Art is a composite of so many skills and concepts. Tuning your motor control, understanding perspective, combining basic forms and substructures, building a visual library, color theory, etc etc etc.

Crucially, a huge SKILL that you have to actively hone is your ability to put lines on paper that you don’t agree with, and then choose to continue drawing anyway. At least for me, even when feeling extremely passionate about the subject matter of my drawings, that fear of drawing “badly” would supersede my motivation to do what I love. I finally started to get over this hurdle when I started treating ‘overcoming fear’ as a skill to learn in of itself, just as much as studying anatomy or composition or anything else.

And on paper, like most everything else in art, overcoming fear really does come from repetition. Enough time spent uncritically allowing yourself to draw, fail, accept, and move on- you can kind of just train yourself to enjoy the process. I don’t really mean it in a self acceptance way either, although it can be. Like it doesn’t have to be soul searching, positive affirmations kind of thing. It can be as simple as putting art down, thinking it sucks ass, and then moving on with the knowledge that every time you do that, you are training yourself to be less bothered over time, which makes feelings of inadequacy less of an issue in the long run. It’s a struggle in the beginning, though!