How I improved at art using other people's art

-And how you can too!

I initially made this as part of a discussion I was having with someone, but I figured maybe it was the kind of thing you guys would be interested in. So along with what I've written in the image itself (you'll have to probably click on the image, wait for the full version to load and then open it in a new tab and zoom into it to read it), I'll kind of recap what the discussion was about as well to give context:

Basically, we had been talking about ways to study and I had mentioned that one of the things I did while I was learning (I'm still learning, but you get what I mean) was that I would identify artists that were clearly better than me but also seemed like "achievable goals," to then try and incorporate parts of what I felt made them better than me into my own stuff.

The conversation actually started because I call that process "absorbing" artists, which isn't actually relevant, but yeah. You can call it that too if you want, I think it's funny.

Is there a way to tell if someone is just above you in skill level? I'm having a hard time gauging that

Was one of the things that I was asked prior to posting this image and in response I said (with some stuff added for this post):

if you look at their art and think "I could probably do that, but I haven't been," then they are likely within a similar level of ability, or at the very least their level is approachable for you.

It's not an exact science, so it doesn't really matter if you gauge something wrong and it ends up being way more difficult than you thought. The point is just to identify things that you feel would make your art "better," that you also think you should be able to reproduce, then reproduce them until it feels like it's second nature. Then after that, you move on to another thing.

You can also take less difficult things from artists that are way better than you or just jump straight into extremely difficult things, but that's obviously harder, because the more skilled someone is, the more difficult it is to break down what they're doing and why.

That's important because, being able to reverse engineer why you're doing something is typically essential to long term improvement as an artist. The less you get why you're doing something, the less likely it is that you'll be able to build on it, which would be bad, obviously. You don't want to just be imitating, you want to be creating.

Which brings us to the actual image chronicling a very small part of my artistic journey. I made a note during the conversation that this shouldn't be taken 100% at face value, since it was more nuanced than I made it out to be.

I had gotten to a point eventually where I was taking many things from many different artists at once, but the general idea of taking things from someone better than you that you think will make your art better stayed the same, it just became nonlinear.

Anyway, I followed up with:

You just try things until you get a sense of what you can and can't achieve right now, focus in on the things that you find out are achievable, build them up until you feel comfortable enough that you'll be able to achieve more complex things and continue going from there

Which applies to studying overall really, no matter how you plan to go about it.

This all more or less comes back around to that idea that "good artist copy, great artists steal" and all that which has been talked about to death, but that statement doesn't really mean much if you just hear it out of context and a lot of people misinterpret it as well, so I figured that maybe this little interaction plus the barebones visual aid might prove useful to someone, maybe.

I think that if you're someone who finds the idea of master studies or what can sometimes feel like aimless fundamentals grinding intimidating, this is a very viable and potentially more engaging option. That being said, you will still have to learn fundamentals outside of what you pick up from other people's art, but not all studying needs to be a grind all the time.

If you're interested in more of my random thoughts about art or if you found this helpful but want clarification or for me to expand on anything here, let me know and I'll either reply or do some more posts like this about what you guys ask. Of course, the opposite is true if no one cares.

Either way, thank you all for your continued support, Wishlist SweetCanvas on Steam (there will be a much shorter post about that after this) and I PROMISE I'll be back to posting art soon, I just have not been able to predict how anything that's happened this year would go at all...