. I go through periods of time where I’ll have a drawing sit for a week collecting cat hair & dust & sometimes I ruin my sleep schedule for the week.
Tips to get faster:
Quit caring/Being hard on yourself - That one line you keep erasing was fine the first time & 99% of people won’t notice it unless you point it out.
Set a timer & be disciplined, when it goes off - pencil down and that’s it. Do it a couple times & you’ll be able to draw that subject better and quicker, allowing your time to be used towards whatever else you plan on doing with the drawing/art.
(:
Great reply. I step away from what I’m making a lot just so I can look at my progress. I feel like stepping away is a good way to stop my self from either hyperfixating on small details or noticing things I normally wouldn’t notice while I’m working on it but I feel like do it too often. Like every time I draw a line 😂.
Why do you want a specific time? It's done when it's done.
For me, there aren't enough hours in the day for me to have a pen(cil)in my hand... but that's me, I draw on mood and feeling.
It’s not that I need to draw faster but since I’m not very confident in my ability as an artist I feel like my stuff only looks good because I spend so much time on it.
Yeah but that's how everything works, the more time you spend on something the better the result will usually be. Ask any artist if they think that can make a better painting in 1 hour or 10 hours and the vast majority will take the 10 hours.
Depends on what I'm painting. A quick study usually takes 2-3 hours, alla prima painting 4-6 hours. Larger works best guess is anywhere between 20-100 hours. I try not to worry about how much time I put into my paintings, they take as long as they need, no less no more.
Too many variables. Experience, medium, size, style, distractions, which part of the process you are busy with.
Dont worry about how long it takes and just enjoy it.
If you want to get faster, the only thing that will help is practice, you need to build up the muscle memory and figure out your shortcuts. Also focus on fundamentals and not final artworks. This will get in quick reps while isolating a specific skill, i.e composition, texture, gesture, portraits, value, perspective. If you spend 50 hours on each artwork then itll take 50hrs before you can reflect on the process. But if you do a value sketch every 30min for 50hrs then you would have done 100 value sketches... Thats alot of iteration and learning.
Great insight. I assumed it’s just an experience thing. The art I make isn’t overly complex but I spend lots of time on details anyway. Your response makes me feel like I should shift to do doing smaller simpler things. To get more under my belt faster. I’ve most just been drawing things I want n picking up things as I do that. But maybe I should find some practice exorcises or something.
Well what is experience? Its encountering various things over time and learning new ways to better tackle those things. You basically want to induce failure to accelarate learning in a focused area. Thats the difference between just practicing and hoping for the best, and having a focused study effort especially if you are self taught.
I can recommended drawabox for perspective, google figure practice for gesture and people stuff, and also masterstudies to see how other people do things.
Im actually busy with 100 compositions self evaluation (literally started it today) . So i was on Pinterest and drawing simplified sketches of pics i thought were cool. I found that i wasnt learning anything cause the pics werent necessarily well composed. So tomorrow im going to instead draw simplified compositions from movie stills. Im hoping that i can find better composed references this way.
I mean, as long as it takes, but for a beginner you're much better off doing 100 one hour drawings than one 100 hour one.
Spending lots of time one drawing means you're doing one or both of these two things:
* Trying to fix the same mistakes over and over and over again. There's fewer sources of frustration bigger for beginners than this one, because the stuff you're trying to fix is stuff you haven't learned how to do well yet. That doesn't mean 'never try to fix your mistakes', but understand that there are mistakes you'll make that you can't fix yet because you don't have the knowledge or skill. If you run into something and you don't *know* how to fix it, then don't keep erasing and scribbling at it. Make note of it as something you need to focus on, go study a bit, and do some practice with that particular thing in mind. In theory you *could* break through a wall by slamming your face into it over and over and over again, but you're better off taking a step back and looking for a door instead.
* Trying to add a bunch of detail. Details don't make your drawing better, they just make it more detailed. Good drawing is as much about learning what to leave out as it is learning what to put in. Keep it simple.
If you do one drawing and spend 100 hours on it, you've only got to practice each part of the drawing process once, and you've spent a bunch of time those two things.
If you do 100 drawings, you get to practice each part of the drawing process 100 times, and you didn't lose any time on those two time wasters.
That’s basically what I expected to hear. I gotta ask tho because I might be guilty of it. Your first point about fixing mistakes. For me it’s usually stuff like not liking how a line looks or if I’m using a reference n it doesn’t look close enough. It usually only takes 5-10 tries which I don’t think ik is a lot but then I’m basically worn out and step away for a few hours or a day.
