Just keep at it. With more mileage your confidence will improve; don't worry much about the quality in the beginning. Draw lots of things. Observe and draw from real life as much as possible; fill sketchbooks with doodles and drawings of objects and people around your house and community, not just from pictures. That helped me a lot in the beginning. All the best.
Thanks a lot, I really needed to hear that. I haven't been doing a lot of 50% drawings lately and I don't know how to force myself to do it. I know it will be helpful in the long run but I just can't manage to sit and let my mind leak onto the page. I'm bombarded with questions in the process, some being: Why can't I think of anything? Why is it so bad? Why is it not working? Why don't I know how to draw this? Any bad drawings I make make me so frustrated I rip it out, throw it away, and cry for like an hour. I don't know how to get out of this mindset, but I know I need to get out of it soon.
This video helped me in the beginning: Doodle your Way to Being a Great Artist by Stefan Baumann. Early on in my journey I accepted his challenge to do 500 doodles a week. The first week I filled an entire sketchbook with 700 doodles!
A note about Stefan: he has some good advice, but I'm not a fan of how he teaches sometimes; I find he can be a bit dishonest and manipulative to get students to do what he wants. Just keep that in mind if you go on to watch more of his content. This doodling advice is great! I spent a few weeks focused on this. As I spent my weeks doodling, I listened to a bunch of art podcasts, interviews, discussions, etc. Check out the Draftsmen podcast and Creature Art Teacher; that's a great start, and there's so many more.
The goal at this stage is develop your hand-eye coordination to get your hand to do what you want it to, as well as to build up your visual library; but you don't have to consciously think about those things; as he said, don't worry about quality. Commit to a certain amount of doodles each day/week and have fun with it. Put in the time. This is a marathon, not a sprint.
Thanks a lot, I'll make sure to check it out.
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This is another one of those things that aren't sold through Amazon, so I don't get a commission on it - but it's just too good to leave out. PureRef is a fantastic piece of software that is both Windows and Mac compatible. It's used for collecting reference and compiling them into a moodboard. You can move them around freely, have them automatically arranged, zoom in/out and even scale/flip/rotate images as you please. If needed, you can also add little text notes.
When starting on a project, I'll often open it up and start dragging reference images off the internet onto the board. When I'm done, I'll save out a '.pur' file, which embeds all the images. They can get pretty big, but are way more convenient than hauling around folders full of separate images.
Did I mention you can get it for free? The developer allows you to pay whatever amount you want for it. They recommend $5, but they'll allow you to take it for nothing. Really though, with software this versatile and polished, you really should throw them a few bucks if you pick it up. It's more than worth it.
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