Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello, my name is Michelle Tabares. I'm a cartoonist, Illustrator, and traveler based in sunny Tampa, Florida. Welcome to this introduction video. In this video, we are going to talk about the importance of critically analyzing your artwork so that you can use it to improve your drawing skills. When you are a beginner, sometimes you can be confronted with this idea that making art is a sort of magic, and while at times it can feel that way, the truth of the matter is, is that art is like any other skill. It can be honed and improved upon. When you are starting out, it can feel a little bit overwhelming because there may be a lot of areas that you want to improve upon and it can be difficult to figure out where to start. The aim of this class is to give you a little bit more direction on your growth as an artist, and fine tune the areas in which you really want to improve, so that you can grow and develop the skills necessary to create the kind of art that you really want to make. It's also important to keep in mind that this is an ongoing process. Even though I have used a lot of the skills and techniques that I'm going to discuss in this class, I myself have not stopped my creative journey, and in all likelihood, art that I'm making now will be very different from the art that I'm making it a few years. That is totally okay, normal even. The whole point of this class is to help you figure out what are some of the things that you could be doing better and more successfully to help you grow and develop in a way that satisfies you creatively. In this class, I'm going to be showing you some techniques and methods of improvement that I have used personally and I have found that they have helped me greatly in my own creative practice. If this class appeals to you and you are ready to start learning about some new ways you can improve your art, let's head on over to the next video. Thanks, and I will see you there.
2. The Benefits of Critical Analysis: Let's go over some of the benefits of using critical analysis to improve your drawing skills. The first thing to keep in mind is that by using critical analysis to improve your drawing skills, this will help you improve faster. It's true that practice makes perfect and doing a lot of drawings is the best way to get better. If you want to improve in a short amount of time, being really selective and choosy about what it is that you draw can also be really beneficial. Another benefit of using critical analysis to improve your drawing skills is that it will give you direction in your progress. This is the case because you can hone in on specific areas to focus your improvement. For example, let's say that you have identified that you really want to get better at drawing skateboards. Now that you have determined this, it means that rather than doing a bunch of drawings of figure on a skateboard, and backgrounds, and other details that maybe you're less interested in improving on, you can focus specifically on drawing skateboards over and over again. Final benefit that I want to talk about is that by utilizing these critical analysis thought processes while you're drawing and while you're analyzing your work, you'll find that this will help you improve overall. Let's pretend once again that you are set out to improve your skateboard drawing skills. Over time, you may discover that as you get better and better at drawing skateboards, that you also become better at drawing other things too. For example, maybe you've spent a lot of time drawing skateboard wheels, as a result, you become better at drawing all kinds of drawings subjects that have circular or round shapes too. It's in this way that sometimes, giving yourself a specific topic to improve upon can actually help you improve in a more general and broad way. I hope that makes sense. If you have any questions, please let me know, and whenever you're ready, let's move on to the next video.
3. The Importance of Observation: Let's spend some time to discuss the importance of improving your observational skills. Becoming more observant of the world around you is something that will allow you to better interpret things more accurately in your art. Our brains are great, but sometimes they don't fully understand how something should look. When we're drawing, sometimes our brain will fill in the gaps by guessing. It's in that guessing that inaccuracies and mistakes will happen. Unless you're going for an intentionally abstract drawing style, it's better to base your drawing on reality versus a guess that your brain is making. Sometimes it helps to ask yourself, how have I been drawing this versus how should I be drawing this? Or how should this drawing subject look supposing that it existed in real life? What are the mistakes that I'm making in my drawing that prevent my drawing subject from looking more realistic or believable? I think it's really important to start getting into the habit of studying the things around you, even when you're not drawing. I think it's especially helpful to train yourself to do this if you're engaged in a mundane task. Like let's say you're taking a shower, pay attention to the way the water looks, the different shadows and highlights. How does it look against the tile versus how it looks against metal. Anytime you find yourself waiting in line at the grocery store, cleaning your bathroom, or on hold waiting for customer service to help you out, take it as an opportunity to study your surroundings carefully so that you can take what you learn about the real world and apply it to your art. Other things that you can keep an eye out for, maybe noticing what colors look good together, how shadows and highlights change in intensity depending on the light source. You can also pay attention to things like variation in texture depending on a surface, or perhaps paying attention to people and animals in real life to determine what poses and stances look most natural. I think the importance of observation skills are much like the importance of listening skills. In a conversation when we want to best understand what a person is telling us, sometimes it's best to focus on what is being said, to internalize and digest it, rather than focusing on coming up with best, most clever or funny response. I think that this also applies to making art based on observation rather than based on what we think a viewer might want or what we think is real. Hope that makes sense. I know it's a little abstract, but definitely leave a comment if you have any questions, and I'll get back to you as soon as possible. Thanks for watching and whenever you're ready, let's move on to the next video.