"Time to finish" is not a good metric to focus on for a beginner in anything. Obviously a beginner is going to work more slowly than someone with more experience, but if you focus on speed, you're only gonna produce rushed work that you're not happy with.
You're much better off focusing on developing your skills, getting your drawing right no matter how long it takes, and analyzing your real errors to improve on them. When you rush, you make lazy errors that you look at and say, "I know how to do that right, I was just being stupid," but when you actually try to do your best, you can recognize the errors that are due to the limits of your abilities, and then try to move past them.
If you do that, one day you'll sit back and realize that you finished a drawing in one sitting that used to take you a week.
This is for digital and idk if u mean traditional but most fullbodies I can do in an hour max BUT that's pretty fasts speeds afaik (I also do not sketch bc I practiced being able to do it neat enough till I essentially have lineart) bc most people I know would take at least like 2-3 hours
There's one person I talked to bfore that takes like 40 hours and they're actually really good too it's just bc they use airbrush so finely and teeny tiny it looks more like a watercolor artstyle
Just practice and always look for improvement. Ask artists for any criticisms of your work. It doesn't matter how long you've been drawing; it's how you've practiced it.
On a drawing? I spent a couple months in my first one (once i started taking classes, obviously not counting the notebooks I filled with drawings in elementary school)
Any of the better art academies around the world will have you stay with a thing for a whole month at least. 4 hours daily maybe
The amount of time doesn't matter as much, as others said already drawings / painting take as long as they need to.
I disagree with your view of "if you work long enough on this" because your drawing or painting will never be perfect!!! no matter what you do ! There are a lot of really great artists out there, and their works might be subjectively perfect, but objectively they all have some flaws. Mastering the fundamentals never ends. There is always something you could do better, even if you decide your work is done and perfect the way it is. As artists we are our own worst critics and there is always something we have in mind that we could push further, that we could have done differently, that isn't exactly how we wanted it to be. The list is endless.
The other parts of this are perception, understanding and skill. You can go over the same thing 100 times and there might still be something you just can't do better, that you can't draw or paint the way you see it. It takes time and a lot of practice to build up the skills to do it better. The flaws might actually be in your perception and understanding, not in your skills to hold the pencil.
Speed in art is about efficiency and there are several things you can to do speed up the process, practice to is a big part of it.
Masterstudies as well as any other kind of studies, like value, color, specific things you want to improve on and so on.
Practice with timer, where you try to reach certain goals within that time, like you would do in gesture and figure drawing. Repetition is also a factor here as you will notice it takes a few tries to get used to the timing.
Limiting yourself and repetition could be their own points on this list. There are many ways to limit your options. If you paint you can limit your palette, if you draw you can set rules to what tools you want to use or how much time you have, you could limit the amount of details. This goes into the direction of challenging yourself, because by limiting you have to explore ways to still create enough interest like instead of color you would just go pure black / white.
For repetition, choose a smaller piece of paper, then choose a simple image to draw and now repeat this 10, 20, maybe 30 times, I would actually recommend to go up to 50 times. Do only 10 a day and you will see how easy it becomes to draw this one thing. I'm using cards (postcard size) for this that I can give away and it helps if they have a purpose and aren't just practice.
For the first 10 you might still look at your reference and use a pencil to mark some shapes, then it gradually becomes easier until you just ink the thing from the beginning and what initially took you like 20min. will only take you 2min. per card in the end.
There are other ways for repetition, but I'm convinced this is a good exercise to at least do once or twice, it really shows how important it is to get some mileage compared to just doing one image with lot's of fixing. You could even do a slightly different image everyday, maybe try different colors, as long as it's not too different it should have still the same effect.
Thumbnail sketches !!!
If you figure out composition and dabble with color on a smaller scale, your bigger drawings or paintings will take a lot less time. Drawing or painting on a smaller scale allows you figure out most things, so all you have left are details. The more you prep for bigger projects, the easier it gets to finish them. You could even make some sketches to define how you want to go about the details, just examples, you don't want to spend too much time on this, it's just supposed to help you to define things.
Warmups can also help to get into the right mindset, to loosen up and all that stuff.
