Megasketch Monday -- Practice Does Not Make Perfect

As a musician, one of the things we learn early on is that practice does not make pefect; rather, perfect practice makes perfect. If you play the same phrase over and over, with the same mistakes, you're teaching yourself to make those errors every time. The more ingrained they get, the harder it becomes to correct them. I think this holds true for how we practice and see things in art too. This is one of the reasons why it's harder to see issues in our own work than in the work of others. Mistakes that we make again and again become invisible to us. When we play back a recording of ourselves playing a piece, or look at our art in the mirror, we get a new perspective on what we've done. Mistakes jump out like a sore thumb.

When I was practicing circles and ellipses, I was concerned that I'd develop faulty muscle memory if I drew a lot of them that weren't exactly symmetrical. I was afraid that I'd stop seeing the symmetry if I got it wrong. (See my previous post, "Lines, Ellipses, Perspective, Cross Contours," if you haven't already.)  Apparently, this concerned somebody else too. I searched around the internet and

Lines, Ellipses, Perspective, Cross Contours, Bugs and Animals, Oh My!

One of the most important goals in my 600-page Project Megasketch was to develop line quality, and move away from chicken-scratchy type sketches that destroy the flow of beautiful lines and graceful forms. It's difficult to place a line exactly where we want it as it curves around a form, or moves straight across the page.  We compensate by trying again, and again, and again. What we end up with is a hatchet-job of a sketch, created with lots of small lines in an attempt to correct what we didn't do right in the first place. Even if one of those many lines is correct, the sum of the parts is not pleasing.

I searched online to find a process that would lead to an improvement in the quality of my line work, and came upon Draw A Box.  I think it's one of the best free resources for drawing on the internet. Don't miss the opportunity to take advantage of it! If you've decided to take on Project Megasketch, I'd highly recommend that you make it part of your Megasketch journey.

You may get tired of drawing lines and ellipses after several days of it, but the eventual payoff is huge. Don't skip over it. I stopped counting the pages toward Project Megasketch that I spent on the lines and ellipses because there were so many of them. I found them invaluable as warm ups. A couple of months later, I pulled out some vases, pots, pitchers and bottles to sketch. I wanted to see if it helped as much as I hoped. I found that I could draw them directly with ink in just a couple of minutes, and even if they weren't perfect, the improvement in my ellipses when applied to drawings was dramatic.