4. Keep in Mind Before You Start...: Before we get started on using critical analysis to improve your drawing skills, I want to bring up a couple of things that you should keep in mind before you get started. This process involves a lot of paying attention to the flaws in your work and taking notice of the things that you're doing wrong in order to correct those mistakes and do better. That said, it can sometimes be discouraging to look so critically at your art and to be confronted with the things that you're doing wrong. I want to take this opportunity to encourage you to try to put your personal feelings and insecurities aside during this time. The point of this exercise isn't to become a master overnight or to feel bad about yourself. Critically analyzing the mistakes that you make is meant to help you. If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed, or upset for whatever reason, try to take a break, take a breath, and remember, this is for your benefit. Making mistakes in art doesn't mean that you're a bad artist. It just means that you're going through the same learning process that every artist goes through in order to improve. On that note, it's also important to pay attention to the things that you're doing well. Not only will paying attention to the things that you're doing well help you feel more encouraged and better about your art, it will also help you examine what it is that you're doing right, so you can continue to make the same positive creative choices in future works of art. Now that we've gone over some things to keep in mind while you are analyzing your work, let's move on to the next video where we will begin actually analyzing. I'll see you there.
5. Tracing Exercises: In this video, I want to share with you a useful tracing exercise that will allow you to put your observation skills to the test and will also help you commit some of the observations that you're making to muscle memory. Now it itself, there's a lot of benefit to taking a piece of tracing paper and tracing over photographs and masterwork pieces. But I think an even more helpful exercise is to first draw an object or subject by memory, then to take a piece of tracing paper and trace over the same object or subject, and then after doing the tracing, redraw the picture from memory again. The great thing about this exercise is that you can see through your drawings how your memory of an object improves after tracing it. All you need is some simple tracing paper or vellum paper. Or if you have a light box, you can use that instead with regular paper. You can also do this exercise digitally if you prefer, by using Photoshop and simply creating a layer that will go on top of the image that you want to trace. I want to give credit to @byelacey from Twitter who first shared this exercise along with examples of her drawings by memory and tracing of a car. To demonstrate this idea and each step, the subject that I have chosen for this exercise is an armchair based on memory and with no reference material. Now the good thing about this drawing is that it does successfully read as a chair, which is the most important thing to me, that my drawing accurately communicates the object. That said though, if we take a closer look to analyze this arm chair, it does feel a little off, maybe a little too static or stiff. Before we analyze this any further though, I'm going to go ahead and take a sheet of drawing paper and trace over photograph of an arm chair that I have from furniture book. If we put my first drawing and the tracing together, we can see right away that there's some pretty significant differences between the two images. For one, I can see that the perspective in my first drawing is off. The back leg doesn't properly align with the back corner of the seat of the chair. I'm also seeing a lot more organic curves within the armchair that I traced. Part of that has to do with the style of the arm chair because this is more of an old fashion armchair or modern armchair would have more straight lines. But the other thing to keep in mind is that since this is a photograph of a real chair, it was designed for human use in a way that my quick from memory drawing isn't with my first from memory drawing. I was more concerned with the chair, just reading as a chair and not actually giving a lot of thought to the function of the chair itself and how that function would be relayed in the design. Now that I've taken the time to analyze my first drawing and the tracing, I'm going to go back and draw my final image from memory. This second drawing is going to be much more successful than the first. Because now that I've taken the time to analyze some of the weak points from my first drawing and implement some of the improvements from my tracing, I've been able to draw a chair from memory that is not exactly like the tracing, but does have more organic curves and better perspective and overall just looks like a more comfortable, usable chair compared to the first drawing from memory. I really do recommend this exercise since it will help you to pay attention to the different details that you can find from real life reference images and figure out how you can work it into your own art in a way that is livable and meaningful. Keep in mind also that the idea is not to create a perfect reproduction of the reference image that you're using. The aim is to be conscious of the aspects of the traced image that are successful and to find ways to implement them in a new and original way in your final drawing from memory. If you're very deliberate about this process and do your best to commit this to memory, hopefully, this means that all future drawings of this particular traced subject will be better. I hope this video was helpful, please let me know if you have any questions and whenever you're ready, let's move on to the next lesson.
