I'm Not Improving And it's Killing my Motivation

hello

i've been drawing animals for a few years now and over the past 2 years i haven't improved much, i think i may have even gotten worse

this has been making me draw a lot less, i'm going to try doing 1-5 animal figure drawings each day but i'm worries i wont improve much

please help

Maybe you can try something little bit different. For example change your topic. Try different exercises. Do warmup before drawing session. Do exercises like: 2 drawings reference photos and then draw same thing from memory.

Practice your foundation: Form, Gesture, Structure and Perspective.

May I just say I love your profile picture, if you drew it yourself I think you did a really great job.

I'm having trouble drawing animals too but I just don't focus to much on them, have you tried practicing textures and how to draw fur and stuff? look up animal skin textures and practice those, I hope I could be of a little help!

Specklld, what is your current goal for your practice sessions? Having an extremely vague goal like "get better at drawing animals" can mean that your brain doesn't know what piece of information to pay attention to in all of the thousands of things you might learn from a practice session, and lead to you not really retaining anything. Pick something really specific to focus on in your practice sessions for awhile. Change your practice goal every 2-4 weeks. Give your brain an area of learning to focus on. Otherwise, it is very easy to plateau. :)

@Kim what do you think about goal "Drawing animals from imagination"? is it to big or just fine?

• Adku edited this post on September 10, 2018 7:29pm.

Too big! At least pick a species to focus on, even if it's just for that one practice session.

You might also want to be clear about what KIND of drawing from imagination -- should your imagined animals look more realistic? More exaggerated and dynamic? Here's some random suggestions of what a more specific practice goal might look like:

"For this practice session my goal is to draw bears from imagination, with a focus on understanding the underlying shapes the construct their form."

"My goal is to draw horses from imagination, with a focus on correctly portraying their special leg anatomy."

"My goal is to draw animals from imagination, with a focus on picking one key part of the body to exaggerate to make it look like they are in vigorous motion."

I am going to back up the advice here.
"Getting better" is too vague and too big.
What does "getting better" mean?

I strongly suggest narrow down your goal.
What is better? Do you want more realism, do you want more defined cartoon, do you want more anthropamorphic? Only you know what "better" is.

I spent a DECADE trying to get "better" and I was never making progress. Then I started to focus on realism, and I chased that for a year, and along the way I started sub goals. A 5 minute gesture executed in 10 lines or less, was one of them.

Learning oil, learning to go back to pen and ink. I set small goals of mastering a skill or technique. And then I discovered a new style along the way an dI am pushing that as far as I can go.

You have to have a specific goal in mind, and then you need to be disciplined to get there.

and I reccomend change it up. I prefer human anatomy and portraits to all other subjects. But I keep myself challenged. Every morning I do a 10 minute sketch from this site. And I rotate through the 4 subjects. It keeps me fresh. Look up Hornet of Justice on Instagram or Hornet of Justice Art on Facebook if you want to see the images I do.

"get better" is not a goal.
Set a specific goal and see what happens.

A 5 minute gesture executed in 10 lines or less, was one of them.

I just wanted to call out how much I love this goal, and to acknowledge how much time you gave yourself to do it in! That takes a lot of patience and deep thought.