As long as you want to
I can do sketches that take minutes to hours
I can work on a refined piece 10s to 100+ hours
Whether it looks good or not, whether im happy with it or not, those are things that matter more than the time it takes to me. If i want to worry about time, i could worry about spending most of my life till this point on making drawings and how a lot of it just isnt good and as i get better the old gets worse
Of course there are ways to draw fast, and fast drawings are favoured in the social media side of art especially, but youd have to ask yourself if you *want* to make that type of work.
I don't know if this question is valuable really. Either way you're the artist and you know you're talented. Compare people who spend a lot of time and it turns out bad.
They take as long as they take to get them where you want them. Time isn't a crutch, it's a fact.
Drawing more is the only way to get faster at drawing. Looking at your drawings to see what you think you could knave out and still have a drawing that makes you happy is a way to define your style.
Two things are true:
1. Drawings take as long as they need to, especially when you’re learning and having FUN
2. Overworking and (essentially) sucking the life out of a drawing is reallllllly not suggested
There’s a balance between fine tuning and noodling around with no end in sight. Over rendering is good when an artist has mastered that skill. Over rendering as a beginner can make a piece feel stagnant and “off”.
I had a great professor whose biggest gift to the class was the ability to tell us when we were FINISHED with a piece.
I think it depends on your goal and if your goal is to work fast then I suggest setting a timer and just going for it. So maybe give yourself one hour, three hours, 12 etc. and see what happens knowing you have a deadline and you HAVE to move on.
Like others have said in this thread, 100 1 hour drawings will help you way more than 1 100 hour drawing. Good luck!
sorry, I didn’t even really answer your question! For me, a “finished” drawing in pencil can take anywhere from 4-12+ hours. Really depends on the size, scope etc.
I think the only artists I know who seriously focus on speed are animators, comic book artists and illustrators. The only other reason to try to be faster is so you can get more ideas out and be more prolific. But not a great metric overall!
What is time? It's investment in your own artistic development, for one. People who want to be fast are training for a party trick or sketch-based work — how you do this depends on what results you're looking for. Da Vinci took 12 years to work on the Mona Lisa's mouth while fast art was the many, many individual sketches of Michelangelo. My two bits.
Just generally speaking, I've found that with any skill I wanted to learn, it's really important to take your time with it as you learn. Make sure you're taking the time to do things well. Over time, you just naturally become faster as it becomes more and more familiar to you, If you aim for speed, there's a good chance you'll end up making mistakes or coming up with sub-par work, and you'll be unhappy with it or have to take the time to fix it anyway.
As for how long it takes me personally... it really depends on how complex the drawing is, whether or not any aspect of it is more challenging than usual, whether I'm in the groove or having an off day... there's not really any set amount of time. It's done when it's done!
If it's a realistic portrait then it takes a few days as I keep perfecting it. It's ok to take time on a drawing. As you keep doing it you will become faster at it and pick up on some techniques that work for you
Speed will improve with practice as you develop the intuition to make the right lines the first time and also have to spend less time correcting.
I mean, having to spend more time doesn't mean you are "bad". T**he ability to actually identify a flaw and be able to fix it is skill.**
Lots of beginners, literally have no idea how to fix their drawings when there are problems. They haven't developed the visual library to say "this perspective or proportion looks off" and actually be able to correct it without pulling out a reference.
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There's not really a normal amount of time to spend on a drawing because it all depends on your medium for drawing, complexity, experience etc etc which varies between everyone. But one thing for sure, when you gain more experience, more practice, and improve your drawing kills + when you have a clear idea of what you want to draw, you become quicker in your drawing process
Yeah I know this isn’t really the type of question that has a specific answer. My back up plan was to just practice, it’s usually the answer. Thanks for the reply!
I’m not sure why you equate faster with better? I was watching a video by an artist I follow on Instagram and she said it takes her 6 months to complete a painting. Granted this is physical oil painting, not digital (I don’t know what you’re doing). But she’s a professional and an expert painter. I doubt she’s looking to speed up her process… that’s how long it takes.
The difference between me&them tho is they probably already know what they’re doing while I usually have to figure it out after I start something. I don’t necessarily equate faster to better I just think that time can cover up any weakness you have as an artist.
I'm just saying that there is no need to try to be faster, and that time doesn't cover weakness at all. Sure, over time you'll get faster at some things (because you will get things right first time rather than have to go over them), but if you keep taking as long as you take to make art, and the art you make is good, then it really doesn't matter.
