Learn How to Draw Part 2 (of 6) - How to Keep Motivation and Overcome Fear |
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What's the biggest challenge most beginning artists face? They are afraid to make mistakes! Even experienced artists often struggle with their own insecurity. Finally these feelings are the reason for most artist's blocks - be it conscious or subconscious.
You experience the same problems? No need to worry, this main obstacle to your drawing success can be overcome.
When Learning to Draw - think about yourself Well, to be honest it is not that easy. The first step is to relax and make yourself clear, there is no need to be afraid of failure! You don't have to prove anything to anyone. Your drawings are for you as long as you don't want to show them to others. Before you read on, take some minutes and think about this!
Ok, what are your conclusions? Perhaps you recognized, that you are most afraid to fail before yourself? For this problem I will show you a recipe later.
Drawing Failures You can AvoidThe next important thing to do, when starting your drawing endeavors is to reduce your risk of failure. Just follow these two important steps:
- 1. Choose easy subjects! I know it is tempting to start drawing complicated subjects - a portrait of a beloved person or nice sceneries you have seen recently. But this will inadvertly lead into failure unless you are a natural genius. Your drawing skills need time and practice to develop. So start with simple subjects. Copy other drawings, photos or simple still lives. Prefer subjects that consist of straight lines over complicated curved shapes.
 
- 2. Choose easy techniques for your drawings! Don't use colored pencils right from the start. Don't aim for creating photo-realistic drawings right from the beginning. Start small, first try to capture only outlines and proportions of your subject. Concentrate on the simplest parts and leave all the shading, texturing etc. for later.
Make Constant Progress in Learning DrawingThird you must make sure you make constant and regularly progress. Two tips how to achieve this:
- 1. Drawing a few minutes each day help more than only drawing through the whole weekend. I myself struggle to follow this advise much too often, but I learned it the hard way how necessary constant practicing. So try to find a few minutes every day for drawing.
 - 2. Don't be afraid to repeat drawings! Something went wrong? The best reason to start over again and to repeat this drawing. But don't overdo until you are bored by drawing. Instead try to find a new approach each time you are drawing the same subject. Try different interpretations, different angles, different light conditions etc.
Silence the Drawing Critic Within YouAnd now the most important tip. Your fear of failure is most probably to a large extend the fear to fail before yourself. So you need to silence the critic every one has within oneself.
Well actually it is very difficult to silence this critic completely. So use this trick:  Every time you want to start to criticize yourself, every time you feel your critic trying to spring into action, tell him: "Later!". Store the drawing in away and have a look at it a few months later. What happens then? When you take your drawing again and begin to criticize, it is some months old. Usually you'll see it isn't as bad as you thought. And if it was not that perfect, it cannot hit your self-confidence. When you followed these tips, you know: during the last months you have improved that much you don't need to worry about mistakes you made months ago! Learn Drawing FasterSilencing your critic works best if you can really make sure your progress is regular and continually. Besides the tips I told you can additionally boost your progress by getting a some good exercise books or practices on DVD.
But this is another chapter. New layer... New layer...
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