Zena (Portrait Study)

Graphite
11x14

Guys,
This right here is the sum total of my argument against shortcuts.
When I first joined deviantart as a teenager, I was frustrated that many other young artists my age gained such a large following with a constant stream of one-reference/traced/gridded horse drawings. No matter how long I spent on a drawing, erasing holes into my paper, I couldn't compete with that level of perfection. And up until I grew a brain at around age seventeen or so, I sometimes seriously considered just adopting that popular method in order to produce anatomically-perfect horses, quickly. And it's heart-breaking that I still see this happening all of the time.
The thing is, that's not how learning works.
I went through a lot of truly terrible drawings before I sat down to make this one.
But this one took less than an hour. In fact I'd peg it at the thirty minute mark.
Real "the man who drew one-thousand fish" lesson for you, I guess.
It's not the best drawing in the world, but it serves its purpose as a selective-description study.
Not trying to be self-righteous or anything, so please don't interpret it that way. But I had to get on my soapbox, just once, and defend the value of being bad at art. Because I can draw a really good horse. I can look at one photo and make the drawing look like it was done from life, and I can take a thousand photos and turn them into one consolidated drawing. That didn't happen by working for internet popularity. It would have been nice, I grant you. But it was never the end game.
Look.
HRPG and the like are fun games, and if you want to participate, that's fine. It's great.
But if you came to this site to draw, and fell into creating a never-ending stream of identical character sheets with flawless-but-sterile horses that you copied off of a google image search, you stopped learning. I've seen kids who joined this site with the classic starter combo of great ability for observation but shaky technical skill (where we all start) apparently drown by comparing themselves to people who are cheating themselves artistically. That's tragic, and it's why I no longer recommend deviantart to high school art students.
So on the off chance that a young artist is reading this...
Please, honey, keep drawing. You cannot help but get better. In a year, not only will you have improved beyond your wildest imagination, but the drawings that made you feel inferior will seem less intimidating. You will have learned without realizing it, and waking up one day and realizing that you hit the level of mastery you always dreamed of is nothing short of breathtaking. Which will happen. Years and years and years down the road.
But it's a foregone conclusion if you just keep at it. You do it the hard way and you've already won. And if even one person takes the above to heart, my job on this site is done.

I'm not there yet with art in general. My figures are stiff because I lack confidence in that area. But I used to lack confidence in horses, and now animals in general just come like music. There are more talented artists, of course, but even with my work's most obvious flaws, I wouldn't trade.

Last night I picked up a sketchbook and, without thinking about any other artist or any other drawing, doodled a figure. It looked pretty fantastic.

"While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior." ~Henry C. Link

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