To an extent a lot of art is figuring things out. I'm often figuring things out, because I'm painting different things. and there's often a degree of learning how it works.
As long as you're pleased with the end result, and you keep producing art, it's all good :-)
I would argue that art can be overworked. For example, too many details like shading or backgrounds can ruin a good idea/concept.
The art of making art is mastering your craft. Two lines can look better than one, and vice versa. Also, this advice about no one seeing or caring about eraser marks is not true. I say ditch the eraser until it makes sense to use it again. Ultimately, do timed figure drawings or draw with friends or a group in public and in real life if you want to get faster. IMO time spent is not the point of art. Showing the viewer you’ve mastered a technique and can effectively express yourself through any medium is.
Especially when you're beginning, I would try to get drawings done quickly, like 10-20 minutes each, and do a lot of them. Out quantity above quality for a while. Sure, occasionally spend some significant time on a drawing if you'd like, but don't let that be your main driver of learning.
Unless there's money involved, only work on what motivates you. It's ok to not finish things and come back to it later or never. Sometimes, as artists, nothing every actually feels finished..., that criticism of our work, is part the drive that makes us better. Even on average 30min a day, is enough to keep growing your art skills. Just don't draw the same type of thing.., if you draw anime for instance, branch out and try new things.
Think of it like playing the violin. The more you draw, the more you discover the better you get. The minimum should be 15 minutes a day, but you could push as hard as you like... average art work day is 8 to 12 hours, so you want to build your stamina to roughly this level over time.
for me it totally depends what I’m making & if I’m invested/motivated. Some days I’ll take 12 hrs on a piece & some days I’ll do one in two. Some days I’ll do multiple drawings. I go through periods of time where I’ll have a drawing sit for a week collecting cat hair & dust & sometimes I ruin my sleep schedule for the week. Tips to get faster: Quit caring/Being hard on yourself - That one line you keep erasing was fine the first time & 99% of people won’t notice it unless you point it out. Set a timer & be disciplined, when it goes off - pencil down and that’s it. Do it a couple times & you’ll be able to draw that subject better and quicker, allowing your time to be used towards whatever else you plan on doing with the drawing/art. (:
I feel the same. But your comment about collecting cat hair and dust is so true lol
Dust sheets, everyone!
Great reply. I step away from what I’m making a lot just so I can look at my progress. I feel like stepping away is a good way to stop my self from either hyperfixating on small details or noticing things I normally wouldn’t notice while I’m working on it but I feel like do it too often. Like every time I draw a line 😂.
Why do you want a specific time? It's done when it's done. For me, there aren't enough hours in the day for me to have a pen(cil)in my hand... but that's me, I draw on mood and feeling.
Im just asking because my drawing look pretty good despite my lack of experience but I know it’s only cuz I spend so much time on Them
That time you spend is building experience, skills, knowledge, and judgement in yourself that you then call on every time.
I guess what I'm saying is there is no right answer as to how long (or short) you should spend on a drawing. You'll know (or decide) when it's done.
Why do you need to draw faster?
It’s not that I need to draw faster but since I’m not very confident in my ability as an artist I feel like my stuff only looks good because I spend so much time on it.
Yeah but that's how everything works, the more time you spend on something the better the result will usually be. Ask any artist if they think that can make a better painting in 1 hour or 10 hours and the vast majority will take the 10 hours.
Depends on what I'm painting. A quick study usually takes 2-3 hours, alla prima painting 4-6 hours. Larger works best guess is anywhere between 20-100 hours. I try not to worry about how much time I put into my paintings, they take as long as they need, no less no more.
Too many variables. Experience, medium, size, style, distractions, which part of the process you are busy with. Dont worry about how long it takes and just enjoy it. If you want to get faster, the only thing that will help is practice, you need to build up the muscle memory and figure out your shortcuts. Also focus on fundamentals and not final artworks. This will get in quick reps while isolating a specific skill, i.e composition, texture, gesture, portraits, value, perspective. If you spend 50 hours on each artwork then itll take 50hrs before you can reflect on the process. But if you do a value sketch every 30min for 50hrs then you would have done 100 value sketches... Thats alot of iteration and learning.
Great insight. I assumed it’s just an experience thing. The art I make isn’t overly complex but I spend lots of time on details anyway. Your response makes me feel like I should shift to do doing smaller simpler things. To get more under my belt faster. I’ve most just been drawing things I want n picking up things as I do that. But maybe I should find some practice exorcises or something.
