LEARN ART ON YOUR OWN ( Ultimate study method)

I've studied art wrong and inefficiently for years and what is actually studying art is it doing pages of anatomy studies in a Sketchbook is it drawing loads hundreds of cubes in perspective on a page is it setting up objects and arranging a still life and drawing purely from observation it's it's all of those and many more uh and like myself a lot of my students I see every week go about that in a very inefficient way they have the wrong even the frame of mind to approach those where they don't simply have that direction so today I am going to share information I wish I had much earlier as an art student much earlier in my art career that I have acquired over the years and I'm going to break that down into a few simple exercises and how to frame your state of mind to go about improving your craft so of course let's begin and stick around to the end if you want to see a bonus tip that changed everything for me let's go [Music] all right hey guys I'm toddler then if you're new here I'm a professional artist and instructor now I was talking with the student I met with last week it had been you know many weeks since we actually got to meet with the holidays and I was sick and everything and so I asked you know how you been what you've been working on he showed me a lot of really great studies stuff like you can kind of see up here on screen now I thought these are wonderful they're well done but I had to ask this one question and I said all right you did all that not starting out well but where's the implementation not to my surprise he paused in silence I think he knew what I meant but he was like you know kind of dumbfounded by you know that oh shoot moment I think I missed the mark a little bit and of course we all do know one of the more conventional ways of getting better at any craft is simply by doing it right by logging the hours and this particular student was clearly doing that they were logging the hours but they were not seeing the Improvement that they wanted to I know I've been there many times in the in the past uh before I really knew how to train a little more adequately now academically in formal arts schools many first semesters pretty much solely consist of some variety of this observational work in my students case today it was just he was doing film studies you know copying various you know aspects of cinematography this comes also in the Forum of you know doing Master studies copying an existing painting as well as doing uh human anatomy and land landscape right in this method of study we're recording shapes proportions and detail accurately from a particular source and while this method I do agree with is great especially if you're a pure beginner um it really just kind of trains you to copy and my student is not a beginner at all and still kind of grinding in those out which we're going to get to a little later why that is also a problem so like I had mentioned I said where's the implementation well there's a few ways to go about this an example a here right we have the Mona Lisa I call this mindlessly copying so unless you're at an absolute beginner I actually kind of recommend not exactly doing this and I'll kind of explain what I mean there's more efficient ways to kind of go about doing a copy or a study and in this example we'll kind of put this as category B here from John park it looks fairly typical to the Mona Lisa right it's almost one to one but I know in the way that that John approaches things there's slower more methodical he's going to break things down he's going to analyze do a lot of deconstruction of of that particular object so that he'll be able to recreate it and and change it and best utilize that information so it's like the difference is visibly not that great here but it's all in the in the mental side of it so like again you're just kind of put logging in the hours for the sake of the hours like in an example a here but with this it's actually just much more you're much more mentally engaged in focus and that particular subject which would lead us to category C which is intently copying and then applying and that is the implementation aspect of it so you see once he understands this information he can then put it back in and create new things or even remix what is there to kind of get something a little new so again the challenge level is gradually going up in this method you know in weight training that they would call Progressive overload you gradually amp up that difficulty so if you're like my student and and I know a lot I see a lot of artists in the discords as well just kind of mindlessly grinding things out and you don't know what you're trying to get out of that that's where the huge issue is it's the same as learning music you start by kind of copying songs and then eventually you learn the language of music and you could eventually start composing your own and so again we don't want to jump into like full World building stuff in semester one right you you need to learn the language of art first and copying will only get you so far that's kind of the point I'm trying to make here and as you can see this is some typical student work from class this week actually not only are we just doing a one-to-one breakdown as you can see here on on the left of that cloud study but we're getting external influence in this case they use Robert Gatto another former student I love when I see my students referencing my uh my older students is kind of work it's it's like my life is coming full circle here but you could see like they're actively engaged in the drawing trying to go beyond this with a specific purpose to kind of design out their own version of what that cloud is so again it's not just like okay I'm copying you know but you know the old grid based exercise where you kind of copy what's in the Square this is going far beyond that in very subtle and nuanced ways it's absolutely great finding that sweet spot for yourself and actively challenge what you're doing I find this requires three key things first here right have a specific goal we'll use another student of mine Lester's work uh shout out to you lesser doing great work this term so an example we're going to do environment design and I want to design a gate using some reference in history some parts of our culture to kind of go in with this design just a simple goal it could be any goal you know designing a character that's a detective but also a dog it doesn't matter having a specific goal is the first important thing and then we have number two here and that is actually doing a little bit of research maybe it's referencing Gathering maybe you're building a mood board but you're essentially preparing for that specific goal so simply just prepare and Lester's case here you can see he got lots of reference of Aztec Egyptian and Mayan architecture as he used to build his idea moving forward and then see this is the last key ingredient you'll actually need to improve pretty well and that's an imagination it could you could think of it as having an idea but it's your creativity this is why we love this craft because we love being creative people and and like I was trying to show it's kind of pushing slightly past that bass reference so that you're implementing your own idea your own personality and and in view of the world your own perspective into that subject so you kind of create something you know for yourself and of course coming back to that idea of progressive overload gradually amping that challenge up as you're improving and you can kind of see that with his work here like they started off pretty straightforward and simple any idea can be built with simple shapes whether it's a