6. Using Reference: In this video, I'm going to demonstrate the importance of using reference material and drawing from life to enhance your art. To do this, I'm going to draw the same subject twice. To begin, I'm going to draw an ice skate twice. The first time will be without reference, and the second time will be with reference. This is my drawing without reference. Let's take some time to analyze this drawing and see what works and what doesn't work. Even though this is not a perfect drawing of an ice skate, you can tell that it is an ice skate. So at the end of the day, it's ability to communicate the message of this being an ice skate is successful. There are still some things wrong with this picture. First of all, there's something about the late of the ice skate that seems wrong to me. I'm not exactly sure what that is because I don't have a full and complete understanding of what an ice skate looks like from memory. But I did my best to, guess. I'm sure that once we redo this picture with reference, the blade will look much better. There's also aspects of the construction of the boot itself that seem wrong to me. I think this could be due to the fact that I've made the ice skate look more like a boot or a shoe rather than an actual skate. Then of course, there are also construction aspects of this drawing that don't seem quite right. Particularly there's something about the color of the boot seems wrong somehow, and also little things like here, the spacing in-between the grommets is inconsistent. This part I can easily fix on my own, but as far as the wonky blue color, this is something that I'm going to have to take a look at a photo to really nail down and get right. Now let's take a look at my drawing that I made using reference. As you can see, this ice skate is much more convincing Now that I've taken a chance to look at some reference, you see here that the construction of the blade feels more solid compared to the previous drawing, and includes certain details like these ridges here that grip onto the ice. Even here we have a bolt that connects the blade to the shoe. Another thing that I've noticed in a lot of the reference photos that I took a look at is that there seems to be a seam down the middle of the toe of the boot. So I was sure to add that. The grommets or a little bit more evenly spaced here, and I also noticed that there were islets or belt loops at the top of each boot that I saw. So I went ahead and added those and also made the lacing different. Since this style of lacing seems to be more in line with what I saw in the photos. You might also notice the change in the boot color for there is more of a distinctive shape that contours to the construction of the shoe, and also the tongue of the boot is more distinctive. Let's take a look at the two ice skates side-by-side. We can see that the ice skate on the left, the one done without reference, almost has a flatter two-dimensional look to it. Whereas the ice skate on the right looks as though it would fit a human foot much better as it has more contours in the right places. On top of that, there's also details that implied dimension and depth in this ice skate that are absent in the first one. For example, in the first image, we see that the heel is articulated with this kind of flat rectangular shape. But the ice skate on the right implies more of a sense of dimension and depth and seems like it would actually support the weight of a human body. I think this comparison clearly illustrates the benefits of drawing from life or using reference to enhance the believability and realism in your work. It's also worth mentioning that by looking at reference material, I was able to learn that not all ice skates look the same. You can see in this image here that there are some pretty pronounced differences between a figure skating escape and a hockey ice skate. Since I don't ice-skate myself, this is something that I only would have learned by studying reference material. I hope this was helpful. Whenever you're ready, let's move on to the next video.
