How do you get good at art really fast? We've all asked ourselves that question at some point, so... In this week's episode of YouTube Art School, I'll reach into my experience bag of 20 plus years working as a professional artist, my 10 years of teaching art and mentoring students to... To try and give you the best possible rundown. We often hear that practice makes perfect, but that's not true.
Regular practice is trash. It just doesn't work with art. So instead, I'm here to give you the blueprint to perfect.
Practice. Oh, oh, oh, class is starting. So what's the first thing that you should be doing to achieve perfect practice?
And you might want to skip this first part and move on to the second point in the timeline below if you already have some experience. But if art is new to you, this is your starting point. The first shortcut, the first step towards perfect practice is to trace other artists for practice purposes only, if that's not already obvious. And I did just say trace, a forbidden word in the art community. So let's unpack this real quick.
Tracing is not good when it's done to help you make a drawing that you would have otherwise not been able to do on your own. And as a result, kind of get credit for something that you can't actually do. Not that far from using AI, in my opinion.
And you learn very little doing that. It's great, however, when it's done with the purpose of learning. And I think a lot of us start off as artists doing just that. Tracing over other artists'work when I was much younger helped me realize I could also draw the same lines as those more experienced artists, even if I needed them to guide me with their actual drawing.
It made me realize that with some experience, I could probably do it too. Tracing gets real boring real fast though, so most of us will try to draw our own things at some point. And if that's you right now, how you approach this new challenge will make a massive difference.
The best way I believe is to first go into it blindly. So try drawing something that interests you until you inevitably hit a wall. Until like frustration builds and you find yourself unable to figure it out.
And it's at that point that it would be a great time to introduce some art study. My art studies always come as the result of a problem that I'm facing and I recommend that you do the same. If getting better faster is the goal, always use a problem-based approach. So start drawing and then when you run into something that you can't draw properly, a problem, you study that single thing until you can draw it.
This step is all about isolating the problem, really figuring out how much I know, and then what exactly I don't know. So don't study everything like a bunch of different topics all at once. Only study enough to solve that one single problem directly in front of you, blocking your path.
Do this each time that you run into a new issue, preventing you from completing the drawing that you're working on. And so now I've mentioned studying the problem directly in front of you. But here's how you actually do that. So as an example, and it could really be anything, but let's say I'm stuck drawing the face of a new character.
I'll start by finding a bunch of reference photos but also actual art from artists that I think are doing that specific thing better than me. It's important to have a mix of both. The real life reference will show me what it should look like while the drawing references will show me ways to simplify that reference. It basically shows me what other artists have found to be like valuable information from similar real life references and that's a huge time saver for me.
I think of it as like learning the best talent builds in an RPG game or like learning the best pattern of a game boss by looking at YouTube videos first. It's very likely that I would have eventually discovered the same, you know, or something equivalent on my own with enough time, but if I don't have to and I can instead just use the discovery of a bunch of other artists, then I save myself a huge amount of time. So now that I have references in hand, I actually won't start drawing just yet.
There's an important step that comes right before that, so I'll usually spend a minimum of like one to two minutes just sitting there. there and observing the references that I've collected. Not just looking at them, but actively observing like everything about it.
And that's a really long time to just be looking at something. But I think it's a crucial step, and I think it's really been a game changer for me when I started doing this. When you initially encounter that problem the first time, you know, all that time you spent wondering if what you're doing is right, erasing, trying again, all of that serves to highlight what you should be observing better.
It's like a clear piece missing to your puzzle and now you're searching for it as you observe. Now you know what you're looking for. And it's always very tempting to just go and draw it already.
But you should always force yourself to spend some extra time observing, not rush into it. it. One trick I like to use when looking at references is to try closing my eyes and imagine in as much detail as possible what that reference looks like. Then I'll open my eyes again and repeat the process until my mental image when my eyes are closed is significantly clearer. And it's at that point that you should be ready to try copying, without tracing this time, the references that you gathered from different angles, pulling more references if needed, testing different ways to draw and simplify the references, then go back to observing some more, and then, you know, do this over and over again, usually filling up the equivalent of a sketchbook page full of studies.
When the page is full, I usually consider that I've kind of acquired the skill. But there should be no guessing here, no drawing from imagination, only copying what you see from the references. And all of this, to solve the problem directly in front of you, which in my example was figuring out how to dry face. So what we've seen so far will make a huge difference, but we're not done.
The next thing to achieve perfect practice, and we're almost there, is to follow expert frameworks. It's basically a structured approach to learning built by an expert. And I'll do this myself for anything that I'm not an expert in, whether it be learning from fitness experts and how to work out my body to achieve my goals faster or learning. to cook or learning to go-kart and get better lap times. There are many experts out there who've dedicated their career to teaching others, you know, how to do what they do.
And the older I get, the more obvious it becomes that those are the people that I should go to to speed up my own progress. I don't ever plan to become a professional at any of those skills, but I value my time, you know, and I take my hobby seriously. So it makes sense to me, at least, to want to get as good as possible in as little time as possible. And that's probably why you're here if you're an artist. watching this.
You're definitely in the right place. I spent the last like 10 to 15 years teaching and learning about teaching art. It's my passion.
And that's why I have a channel full of free content like this. But you know, the structure can definitely be missing. So if you're looking for everything that you need to go from zero to pro, I also have an art program that I've dedicated years of my life building with video classes, exercises, an awesome discord community and a study workbook that will take your hand through all the content week by week.
And you can find a link to that in the video description down below or by visiting cgart.school. And I just wanted to add that I'll be extending the big sale to celebrate reaching 25,000 students last week. So you'll be able to get the entire program at a massive discount for a couple more days. And it might just be what you've been missing.
Check it out. But if your budget is $0, I also have a couple of freebies on there, including my starter brush set that includes a bunch of my favorite brushes. If you haven't grabbed it already, it's great value because it's free. Again, a link down below.
Now, finally, the last thing to achieve perfect practice is going to be to shrink the feedback loop as much as possible. Basically, eliminate as much time between your attempt and getting some feedback on that attempt. So the sooner you get feedback, the better.
You know, as toddlers and kids, we always have a parent or an authority figure right there almost at all times to correct, you know, anything that we're doing. If we're learning to talk and we mispronounce something, well, there's always a parent right there, right then, ready to correct us, right? And that makes for a very short feedback loop. You fail at something and you know immediately almost why you failed and what's the right answer. But we lose that as we get older, right?
People stop giving us feedback because I guess they think we got our shit together. But do we really? So that's what you should try to find when it comes to your art. It's not easy to find.
My art school program has a Discord community, like I just said, and it's a great place for students to ask others about their progress at any time. You should try to find something like that. It's not the only one, obviously.
Like during my early years as an artist, I was always on art forums. And later in my career, I had the art directors and the senior artists on the teams that I was working on to help me with feedback. And I just can't emphasize just how helpful a second set of eyes and constructive feedback can help to speed up your progress.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that you'll get better multiple times faster. And yeah, there are a lot of art communities around. If you look carefully, be part of one.
Do it. And that is going to be it for today's class. Now, you.
have the blueprint to achieving perfect practice, the fastest possible way to level up your art. So go out there and level up those art skills.