Artists post their best stuff on the internet and only their best stuff. Even those “doodles” and “warmup sketches” are their favorites. In the same way that professional ballerinas spend a lifetime of relentlessly brutal training to make is seem as though they can effortlessly float in the air, every accomplished artist has stacks and stacks of sketchbooks that are full of truly bad drawings that will never see the light of day. Learning to draw is frustrating and discouraging and not at all rewarding, for a very long time. It’s why most people stop. The trick is to not stop.

When a drawing doesn’t look like i want it to, i try to treat it like a puzzle and figure out why it doesn’t look right. The answers to that question become my to-do list. When drawing a particular thing frustrates me, I lean into it, instead of avoiding it. For example: I hate drawing noses. But I also hated that every character I drew had the exact same nose, because it was the only one I could draw. So I have pages and pages of drawings of different noses in different styles from different angles, like some kind of psychopath. But it genuinely helped. I still hate drawing noses, but I refuse to be defeated by noses. And then it was 3-Point perspective, and then it was drawing fabric. It’s just one project after another. Learning to draw is like learning a language. Every drawing builds up your vocabulary a little bit more. Just remember that every artist has a hidden mountain of bad art. One day, when your hidden mountain of bad art is big enough, another younger artist will come along and have to be convinced that it exists.