7. Analyzing Old Art: In this video, I want to go ahead and demonstrate some of the things that we've already talked about by analyzing an older piece of art so that we can make a new piece of art that improves upon this one. Before I begin actually analyzing this piece, I'm going to take the time to remind myself that this is for my benefit, that it's okay to make mistakes, and making mistakes doesn't mean I'm a bad artist. Anytime you're about to critically analyze your work, be sure to quickly remind yourself of that. Also remember that if at any point you start to feel overwhelmed, it's perfectly fine to stop and take a break and disconnect from your analysis before coming back to it with a clear head. Now that we have done that, I want to start by talking about some of the things that I like in this piece that I want to continue to incorporate into the new piece. First, I really like the way the hair is rendered on both of these figures. One thing that I like here is that you can see that there is a high density of lines anywhere where I want to imply that there is shadow darkening the hair. Since I think this works pretty well here, I'm going to continue it in the next drawing. Another thing that I like about this piece too is that there's a certain mutinous to it. While the next piece that I do after this, I have a slightly different tone, I do want to keep some of that introspective, quiet mutinous that I'm feeling from these two figures, and especially this figure right here. I also like the way that these two figures are interacting. I personally think it's challenging, but in a really gratifying way to draw figures interacting with each other. While the pose will probably be at least a little different when I redraw this, I do know that I want these two figures to be hugging and to interact in that way. Now that we've talked about some of the positive things about this drawing, let's move on to some of the things that I think need to be improved upon. First, it's worth mentioning that this is a drawing that I did without reference material. Frankly, I do think it shows some of the proportions here are simply incorrect. If we take a look at the width of the male figures leg right here and compare it to the width of his waist, we can see that they're actually almost the same, which is totally incorrect. Typically, a person's thigh is going to be thinner than their waste. That's just one example of how the proportions of the bodies need to be adapted in this image. Some of the posing here is also a little bit unnatural. If we take a look at this hand right here, you can see that it's resting awkwardly on the man's shoulder and her fingertips are just barely grazing the man's back. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing, but I feel I could have done a better job at making it look intentional. For example, if we were to say redraw her hand so that it is hanging further out from the man's shoulder, I think that would look more intentional and would also convey a little bit more emotion. But since that's not the case, the hand just looks like it's in this awkward place between resting firmly on the man's back and just hanging limply. Additionally, the placement of some of the body parts also needs to be fixed. I think the placement of the ear on the woman needs to be actually moved to about here. Slight difference, not a huge amount, but I think it's still would look much more realistic and anatomically correct if we were to make sure that the ear is in the correct position. The next thing that's bothering me is the color palette. I feel it's a little bland, and while I do like this soft purple color, I don't think it's really appropriate for the mood that is trying to be conveyed here. Changing the color palette so that it is more reflective of the tone of the piece is really important. Finally, the last thing that I want to mention about this piece is the lack of detail. This could mean for one having a more interesting background to put the characters in so that it feels more believable. Even just placing these characters beside a wall with maybe a picture hanging in the background would give us more of a sense of place, and time, and make the piece a little bit more visually interesting. There's also not a lot of detail in both of their outfits, and more specifically in the woman's outfit. I think that's a missed opportunity. Drawing things like hair accessories and jewelry can also help tell a story. You don't even have to stop there, you can also draw things axioms or pleats, and that's another way to make an image like this more visually interesting, maybe he needs some cufflinks too. These characters were supposed to be in a formal setting, and I think adding those details will help convey that message more clearly to viewers. Now that we've analyzed this piece and addressed some of the issues, we can go ahead and move on to our redraw where we can incorporate the improvements that we talked about and also practice some of the other things that we learned from previous videos, like using tracing exercises and reference images to help enhance the realism and believability in our redraw. Thanks so much for watching and whenever you're ready, let's move on to the next video.
