Practice does not make perfect and your life is a lie.

Is your mind blown yet? I can explain. We all grew up hearing ‘practice makes perfect’ and believing if we put in the time, if we just Did the Thing over and over and over and over and over, we would eventually become experts. I became aware of something recently, as I sketched and sketched and sketched some more – but before I tell you what I learned, let me just quickly explain something to you.

Creative growth isn’t a straight line. The artists I know work hard, their artwork improves, and then suddenly—down it goes. It’s very much like a roller-coaster. Each rise to new artistic heights is preceded by an extreme dip down. It feels like you’ve lost 99.9% of your talent and you’re three years old again, except this time you’re terribly self-conscious and aware of just how bad your art is. This happens, because creative growth is wibbly-wobbly. That’s the scientific answer.

Recently, my favorite nomadic troglodyte sent me an email. Now, Hannah is a renaissance woman – you name it, she’s dabbled in it. (Except alchemy, I think; we’re planning to learn that one together.) She had a good eye for art, but felt she needed to improve. Her email was an excited one – she was making progress. Huge progress. Leaps and bounds of it, because she’d been watching a YouTube series on improving your art, and it was working.

The thing is, it wasn’t that she hadn’t been drawing steadily before. She had. She’s been involved with artwork since I’ve known her, and that’s been years (and years). But it wasn’t necessarily the practice that improved her artwork. It isn’t necessarily the practice that improves mine.

It’s awareness. See, I like to sketch. I like to doodle. If my mind is otherwise occupied (a documentary, a sermon, a lecture) in order to stay focused on that, I need to be doing something with my hands (hence growing up as a Church Serial Doodler, when I wasn’t eating a box of raisins). The trouble with ‘mindless’ anything is the lack of awareness that accompanies it.

You aren’t going to improve if you aren’t conscious of what you’re doing. Any savage can dance. Anyone can doodle, and lots of people do – but there’s a difference between sketching and mindful sketching.

Sketching looks like putting a pencil to paper again and again and getting similar results each time with no significant improvement, because you aren’t really paying attention.

If you could hear my thoughts while I’m sketching mindfully, however, it would probably sound something like this:

‘The line of his forehead is too shallow, I need to bring it out. That eyebrow isn’t dramatic enough; gotta fix that. The nose is kind of disproportionate – his mouth is good, though. Wait, I need to choose a light source so I can add shading in the right places. Hair doesn’t naturally fall this way, even if it’s voluminous – it does if it’s windy, so I’ll make sure his clothing looks like there’s wind as well. Hang on, his neck isn’t looking right where it connects to his back, I need to look at a reference – ah, there we go. That’s much better. Now to make these folds of fabric drape realistically.”

And so on and so forth. Mindful sketching means looking at your work with a critical eye. It also means you look at references. It means you’re aware of things like shading and environment and expression and weather. It means when you draw something you don’t like, you purpose to figure out why you didn’t like it. And it means, rather than tuning out of your drawing, you tune in.

Once you start to really see your own work, you’ll begin to see mistakes (and improvements). You’ll begin to see what you could do better, and you’ll work on those until you get it right, and then you’ll fix something else. You will always, always keep improving because there’s always room for it – and so no, practice doesn’t make perfect.

But mindful practice just might.

I realize the tagline of this blog says writing, art, etc. but is 90% writing and 5% etc. Today, to shake things up a little bit, I’m focusing on the OTHER 5% (finally) and talking about art. Actually I’m asking you guys some questions about art, which is totally the same thing.  Lately I’ve been giving heavy thought to the question how can I make a steadier income with my art and my lovely fellow human on Facebook and Instagram have been throwing out some frankly genius ideas.

Here’s the thing – art takes time. It takes years of practice. It’s hard work – and people like art. Some of us even love art. We love seeing a favorite character come to life, or one artist’s take on a film concept. Art makes life better – but it can also be expensive. I’ve had so many people tell me, “If I had the money, I would so commission X piece from you.”

As someone who’s definitely never fallen into the ‘rich’ category, I can say from the bottom of my heart, I feel you. And I want to do something about it.

Some of the suggestions tossed out to me are as follows:

• Why don’t you sell pages of your sketchbook once you’ve finished them?

• What about blind date with sketches — someone buys a sketch from you and doesn’t know what they’re getting until it arrives? (This would probably be a monthly thing – think OwlCrate or BirchBox, but with sketches — possibly multiple sketches per ‘envelope.’)

