Every morning I take some time to study. I’m still at a place in my artistic journey where I don’t feel good enough, so I’m always striving to improve through learning.
What I’ve realized in the months I’ve been doing this is that I’m not observing enough for my art and drawing practice. I even go through my life blindly instead of looking at things. When I was a child I was much more curious than I am now, and I lost that thing somewhere and somehow.
When I was thinking and writing about this topic, I found a note where I wrote that we have to observe 80% of the time and use what we see 20% of the time. We have to look at things to see how they work and the way they behave. Why does it look like this? Can it look different? How did it get made? Thinking about more than just how it looks will help you if you want to reproduce it. You will make it much more believable and beautiful.
For example, in the last few weeks, I have been trying to get better at clothes and folds. I realized that I rarely do seams on clothes. And they help so much in understanding what kind of clothes they are and with the figure itself in perspective. Why have I never done those seams? When I look at clothes they all have them unless they are crocheted or knitted. Why have I never seen that?
That’s why I try to observe more in real life. Not to go through life blindly, but to see the things around me and try to understand how things are and why they look the way they do.
I also recommend that you pay more attention to seeing rather than just doing.