When I first started drawing, something that I would often hear from professional artists was that you learned so much in your beginner stages. But then over time you make smaller and smaller gains. And as a beginner, I thought, "Well, whatever. Sounds a bit like an excuse for laziness if you ask me," but then as time went on it started to happen. I didn't feel like I was learning as much as I used to any more and I asked my artist friends and they felt the same way, that this was actually true. So if this is true, then first off why the hell would you improve more in your beginner stages? What's the key difference here? Is it really that it's more clear what you learn as a beginner or it's a lot simpler? And I can't help but think that is not it. Instead I think it has a lot more to do with how we approach these things. As a beginner, you can just sort of jump into it. You have no expectations laid on you. "Hey, I'm a beginner I can make as many bad things I feel like because guess what, I'm learning." You don't need to be good and hopefully you have no expectations of being good. You just do whatever you feel is best for learning and find out what you lack and filling those lacking holes. Time goes on, you have drawn a lot more and you call yourself an artist now. You might not be great But at the very least you're not a beginner anymore. You can draw things and you can show it to people and they can say, "You made a thing. Good job." But that doesn't mean we are where we want to be with our art. We can make things a lot more passable than before. In fact, we might have learned a couple of tricks to cover up our faults, and it's not so much that we aren't learning now. We are still drawing a lot, but we also have an identity to live up to now. To call yourself an artist, you have to also live up to the idea of being an artist, which means being a good artist. There's a lot more pressure now and maybe you can't really post anything you feel like because everything has to be a certain quality. In fact, you might even fear showing something for a critique because you're afraid they might find out you're not as good as you think that they think that you are. Wait, what? When started getting praise online with comments views and attention, you can also start to feel like there's a certain demand from you and this can make it difficult to make it feel like you should just be doing whatever you feel like. This is when you begin to struggle with your ego. And what is ego? It's a lot of things, but at the core we could say it's how you wish that others perceived you. So maybe you feel like you are not good enough, that you are a terrible artist, but you really wish that others saw you as a really, really good artist and when this doesn't match reality it can lead to some nasty side effects, like jealousy or grandiose Self-importance or a lot of self-pity. So a problem with all of this becomes that our elevated ego has made being good at art the most important thing in the world, and the irony of this is that now by studying and getting critique and addressing your own faults, you start to feel like you have actually failed to be a good artist. As a good artist, you need to be able to show your expertise in these fields but by studying you are actually admitting to yourself and everyone around you that you don't actually know what you're doing. So killing your ego is a difficult thing and it helps a lot to notice when you fall into these traps. But when it comes to art and studying and being a good artist, the most important thing to remember is that you will always be a beginner. What can keep us from improving is thinking that the more that we learn, the less there is to learn left, when it's actually the opposite. The more we learn, the more we expand our understanding of the subjects, and the more we find out that we don't actually know a whole lot. Even as a master of anatomy, perspective, and composition there will always be new things to learn, so odds are you will be 40 years old drawing really good hands and saying, "I really need to draw more hands." And you will be 50 years old drawing Anatomy well and saying, "I really should know how to draw a girls better." And you will be 60 years old saying, "I really should be drawing cute girls holding hands." Because although you might already know a lot about hands, anatomy and cute girls, there will always be a lot more to learn about it. You should remember that you will always be a beginner. Because when we stop being beginners is when we start to think that we know how things work. And when we think that we know how things work, we stop exploring that subject and we stop learning for the sake of learning. It's not getting stuck repeating the same starting steps over and over, but approaching advanced subjects with the openness and eagerness of the beginner. Because in the mind of an expert the options can often seem very very limited, but as a beginner very is no correct solution. It's just paying a lot more attention and being more open to being better than you were before. Thanks for listening. If you want to support my content, please like and subscribe. Also, you can buy me a coffee in the link below, or you can support me on patreon. See you! :)