• What about accepting commissions for those color sketches you do?

• What about offering custom trading cards? (These would be available in various mediums.)

I LOVED these suggestions, and when I publish my ‘commission info’ page on this site, you’ll see these options available for purchase. However, my Facebook and Insta peeps aren’t the only ones out there – I want to hear your ideas. What would YOU like to see? What artsy dream do YOU have?

Check out my art on….

DEVIANTART

TUMBLR

INSTAGRAM

And because I like to be a little unconventional, I’ll be open to unusual methods of payment. Have an unused Target/WalMart/WHEREVER gift card lying around? You could totally trade that for some art. Have a product you sell, or something unused-but-neat sitting in a dusty corner? Feel free to suggest a barter!

LEAVE YOUR REQUESTS, IDEAS, AND SUGGESTIONS IN THE COMMENTS SECTION BELOW! I’ll go over them and see what I can do to make my artwork more accessible for you.

For a while in 2016 I had a sketch giveaway for all my blog followers at the end of each week. While I loved the idea, it became too much – I would get caught up with writing, art commissions, editing, and life in general and before I knew it, I’d completely forgotten about the giveaway. So in 2017, one of my blog resolutions was to revisit the idea of art giveaways, but at the end of each month, and with more mediums. This being the end of January (it flew by!), I’m here to announce that the winner of January’s art giveaway is

SparksOfEmber!

Shoot me an email at mirriamneal@outlook.com and I’ll get it sent to you ASAP! See you all in February!

Before you ask where I was, I’ll tell you: I had the Flu from Hell and was laid up for the last week, hence the lack of posts. (At some point I’d like to reach the point where I have enough posts queued up where you don’t suffer, even if I am. Cough. But we’ll get there.) However, I’m on the upside of recovering now, and can look forward to a Christmas without the flu next year. Onward!

Today, I am here to talk to you about one of the most important weapons in an artist’s arsenal. Pens and brushes are all very well and good (and, one might argue, relatively important in the grand scheme of drawing) but the weapon I’m discussing today is the one thing that can make or break a drawing. It’s the difference between the life and death of your sketch. It’s the vital difference between getting your proportions right and re-creating Frankenstein’s monster (or a Picasso). The secret weapon is:

Know when to take a break.

Ever since I began drawing sheets of sea monsters as a toddler, once I began a piece I didn’t stop until I had finished it. I needed to complete the drawing before I could peacefully begin another task – which was, more often than not, drawing another page of sea monsters. I carried that behavior into my adulthood. Once I begin something, I am loathe to take a break from it until I’m finished. Unless a drawing is giving me a particular amount of grief, I’d rather remain bent over it for three hours when I’m on a roll than take a break every half-hour.

But once I began taking breaks halfway through, I discovered something upon returning. Nine out of ten times, the drawing I had thought was perfectly proportioned was, in fact, lopsided. The perspective was off, and more often than not, the eyes were extremely uneven. This frustrated me to no end. When I was hunched like Quasimodo (note: I do not recommend hunching) over the piece of artwork, it looked perfect and everything seemed well-rendered. When I looked at it with fresh eyes, I saw I was sadly mistaken, and there’s a reason for it.

When we spend a great deal of time looking at the same thing, we become absorbed in the detail. Instead of seeing ‘the big picture,’ we are caught up in shading the corner of the eye, or detailing the nose or the lip.

Instead of seeing the drawing as a whole, we begin to see it in pieces.

Our mind’s eye becomes so used to seeing the drawing one tiny section at a time that it blurs everything else together, creating the illusion of a proportionate drawing. We literally become unable to truly see what we’re drawing, until we take a break.

I have to remind myself often to stand up, to walk around, to go look at something else for five minutes or more. When I return to look at my drawing, I can once again see it as a whole and not simply a detail here and a detail there.

In his journals, Leonardo da Vinci also praised the virtues of pausing your painting and taking a stroll, because he understood how the artist can become so absorbed in the minute that they become incapable of seeing the entirety.

Note: You don’t need to take a break every five or ten minutes, but every half-hour or every hour is a good idea. If you begin to take breaks more frequently, you could lose your stride and getting it back might prove discouraging.

So, in the words of Eliza Hamilton, take a break! Look at other artwork, move around in different lighting, look at various shapes and colors before sitting back down and continuing on with your work. Your drawing will thank you.