8. Redrawing Old Art: In this video, I'm going to break down the process of redrawing my old pictures step-by-step incorporating all the things that we've already talked about like tracing exercises, using reference images and so on. Usually when I create a drawing, I don't follow all of these steps. I might just only follow one or two. But for the purposes of this lesson, I want to demonstrate how you can use all of these techniques together and make them work for you and make a stronger drawing as a result. The first thing I'm going to do is search for reference images or various poses where two people are hugging. The first thing that I notice about all of the images that are coming up is that these hugs and physical interactions all look different and unique, which goes to show that you don't have to draw a hug the same way or just what you think it should look like. Using reference images like this can open you up to different possibilities that you hadn't even considered. I'm also playing around with different keywords and even though the two figures for my first drawing aren't necessarily a couple in my mind, using the keyword couple and searching allows me to see even more interactions between two people. I've gone ahead and saved some of the images that I think are the strongest or the most interesting to me in some way and there's something about each of these images that resonate with me in a different way. For example, in this particular image here, I really like that this seems to be a formal setting and we can see that the man is clearly wearing a jacket and shirt, much like the male figure from my first drawing. In this particular image right here, even though I don't necessarily want the bodies to be positioned in this way. The two figures have a really quiet, mysterious expression to them that I find really compelling and interesting. Now that I've collected my images on a Photoshop document, I'm going to create a new layer and trace over each of these images as a warm up and see if I can learn anything new by tracing over them. You can do this traditionally with tracing paper if you'd like but since I've already demonstrated that in a previous video, I thought I would try doing it digitally this time for you. When I did this exercise, I decided to just create a new layer directly over my images with the pen tool in green but I think an even better way of doing this exercise would be to create a new layer, build a document up completely with a 50 percent opacity white, which will still allow you to see the images, but make them a little less contrasting and then take a black pen or pencil tool and trace on top on a new layer. I find that doing this instead actually creates more of a sense of using tracing paper since tracing paper essentially makes the image underneath semi-opaque and here's what my tracings look like without the images underneath. While some of these images are not going to directly be translated into my final drawing, it was still really important for me to try and experiment different things and get into the frame of mind that hugs and physical interactions can look differently and mean different things depending on a situation or a particular type of relationship. This tracing exercise helped me to not only experiment with different poses, but it also allowed me to get a better sense of actual proportions and natural body movements. Now, I'm going to take what I learned from the tracing exercises and reference material and use it to create a variety of rough sketches of the two characters interacting in different ways to try to get a sense of how I want the final pose to look like. I've done this with paper and pencil and I've scanned it into Photoshop, but if you prefer to sketch digitally, that's perfectly fine as well. Keep in mind that you don't want to copy from the tracings or the reference images. Instead focus on making your own poses that are inspired or loosely based off of the reference material or tracings that you do. I have decided on the one that I want to base my final drawing on, and that's this one right here. I wasn't 100 percent happy with it as it was though, so I decided to modify the pose a little bit. I chose this pose because I liked the bird's eye view perspective and the way the arms are positioned. That said though, I wasn't 100 percent happy with it, and decided to modify the faces and I also added the dangling arm, which you can see here in this sketch. Here, I've started to base my digital pencils off of this pose. I wanted to keep the background simple because the focus should be on the two figures. I quickly penciled in a floor and some walls to imply that they are in the corner of a room but I found myself feeling uncertain about the perspective. Because I wanted to make sure that the perspective in this image was correct, what I did was I found a corner in my actual apartment and because I am a short person, I decided to use a chair and stand on top of it and while standing on top of the chair, faced my camera downwards and take pictures of this particular corner in my room. Just a quick reminder, if you are going to stand on top of furniture, like I had to get this particular shot. Please be careful. If you're having trouble finding existing reference images. It's a great idea to take your own. After taking a few reference shots from various angles, I was able to incorporate the reference image that I felt was most appropriate and then adjust my pencils accordingly, so now the perspective in this image looks better. Since my pencils are digital, I've placed them on a separate layer on top of the reference photo but if you're working traditionally, you can lay a sheet of tracing