human a vehicle or a mountain you can figure it out in simple shapes and then gradually make those shapes connected in a more complex way and more subtle lighting as your projects develop and you're getting more sophisticated again right with your language of Art and again this is finding that right difficulty level for your skill set you're gonna most likely be able to maintain Focus have a sense of clarity and get fully immersed in the task at hand all mental benefits for working at the right difficulty level for yourself they often call this Flow State or deep work and this is just achieving that Peak intuitive ability and it's going to surely result in measurable measurable gains and results unlike just drawing cubes you know buy the hundreds just because you heard someone else doing that and maybe it did work for them you got to figure out what works best for you so what does this all lead to again finding and maintaining a flow State finding a proper balance and difficulty in how you're approaching exercises and assignments a study of art I often just call this indirect referencing simple enough it means not necessarily going one to one with something but taking as much aspects right still like an artist taking aspects of the subject and injecting yourself into that and going beyond that and as you can see here this is like that base level example of this it's direct referencing there's a subject this was a from a challenge we did in the patreon Discord a few months back we all looked at this one subject and we interpreted it very differently there was a lot of different results and again that's the beauty of this and of course if you have Community to bounce ideas and get feedback from that's that's a great way to improve as well but this is just kind of going one-to-one not changing any of the core subjects and parameters above it about it this is a great way to start you know I'm not designing a fantasy worldscape or or building the next mythology now this is just Keen observation and implementation at the same time it's the easiest way to to to approach trying to improve whether it's drawing or painting maybe it's color light maybe it's texture you can really double down and specify what you want to improve on if again if you outline that goal like I had mentioned now and if you're we want to up this challenge again Progressive overload I found a really cool uh photograph from this guy French French Sasquatch on Instagram he's got great photography that's great for a study right so like let's say if you can replicate the subject matter in your own sort of way and kind of start to get results that you're satisfied with what's a great way to improve from here start adding story into everything and I'm like that with my client work even if a client asks for a forest or a mountain Escape I'm gonna try to inject a little bit of story a little bit of base level narrative in everything and that will always improve the quality of your output or results so in this case you know I just kind of did a little bit of ashitaka a little bit of a little bit of fan service here from from Mononoke and you know pushed beyond that study and and got some got some nice illustrative art as a result but again this started with reference it started with a particular goal and evolved to push a sort of narrative that's going on in here I'll show you another example of this too again here's the subject it's a beautiful you know mountain in the in the glaciers it's great and I I did a one-on-one of that but at some point I'm like okay let's go beyond this let's let's let's tell a story and in that way anything that I do change within that reference again this is change within reason I'm not the only thing I added in was storytelling based things and you can kind of see that happening right here with the uh with the ship and why is story so great on a study like this because it gives us a reason to doing anything else in the picture so anything I added right like this like this extra atmosphere different breaks in the ice it was all to push direction it was to frame create a sense of movement and to really emphasize that story and so again it's it's pushing my design skills now it's it's pushing my overall thought process when I'm just you know I'm not blindly just copying that our initial reference now now the third way if you want to up things even further that's just kind of going Beyond story using a little bit of multiple references and just kind of interpreting them right your head is the blender you're taking reference a reference B putting it all in and it's going to spit out maybe an idea in this case you know I took the references I put Totoro and but it it really just is a combination of those two references that you know I used to essentially kind of frame that okay we get the atmosphere and mood of this we get the Food Shack right here let's put it all together so right I'm not ever one-to-one copying anything but I'm trying to look at and understand how I can Implement these things and some people call it cross-referencing again indirect referencing is right but I wish I knew this years ago because for so long I was just kind of copying one to one and not improving the way I need to because I'm just regurgitating information here's another great example from one of my color and light lessons Shameless plug you know where I like did a study of the seasides painting and then I took a very and this is the trick find a very Bland or boring reference like a couple fish hanging out under here you start really remixing this right so not only we're injecting story we're injecting personality character and really drastically changing things up using the core subject right so in this case it's like what are what are the pieces I can use I I can use you know fish I got the Beach ocean I've got fishing equipment right boats so I'm not gonna really I'm not gonna add a monster or a cyclops or a knight back there but I'm just gonna use this subject matter try to tell my own story just using okay maybe I artistically want to look at the mood and the atmosphere of this and really play up what is going on here you know which is going to lead me essentially to my last tip my bonus tip the thing I wish someone had told me way earlier and that's when looking at any subject matter try to paint the essence of something versus that exact version of it and you can see here two very different stylized Penguins we all know what a penguin looks like one of these is a lot more successful than the others because the other one tried to it really did hit that uncanny valley you know and that maybe that's a subject or another day let me know if you want to hear more about that but you know where it's trying to do one thing but it's kind of too attach to that idea of what a penguin is it it still has way too many kind of characteristics and it's trying to be a a very nice character in itself where it's like these care these penguins on the left they're going all in on just like we don't need to necessarily reference reference or represent an exact version of a penguin but if we capture that essence of it that's what's the most important all right don't forget if you're looking for more structured learning I do teach courses at cgma and I have my own courses as well all linked below I'll catch you guys next time the mentorship is booking for uh July and we have immediate availability with Zhao fan if you want to specialize in characters and illustration I'll catch you guys next time see ya

Channel: Tyler Edlin

Views: 261,686

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Id: lDpejTqQvcI

Length: 16min 18sec (978 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 25 2023