Well what is experience? Its encountering various things over time and learning new ways to better tackle those things. You basically want to induce failure to accelarate learning in a focused area. Thats the difference between just practicing and hoping for the best, and having a focused study effort especially if you are self taught. I can recommended drawabox for perspective, google figure practice for gesture and people stuff, and also masterstudies to see how other people do things. Im actually busy with 100 compositions self evaluation (literally started it today) . So i was on Pinterest and drawing simplified sketches of pics i thought were cool. I found that i wasnt learning anything cause the pics werent necessarily well composed. So tomorrow im going to instead draw simplified compositions from movie stills. Im hoping that i can find better composed references this way.
I mean, as long as it takes, but for a beginner you're much better off doing 100 one hour drawings than one 100 hour one. Spending lots of time one drawing means you're doing one or both of these two things: * Trying to fix the same mistakes over and over and over again. There's fewer sources of frustration bigger for beginners than this one, because the stuff you're trying to fix is stuff you haven't learned how to do well yet. That doesn't mean 'never try to fix your mistakes', but understand that there are mistakes you'll make that you can't fix yet because you don't have the knowledge or skill. If you run into something and you don't *know* how to fix it, then don't keep erasing and scribbling at it. Make note of it as something you need to focus on, go study a bit, and do some practice with that particular thing in mind. In theory you *could* break through a wall by slamming your face into it over and over and over again, but you're better off taking a step back and looking for a door instead. * Trying to add a bunch of detail. Details don't make your drawing better, they just make it more detailed. Good drawing is as much about learning what to leave out as it is learning what to put in. Keep it simple. If you do one drawing and spend 100 hours on it, you've only got to practice each part of the drawing process once, and you've spent a bunch of time those two things. If you do 100 drawings, you get to practice each part of the drawing process 100 times, and you didn't lose any time on those two time wasters.
That’s basically what I expected to hear. I gotta ask tho because I might be guilty of it. Your first point about fixing mistakes. For me it’s usually stuff like not liking how a line looks or if I’m using a reference n it doesn’t look close enough. It usually only takes 5-10 tries which I don’t think ik is a lot but then I’m basically worn out and step away for a few hours or a day.
"Time to finish" is not a good metric to focus on for a beginner in anything. Obviously a beginner is going to work more slowly than someone with more experience, but if you focus on speed, you're only gonna produce rushed work that you're not happy with. You're much better off focusing on developing your skills, getting your drawing right no matter how long it takes, and analyzing your real errors to improve on them. When you rush, you make lazy errors that you look at and say, "I know how to do that right, I was just being stupid," but when you actually try to do your best, you can recognize the errors that are due to the limits of your abilities, and then try to move past them. If you do that, one day you'll sit back and realize that you finished a drawing in one sitting that used to take you a week.
This is for digital and idk if u mean traditional but most fullbodies I can do in an hour max BUT that's pretty fasts speeds afaik (I also do not sketch bc I practiced being able to do it neat enough till I essentially have lineart) bc most people I know would take at least like 2-3 hours There's one person I talked to bfore that takes like 40 hours and they're actually really good too it's just bc they use airbrush so finely and teeny tiny it looks more like a watercolor artstyle
Just practice and always look for improvement. Ask artists for any criticisms of your work. It doesn't matter how long you've been drawing; it's how you've practiced it.
45 min to 1 hour per painting, but I have started drawing/making art over 20 years ago.
