Blog #14: How to measure progress in your drawings

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CHIBI ME - WRITING by Shight   CHIBI ME - DRAWING by Shight
"If you can't measure it you can't improve it." ~ Peter Drucker (maybe)
Pretty easy concept right? If you want to lose weight, first you find out your baseline and check again after a day, week, month or so. If you want to run or swim 100m faster, you measure your current state, train or change something, and see the difference. In other words, you have a "before and after" difference to compare and put numbers to measure.
From these analogies to sports and fitness how can we translate this to art and drawing?

TIMING YOURSELF

It's a very useful practice, especially if you plan to work on commissions, to know how much time it takes you to sketch, ink or color an illustration, to know how much to charge roughly for minimum wage per hour.
My suggestion is timing yourself on your favourite subject drawings (character design, background, manga page, illustration, etc.), and divide it in a bit smaller chunks, like sketch, ink, flat color, shading color, for example.
Each time you're going to draw something, especially a recurring theme or subject:
  • You can use a stopwatch from your smartphone (and do cool poses by yourself when you finish like Kira) to get a more accurate timing, you can stop temporarily if you have an interruption.
  • If stopwatch makes you too anxious with time ticking (learning to appreciate deadlines is important too), you can just write down the clock when you started to draw and when you finished.

Write down your numbers per each drawing (or action, like sketching, inking etc.) and see the progression on excel, google doc or just look at them on notes, you can ask and answer yourself why your time is improving or not, what you could change or do less, etc.

BEFORE AND AFTER (DRAW THIS AGAIN!)


We've all seen this meme in the art community:

Ehm I mean this one.
Meme: Before and After by Bampire 
It's a very useful way to have your "fix", I mean "dose" of... confidence when you have an art block, especially with very old Before pics, you can see how much progress and how far you've gone. Here are a few very inspiring ones (I notified with a mention, I didn't want to wait the time to get permission from all of them, so I hope they'll forgive it with credit and link to their profile, if not, let me know and I'll delete it):

Draw It Again by Flowerxl BY :iconflowerxl:
Draw This Again by JadeMerien  BY :iconjademerien:

lazy draw this again meme by Shikaama BY :iconshikaama:


GRADING


It's a rough and approximative method: 
  1. Choose one or a few drawings as a starting reference point for your standard quality, choose a pretty good one to set a high standard and live up to its comparison if you're very driven.
  2. You give a rating on a 1 to 10 scale to each new drawing or you can ask others to rate it compared to the standard quality drawing(s). You can ask here on groups or facebook groups, and calculate the average of the numbers, but always ask why, why 3 or 10, only include a bit more detailed and critical feedback, internet is usually too forgiving in this case.
  3. If you hit a high 8-10 or a low 3-4 (very unlikely anyone would say 1 or 2), ask yourself why, what makes it so much better/worse than previous drawings? What did you do differently?
  4. Once your new 10+ drawings keep hitting the homerun it's time to move on your standard quality reference point to a new level and keep on improving.
LAST TIPS AND THOUGHTS
  1. Be more focused and specific: already covered in "timing yourself", in the "before and after" for example you could focus and zoom more on re-drawing only your weak points (hands/feet/clothes/tree/sea etc.) or strong points to breakthrough and improve them even more. It's useful if you want to improve something specific on a short span, after a few years you can obviously change your whole style and technique but in a short period it's harder to make a huge difference on a big scale.
  2. Similar but different: try to add, tweak something, the minimum that will create a huge impact change in the quality of your drawings (change brush setting, opacity, color values, etc.). If you have the .psd files you can try to change a few details applying 1 or 2 new techniques you've studied.
  3. Emphasize your strengths, minimize your weaknesses: this is why it's so important to really know what you and also other people think you're doing right or wrong. If your new coloring technique makes your drawings amazing, keep it. If the new way you changed the backgrounds doesn't affect at all or even worsens the drawing, throw it. But this also means, if you love drawing characters (like I do) and you suck at backgrounds (like I do), don't focus too much on improving a weakness that will become average at most (unless you're madly driven to master it for a good reason), instead focus on those things you really like, craft them even more, better.
  4. Test A/B + Combine multiple methods: for example you have studied a new coloring technique, cel shading, you can run a test like "before and after", with how you used to color a lineart and how you would try now, showing both drawings and ask to "grade" both and see which you and people prefer and why, meanwhile you can also "time" how much it took you to do both techniques, whether the difference in quality is worth the difference in time (if you took 1-2 extra hours just for an almost equal grading it might not be worth it).

This is a revision of an old post I hopefully improved. 

Any comment here or other social media on what other subject or questions you'd like to hear about or whether this is useful or not is highly appreciated.


Thanks for reading :) (Smile)

MY WORKS
Fanarts: shight.deviantart.com/gallery/…
Crossovers: shight.deviantart.com/gallery/…
Lucid Nightmare: medibang.com/book/we1702102052…
World Wide Manga: www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/…
Dungeon Bondage: shight.deviantart.com/gallery/…
Adventures in Distress: shight.deviantart.com/gallery/…
My Youtube Drawing Videos

BLOG LIST:

Blog #1: The Beginning
Blog #2: The importance of Internet 
Blog #3: Review of the week  
Blog #4: Review of the week
Blog #5: 3 steps to improve your art
Blog #6: Review of the week  
Blog #7: Review of the week
Blog #8: How to track progress in your art
Blog #9: Review of the week
Blog #10: 5 Questions to write your own story
Blog #11: How to commission an artist
Blog #12: How to avoid lower back pain for sitting
Blog #13: How to Draw any Manga Fanart Eyes

Commissions: VERY VERY VERY EXPENSIVE COMMISSION [OPEN]

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Self-Portrait by Shight  COVER IMAGE by Shight
© 2017 - 2024 Shight
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BrownRice111's avatar
Helpful info as usual. Thanks!