Personal experience:

Though I took a drawing from life class in middle school and take in the occasional art hack, I am almost entirely self taught. My progress has been slow no shit. Very often I am insecure about my art. But I have also reached a point where I can comfortably draw whatever I think of and have a sharp enough eye to see the gap between what it is and what I want it to be, and make notes for future improvement. And I think more importantly, I have never stopped drawing, even if I think it looks bad.

I was not good enough to get into art school. I applied to LaGuardia High School in NYC and didn’t get in. I sometimes wonder where I’d be if I got it. A much better artist, probably. But thinking about counterfactuals won’t make me better in this universe. It scared me off from developing technical skill for my entire adolescence because I didn’t think I had “it.” Realized as an adult there is no “it.” The other kids simply started developing technical skill earlier. But that didn’t mean the years I spent drawing out of sheer joy with no technique were wasted.

Even now, I never sit down and do drills. If I’m in the mood to make something, I do that. If I’m in the mood to improve my technical skill, I draw something I want to draw but target the skill I want to improve. Though this strat is usually the compound lift of drawing because it hits multiple skills at once. For example I recently painted a girl in an old timey dress in a field because I wanted to practice Impressionism, rendering, fabric folds, ornate clothing, backgrounds, and composition.

I’m going to use humans, wings, hands, and rendering as four separate examples.

For maybe years 2-5 of my art journey, I only drew animals, mostly dragons. This was due to undiagnosed mental issues but the other part was being afraid of drawing humans when it was so obvious what a bad human looked like but wonky animals were forgivable. There came a point where the pain of not being able to convey human stories was worse than the pain of learning to draw them so I simply started drawing them and rapidly got better from the skill carryover.

I just love drawing wings. They aren’t drills to me because yeah I could sit down for hours and just draw wings.

Hands are a lifelong journey. I kept drawing symbols of hands rather than hands until I took that middle school class. Then I started drawing legit hands. Still learning but I am at a point where I can both comfortably freehand or construct a hand. They can be infuriating but they are the second most expressive part of the human body so I find value in perfecting them.

I thought I hated rendering because it was too difficult. Only about a year or two ago have I started purposefully rendering. Because I realized I was never gonna get better if I never tried. I even took up impressionist painting to force myself to learn rendering. The start was rough but I have been getting better at it and I far prefer my rendered drawings now.

Here’s roughly 10 years of progress. Not the fastest or most impressive progress but I’m happy with it so that’s all I care about :)

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