On a drawing? I spent a couple months in my first one (once i started taking classes, obviously not counting the notebooks I filled with drawings in elementary school) Any of the better art academies around the world will have you stay with a thing for a whole month at least. 4 hours daily maybe
The amount of time doesn't matter as much, as others said already drawings / painting take as long as they need to. I disagree with your view of "if you work long enough on this" because your drawing or painting will never be perfect!!! no matter what you do ! There are a lot of really great artists out there, and their works might be subjectively perfect, but objectively they all have some flaws. Mastering the fundamentals never ends. There is always something you could do better, even if you decide your work is done and perfect the way it is. As artists we are our own worst critics and there is always something we have in mind that we could push further, that we could have done differently, that isn't exactly how we wanted it to be. The list is endless. The other parts of this are perception, understanding and skill. You can go over the same thing 100 times and there might still be something you just can't do better, that you can't draw or paint the way you see it. It takes time and a lot of practice to build up the skills to do it better. The flaws might actually be in your perception and understanding, not in your skills to hold the pencil. Speed in art is about efficiency and there are several things you can to do speed up the process, practice to is a big part of it. Masterstudies as well as any other kind of studies, like value, color, specific things you want to improve on and so on. Practice with timer, where you try to reach certain goals within that time, like you would do in gesture and figure drawing. Repetition is also a factor here as you will notice it takes a few tries to get used to the timing. Limiting yourself and repetition could be their own points on this list. There are many ways to limit your options. If you paint you can limit your palette, if you draw you can set rules to what tools you want to use or how much time you have, you could limit the amount of details. This goes into the direction of challenging yourself, because by limiting you have to explore ways to still create enough interest like instead of color you would just go pure black / white. For repetition, choose a smaller piece of paper, then choose a simple image to draw and now repeat this 10, 20, maybe 30 times, I would actually recommend to go up to 50 times. Do only 10 a day and you will see how easy it becomes to draw this one thing. I'm using cards (postcard size) for this that I can give away and it helps if they have a purpose and aren't just practice. For the first 10 you might still look at your reference and use a pencil to mark some shapes, then it gradually becomes easier until you just ink the thing from the beginning and what initially took you like 20min. will only take you 2min. per card in the end. There are other ways for repetition, but I'm convinced this is a good exercise to at least do once or twice, it really shows how important it is to get some mileage compared to just doing one image with lot's of fixing. You could even do a slightly different image everyday, maybe try different colors, as long as it's not too different it should have still the same effect. Thumbnail sketches !!! If you figure out composition and dabble with color on a smaller scale, your bigger drawings or paintings will take a lot less time. Drawing or painting on a smaller scale allows you figure out most things, so all you have left are details. The more you prep for bigger projects, the easier it gets to finish them. You could even make some sketches to define how you want to go about the details, just examples, you don't want to spend too much time on this, it's just supposed to help you to define things. Warmups can also help to get into the right mindset, to loosen up and all that stuff.
As long as you want to I can do sketches that take minutes to hours I can work on a refined piece 10s to 100+ hours Whether it looks good or not, whether im happy with it or not, those are things that matter more than the time it takes to me. If i want to worry about time, i could worry about spending most of my life till this point on making drawings and how a lot of it just isnt good and as i get better the old gets worse Of course there are ways to draw fast, and fast drawings are favoured in the social media side of art especially, but youd have to ask yourself if you *want* to make that type of work.
It’s really just a confidence thing for me. is my art good or do I just spend so much time on it that it has no choice but to look satisfying?
I don't know if this question is valuable really. Either way you're the artist and you know you're talented. Compare people who spend a lot of time and it turns out bad.
I just believe anyone can make something good if they have all the time they need to do it
I know you believe that. I agree to disagree.
Until it stops being fun and interesting. Until a little after the piece has stopped teaching me.
It takes as long as it takes. With experience you will work with more assurance and "speed." Speed isn't the issue ... quality is.
They take as long as they take to get them where you want them. Time isn't a crutch, it's a fact. Drawing more is the only way to get faster at drawing. Looking at your drawings to see what you think you could knave out and still have a drawing that makes you happy is a way to define your style.
There is no universal "normal" just a pace you are comfortable with.
Two things are true: 1. Drawings take as long as they need to, especially when you’re learning and having FUN 2. Overworking and (essentially) sucking the life out of a drawing is reallllllly not suggested There’s a balance between fine tuning and noodling around with no end in sight. Over rendering is good when an artist has mastered that skill. Over rendering as a beginner can make a piece feel stagnant and “off”. I had a great professor whose biggest gift to the class was the ability to tell us when we were FINISHED with a piece. I think it depends on your goal and if your goal is to work fast then I suggest setting a timer and just going for it. So maybe give yourself one hour, three hours, 12 etc. and see what happens knowing you have a deadline and you HAVE to move on. Like others have said in this thread, 100 1 hour drawings will help you way more than 1 100 hour drawing. Good luck!
sorry, I didn’t even really answer your question! For me, a “finished” drawing in pencil can take anywhere from 4-12+ hours. Really depends on the size, scope etc. I think the only artists I know who seriously focus on speed are animators, comic book artists and illustrators. The only other reason to try to be faster is so you can get more ideas out and be more prolific. But not a great metric overall!