paper on top of your reference image and make adjustments using your reference image in that way. Now that I'm more or less satisfied with the perspective and the composition. I'm going to go back to my image and focus on some of the details, reference material for formal clothing and jewelry, and incorporate some of those details into the characters and I will also draw inspiration from various fancy interiors, ballrooms, that kind of thing to get a better sense of the space that the characters might be occupying. I've gone ahead and cleaned up my digital pencils a little bit and added those details that I mentioned before and so now it's time to begin inking my final drawing. As I was completing my inks, I felt as though the two figures looked a little bit short where they were placed. So I adjusted this by moving the figures up higher to give them more of a sense of height. I also cropped the image so that the two figures would be more of the focal point of the piece and so here are the completed inks. Once the inks were in place, I went ahead and laid down some flat colors. Initially, I wasn't really sure what kind of color palette I wanted, but I wanted there to be a little bit more warmth compared to the last drawing. Even though there's a lot of blues here, I also tried to introduce some reds and warm browns too. Another thing that you can do to add visual interest to your piece is by introducing textures and this also will save you some time because rather than me having to draw a hardwood floor or a damask patterned wallpaper on the walls, I can simply find royalty-free images and use them to create texture in the background and so here is what the piece looks like with the wallpaper texture and the hardwood flooring texture introduced to the piece and I did adjust the colors a little bit on both. Now the two figures seem to be getting a little lost in the piece because all the colors around them are of the same saturation, so I want to draw attention back onto the two figures. To do that, I first introduced some highlights which brings the eye's attention. Then I also added shadows, which tend to make objects look recessed. While I did add shadows on their body and clothing, I did also make sure to add a shadow around the corners of the drawing to draw the eye to the center where the two figures are, I added additional shading to the bodies to make them look a bit more dimensional and also a light flush on each of their faces. To really make sure that the figures stood out, I decided to make the background recede a little bit more and by doing this, I took the background lines that were in the walls that were originally black and colored them to be lighter and I think this really makes the figures pop in front of them. The final thing that I did was I created a painting for the frame on the upper right-hand corner. I wanted to introduce new textures into this painting and so I used a digital brush that was meant to look like a painter's brush and I made sure not to use any hard lines or too many blacks to give more of that painterly feel and so here is the finished piece. In the next video, we will compare and contrast the original drawing with the new finished drawing to see what stayed the same, what's changed and to give you my personal thoughts on this new drawing compared to the old one. I know this video is a little bit longer than usual, so I appreciate you staying until the end and please feel free to let me know if you have any questions. Thanks, and I'll see you in the next video.
9. Comparing Your Old and New Drawings: In this video, we're going to be comparing my original drawing to the redraw that I made for this class. Before we begin our comparison, let's actually go back to our first analysis of the original drawing and review some of the things that we wanted to maintain and improve upon. The things that we wanted to maintain in the redraw were; the hair rendering style, making sure that there are thicker and a higher density of lines in the parts of the hair that should be darker to imply more of a shadow. We wanted an overall moody, ambiguous tone here and I also wanted to make sure that the figures were still interacting in some interesting way. Now, let's talk about the things that we wanted to improve upon or the redraw. For this particular drawing, I didn't use any reference images, and I think it shows. I want to make sure that when I redid this drawing, I would use reference images. I also felt as though the posing between the two figures was a bit static and awkward, so I wanted to fix the posing to be more natural. There's also some issues with the anatomy and the placement of some of the body parts. I also wanted to improve the color scheme because this soft purple hasn't really conveyed the mood that I'm going for. Lastly, I wanted to also add more details in the clothing and in the background to hopefully make this drawing a little bit more interesting. Here are the two drawings side-by-side, the first drawing was originally done in November of 2017, while the new drawing was completed in July of 2018. In the eight or nine months between these two drawings, I've become more and more comfortable with digital painting, which is just part of the reason why I think the second drawing looks better. I think that's another thing that is important to keep in mind, just practicing and staying active in your creative practice will help you improve. The second drawing did take longer to complete than the first one, that's because more details are there. Now let's talk about the things that I changed from the first drawing to the second drawing. For one, I think the posing is much better in the second drawing and I'd credit