Day 62: Tutorials by Jazza

I've been a big fan of Draw with Jazza for a while now.  For some reason I always home in on the inspirational or philosophical videos.  He does have a series of step by step tutorials for drawing particular subjects or characters that are on my watch list.

This week I caught up on two clips that have been collecting virtual dust on my saved for later list.

How to Practice - Improve your Art Skills, the Smart Way!

Types of Practice:

1. Innate
2. Inspired
3.  Developmental

To paraphrase, innate practice comes from doing your craft, inspired involves simply anything that inspires you, and developmental is deliberately focusing on a topic you need to improve.  For example, when I start working on my first draft of my future comic I'll be getting innate practice in perspective, anatomy, flow and so on.

When I sit down with a dozen copies of Prinny fan art and start reworking them to learn the style / structure of the character that's inspirational practice since I'm huge fan of Disgaea and my desire to learn helps to push me through slumps.

Developmental is my personal weakness, since it focuses on weaknesses and I don't like doing that.  I'll ping on a weak area like drawing hands for a day and then move on.  What I really need to do is take a weekend and just throw a dozen or so hours at dedicated study of one topic and push myself over the hump.  Like Jazza mentions in the video, doing something that you're weak at can be pretty soul crushing.

What To Draw... When You Don't Know What To Draw

I usually don't buy into pep talk videos, but for some reason I get this.  Probably because I've been stuck looking at the blank page so often.

Jazza recommends three exercises which include:

Draw something mundane, use randomized ideas, and repeat the same drawing with progressively less time.

I've done the mundane practice before and have a few dozen sketches of keyboards, mice, erasers, speakers and so no to show for it.  I'm not sure how much it has helped me grow but it's the closest thing to drawing from life that I typically get.

Using an randomized sketch generator sounds like a lot of fun and the repetitive drawing exercise seems like it would help me a lot so I'm going to try to work both into my routine.  Just as soon as I can stop playing around with charcoal drawings...