Rock Study Note

So here I wanted to explain my thought process for when I study and hit a roadblock.
When you study and you’re just having a hard time figuring out why it’s not working, best thing to do is take a step back. What is the point of the study, what are you trying to achieve, what do you want it to look like, why did you start the study in the first place, when did it start going wrong, right at the start? The middle, or the end?

You need to actually ask yourself this question.

I wanted to study rocks cuz i could never get the texture right and I was trying to understand how to paint better. After I did the first one I thought, this is good but not what I wanted It to look like. So after that first rock, it changed from nailing the rock texture to "I just want this to come together, my shapes are all over the place, maybe its my brush. It felt like I just put together a bunch of random shapes in the first, so how can I bring these shapes to be more defined"

I didnt have an answer for myself, so I took a break. This morning I woke up and I stumbled upon an artist that painted without lines… (@tanalieku) they would just paint. They were painting with shapes! How they would put down shapes, that appealed to me, so much! So I studied them, only with my eyes. Observed how they would draw, I watched their tiktok video over and over till I could see how they painted shapes.

All their shapes had a particular look to them, they were all different, asymmetrical. They felt bold. They would draw a shape, if it wasn’t to their liking, instead of undoing their strokes, they got their eraser and they would carve Out another shape. when I say I eyeballed their videos for a solid two hours, I did!
I remembered one of my favorite artists, Loish, she does the same thing when she paints. If the shape she put down on the canvas wasnt what she wanted, she wouldn’t go back, rather she would try and make it work, get out her eraser and cut out an interesting shape.

So I took my newfound information and got to work with the second rock. I put a shape down. If it didn’t work, id use my eraser, cut out the shape and move on. And my god everything started making sense. The 2nd rock I did i was like DAMN, this is actually it… mind blown. I did the 3rd one In case the 2nd one was a fluke lol and woah I made something good, it wasn’t a fluke!

So I hope this little story helps someone out if they are struggling with studying something. When you study alone, it’s very very difficult to understand why it is you are struggling. And I hope you start to ask yourself a bunch of questions starting today as you study!