this to the fact that I did several preliminary sketches beforehand to try to figure out what the best posing would be. I also looked at reference material to make sure that the posing felt natural. The posing in the first drawing is very static and very flat, and because we're viewing the two figures at eye level and at profile, we're not getting a good sense of dimension. In contrast, in the second image, the camera is above eye level, so we are seeing two figures at an angle. The way the bodies are positioned are also at more of a three-quarter profile rather than a complete profile, which I think is visually more interesting and less static. Let's also talk about the posing for a moment. In the first image, the posing here is a little strange. It almost feels as though there's parts where the two bodies are smushed together in a way that's uncomfortable. As you can see here in the first drawing, we have the man's head crashing into the woman's head, which is crashing into the shoulder, and then we have these two arms just awkwardly overlapping one another. If we look at the second outline, we can see that the heads have more of a comfortable distance with one another so that both are clearly articulated. The shoulders are further apart, so we tell the difference between the two and the arms are almost spooned within each other, so we can see the woman's arm pretty clearly right here and then the man's arm going over hers. The pose is much clearer to read in the second compared to the first drawing. There's also a lot more details in the second image, as we can see from the textures that I introduced. In the second drawing, the colors are more numerous but less saturated and much warmer in tone. The first drawing doesn't really feature much of a background. It's really just this soft purple gradient, whereas in second drawing, I took care to actually draw walls, and a floor, and a painting. I also took care to add more details in the clothing, specifically the woman; she now has more jewelry, she has eye makeup and nail polish, and she has more visible seams within the gown that she's wearing. Similarly, the man in the image is also sporting a few more accessories too. To close, I'm really pleased with how the redrawing came out. I think that it's much more successful than the first drawing and the second drawing feels much more polished and completed in a way that the first drawing just doesn't. I have taken the time to carefully analyze the first drawing, take note of the things that I liked, the things that I didn't like, and then use the resources available to me to improve upon the idea. To be fair, I feel like that's true for most people. The first drawing that you do of something is generally not going to be as good as the second, third, fourth, fifth, or tenth. I'm sure that if I reattempted this drawing once every few months, we would continue to see improvement with each iteration. What do you think? Let me know or leave any questions for me if you have them. Now, whenever you're ready, let's move on to the next video.
10. Assignment: Hello again and welcome to your assignment video. For your assignment, I want you to implement some of the things that we've talked about throughout this lesson by taking an old piece of art, analyzing it, deconstructing it, figuring out what's working, what's not working, and how you can improve. From there, you will re-create the same piece of art and implement some of the tips and techniques that we've talked about throughout this class to help improve it and make it better. Some of the things that you might want to do to help improve this new version of your old art piece, would be to use reference or research materials available to you, to draw from life or to potentially try some tracing techniques beforehand to warm up. It's really important to remember that even though you want to be critical of your art, try not to pick a part of it too much and cut yourself some slack. Remember that it is okay to make mistakes and keep in mind that confronting and acknowledging those mistakes is the best way to move forward as an artist. It can be scary and a little bit intimidating at times, but try not to take it too personally and remember that this is ultimately for your benefit. If at any point you start to feel a little overwhelmed or vulnerable, feel free to step away from your assignment for little bit. Take a walk, take a breath, and also keep in mind that I'm here for you. If you have any concerns or need, any encouragement or advice, feel free to leave a comment and I'll get back to you as soon as possible. Thanks for making it this far into the class. I look forward to seeing all of your assignments and good luck.
11. Closing Thoughts: Congratulations on reaching the end of this class. I hope that this class was beneficial for you in some way and I would love to hear back from you and learn about what techniques you found the most helpful,and if you've learned any additional techniques that maybe aren't mentioned in this class. So if you have any additional opinions or insights that maybe the whole class could benefit from, feel free to leave a comment, since I would love to know what you think.As mentioned before, if you have any questions or concerns whatsoever, please feel free to reach out since I'm here to help you. I hope that you'll be able to continue to use the tips that we talked about in today's class to help further your art and to help you grow as a creative. Thanks so much for joining me on this journey to self-improvement and creative discovery, I can't wait to see the kind of work that you guys come up with, and I really do hope that you have fun and continue to grow. Thank you, bye bye.