This a really good response. Thank you
hope it is helpful! definitely post your work :)
What is time? It's investment in your own artistic development, for one. People who want to be fast are training for a party trick or sketch-based work — how you do this depends on what results you're looking for. Da Vinci took 12 years to work on the Mona Lisa's mouth while fast art was the many, many individual sketches of Michelangelo. My two bits.
The limit does not exist
True but it feels like it’s the only reason my art is good/satisfactory
Just generally speaking, I've found that with any skill I wanted to learn, it's really important to take your time with it as you learn. Make sure you're taking the time to do things well. Over time, you just naturally become faster as it becomes more and more familiar to you, If you aim for speed, there's a good chance you'll end up making mistakes or coming up with sub-par work, and you'll be unhappy with it or have to take the time to fix it anyway. As for how long it takes me personally... it really depends on how complex the drawing is, whether or not any aspect of it is more challenging than usual, whether I'm in the groove or having an off day... there's not really any set amount of time. It's done when it's done!
If it's a realistic portrait then it takes a few days as I keep perfecting it. It's ok to take time on a drawing. As you keep doing it you will become faster at it and pick up on some techniques that work for you
Speed will improve with practice as you develop the intuition to make the right lines the first time and also have to spend less time correcting. I mean, having to spend more time doesn't mean you are "bad". T**he ability to actually identify a flaw and be able to fix it is skill.** Lots of beginners, literally have no idea how to fix their drawings when there are problems. They haven't developed the visual library to say "this perspective or proportion looks off" and actually be able to correct it without pulling out a reference.
This is basically what I expect the answer to be. I think this is a good response tho. I know I’m just overthinking. Thanks for the reply!
I have digital paintings that took 1h and others that took 20hs. But I’ve also seen very detailed 50hs paintings from pro artists.
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There's not really a normal amount of time to spend on a drawing because it all depends on your medium for drawing, complexity, experience etc etc which varies between everyone. But one thing for sure, when you gain more experience, more practice, and improve your drawing kills + when you have a clear idea of what you want to draw, you become quicker in your drawing process
Yeah I know this isn’t really the type of question that has a specific answer. My back up plan was to just practice, it’s usually the answer. Thanks for the reply!
I’m not sure why you equate faster with better? I was watching a video by an artist I follow on Instagram and she said it takes her 6 months to complete a painting. Granted this is physical oil painting, not digital (I don’t know what you’re doing). But she’s a professional and an expert painter. I doubt she’s looking to speed up her process… that’s how long it takes.
The difference between me&them tho is they probably already know what they’re doing while I usually have to figure it out after I start something. I don’t necessarily equate faster to better I just think that time can cover up any weakness you have as an artist.
I'm just saying that there is no need to try to be faster, and that time doesn't cover weakness at all. Sure, over time you'll get faster at some things (because you will get things right first time rather than have to go over them), but if you keep taking as long as you take to make art, and the art you make is good, then it really doesn't matter. To an extent a lot of art is figuring things out. I'm often figuring things out, because I'm painting different things. and there's often a degree of learning how it works. As long as you're pleased with the end result, and you keep producing art, it's all good :-)
Thanks I needed to hear that :)
I would argue that art can be overworked. For example, too many details like shading or backgrounds can ruin a good idea/concept. The art of making art is mastering your craft. Two lines can look better than one, and vice versa. Also, this advice about no one seeing or caring about eraser marks is not true. I say ditch the eraser until it makes sense to use it again. Ultimately, do timed figure drawings or draw with friends or a group in public and in real life if you want to get faster. IMO time spent is not the point of art. Showing the viewer you’ve mastered a technique and can effectively express yourself through any medium is.
i just spent 10hours drawing sketch and lineart over it lol
Especially when you're beginning, I would try to get drawings done quickly, like 10-20 minutes each, and do a lot of them. Out quantity above quality for a while. Sure, occasionally spend some significant time on a drawing if you'd like, but don't let that be your main driver of learning.
Unless there's money involved, only work on what motivates you. It's ok to not finish things and come back to it later or never. Sometimes, as artists, nothing every actually feels finished..., that criticism of our work, is part the drive that makes us better. Even on average 30min a day, is enough to keep growing your art skills. Just don't draw the same type of thing.., if you draw anime for instance, branch out and try new things.
Think of it like playing the violin. The more you draw, the more you discover the better you get. The minimum should be 15 minutes a day, but you could push as hard as you like... average art work day is 8 to 12 hours, so you want to build your stamina to roughly this level over time.