Keeping Motivation and Overcoming Fear When Learning to Draw By R. Schmidt At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

The biggest challenge most beginner artists face: the fear to make mistakes! Even expert artists struggle often with their lack of self-confidence. At last these feelings are causing most artist's blocks - sometime the artist is aware of this, sometimes not.

Most probably you experience the same problem. But no need to worry, you can prevail over this main difficulty for your drawing success.

You and Your Drawings

Well, to be truthful it's not that effortless. Your first step should be to relax and to make yourself clear: there's no need to fear failure! You won't have to prove anything to any person. Your drawings are for you as long as you don't want to show them to others. Before reading on, take some minutes and instill this thought in your mind!

Ok, what's your conclusion? Perhaps you see now, that you are fearing most to fail before yourself? For this case I can show you a recipe later.

Avoiding Drawing Failures

The next essential advise to follow: when starting your drawings, reduce your risk of failure. Follow these two vital steps:

1. Easy subjects are the one to choose! I know it's tempting to start drawing difficult subjects - a portrait of an adored person or beautiful sceneries you saw of late. But this will inevitably lead into failure unless you are an unusual genius. You need time and practice to develop your drawing skills. So start with simple subjects. Copy other drawings, photos or simple still lives (if necessary). Prefer subjects consisting of straight lines over complicated curved shapes.

2. Simple techniques are the one to choose! Don't use colored pencils right from the beginning. Don't aim for drawing photo-realistic pictures right from the start. Start small and simple, first capture only proportions and outlines of your subject. Concentrate on simple parts and leave all the advanced stuff like shading, texturing etc. for later.

Ensure Constant Progress

Third you must ensure your progress is constant and regular. Two tips for achieving this:

1. Drawing a few minutes each day helps more than drawing through the whole weekend. I myself fail to follow this advise too often, but I learned it the hard way. So find a few minutes every day for drawing.

2. Don't be afraid to repeat! Something went wrong? It's the best reason to repeat this drawing and starting over again. But avoid overdoing it until you get bored by drawing. Instead find a new approach each time. Try different angles, light conditions, interpretations, compositions etc.

Silence the Art Critic Within You

And now the most important trick. Your fear of failure is most probably to a large extent your fear to fail before yourself. So you need to silence this small little critic every one of us has within oneself.

Actually it's a bit tricky to silence this critic completely. It's easier to deflect him using this trick:

Always when you want to start to criticize yourself, every time you feel your critic trying to spring into action, tell him: "Later!". Store the drawing away and have a look at it some months later.

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 improved that much there is no need to worry about failures you made months ago!

Learn Drawing Faster

Silencing your critic works best if you can really make sure your progress is regular and continually. Besides the tips I showed you, you can additionally boost your progress by getting a some good exercise books or practices on DVD.

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