5 Tips From An Artist To Improve Your Art

So you’re an artist! Or, you’d like to be, and you’re struck dumb by just how many talented artists are all around you. Then, you see their age and you’re sat there stunned by just how much skills these kids have! You’d think they were pretty much drawing every day since they were born to get that good at such a young age.

Well, while innate art skills and talents do play a part in how well a person can draw; there’s a lot more that goes into it than that. Practice, of course, is one of the biggest factors that draws the line between art that’s nice to look at and an absolute masterpiece!

Today, we’ll be going over 5 tips from an artist that can help you improve your own art and reach the goals you want to achieve!

Use references and 3D models where possible

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While everyone and their mothers have probably brought up the fact that references are important, sometimes it can be hard to find the perfect one. This is especially the case when it comes to character poses! Sure, you can stalk other artists, get inspiration for poses from them– but then you run the risk of making the pose too similar, maybe even making the character a little too similar to just be a coincidence.

Now you have a hoard of angry fans after you claiming “you stole the art!”, “You’re a tracer!” which is downright the worst feeling possible. You might not even have intended to do that but sometimes it’s just so easy to get overly influenced by the picture you’re referencing. 

So, to avoid this issue entirely, you can buy a 3D model figure instead which allows you to create your own poses and get the perfect reference image every time! You can even get a small lamp and shine it on the figure where you want the light source to be to get a better idea of how light would interact with the character in that pose!

By doing this, you’ll notice near immediate improvement in your art as the model can give you a better idea of how the body moves naturally and the limits we have!

Find a style you like and break it down into the basics

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Now for this step, we’re going to get into a bit more of a controversial area. While some people may worry “Isn’t this stealing an artstyle?” or something along those lines. Well, no, we’re not encouraging you to just straight up copy someone else’s art, but to use it to better understand what they’re doing that makes it look good.

You can gather a bunch of art from different artists that you like and use them as reference while you work. See what it is about their art that you like and try to mimic it too. If you find it difficult to replicate this just from looking, you can even try tracing over it a bit to let your hand get used to the motion of recreating those lines or shapes.

If you’re working traditionally to do this, you can try using a light table or light box tracer and printing out the references. Additionally, you can use that same light box to practice drawing images again and again using one picture as a base reference until you get into the habit of drawing shapes a certain way and are confident you can do it free hand too!

Muscle memory is one of the things you build up through practice, so the more you practice drawing the faces and shapes the way you want them to look; the more likely you’ll be able to consistently draw this way in the future too!

Draw with a pen

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While not every artist that works traditionally will do this, it’s a highly recommended practice! One of the biggest crutches we fall on as artists, is the ability to erase our “mistakes”. So, by taking away this ability, you force yourself to be more careful about where you place your lines and draw and end up drawing them more confidently as you get more comfortable. 

One of the biggest things that separates masterpieces from nice art can be through the lineart. To get nice smooth lineart, you’ll want to be drawing the pieces in longer fluid strokes rather than a bunch of short chicken scratch lines. This'll both the lineart cleaner and bolder once completed!

Don’t let other artists or your current skill level discourage you

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It’s easy to get discouraged while you’re on your art journey. Like we mentioned in the beginning of this article, there are plenty of young talented people out there and every year there’s more joining in the fray! However, if you want to really improve yourself, you need to learn how to draw a line between yourself and them.

Yes, it’s good to have artists you look up to and strive to be more like, but don’t beat yourself up if you aren’t there yet! Art takes time, it takes practice and there’s nothing wrong with taking longer than others to get to where you want to be. In the end, not everyone will like your art just like you won’t like everyone else's, but as long as you’re happy with yourself and your improvement, you can take all the time you need!

Practice, practice, practice

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Yes yes, we’ve all heard this one before, but there’s really no other way to improve other than to practice. You have to want to put the effort in yourself! But we can guarantee that so long as you practice while continuing to push yourself out of your comfort zones, you will see improvement. 

Use references, trace when you need to learn but not as your whole style, find inspiration and just keep practicing! The more you practice the more you learn. In the end, the results will more than speak for themselves.

Now that you’ve learned our top 5 tips to help you on your art journey, why not get yourself some more art tools to help you out? Click here to shop now!