Success and failure are often a hair's width apart.
A few days ago I was working on a drawing. I don't even remember what it was, but I recall that my first attempt was horrendous. I mean, it was so bad that I was ready to quit drawing, sell all of my possessions, and live in a cave. It was the kind of bad that makes you think you'd lost all the skill you had while you were asleep.
I fumed for a few minutes, but was quickly itching to give this drawing another try.
My second attempt was excellent. It was more excellent than usual. I was shocked-shocked that 2 subsequent attempts at the same drawing could be so widely separated in quality.
And I realized that in art, your greatest successes sometimes come after abject failures.
Making a bad drawing doesn't mean you're a cruddy artist. It means you made a bad drawing.
Bad drawings are just a series of poor choices-of line, shape, composition, etc. We often make poor choices because we don't have clear information about how something actually looks. Sometimes we don't know the best way to represent something with the medium we're using. Sometimes we labor over something that should be drawn quickly, and vice versa.
What we often lack is not ability or skill, but information.
So when a drawing is bad, we can simply ask ourselves:
-Am I clear about the way this object or body part is shaped/put together?
-Is there another way to draw the same object?
-Is the composition boring?
-Am I using enough contrast?
-Is my hand moving the way it should?*
*A note about this question. I feel like I need to move my hand in a certain way when I'm drawing a comic page, and another when I'm drawing a slick cartoon. Different hand movements equal different lines. I can draw wildly different images depending on how much freedom I give my hand to move the way it wants. My hand movements change the appearance of the lines, and therefore the tone of the entire drawing.
Keep drawing. You never know when a masterpiece is going to show up.
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