If you’re a new artist, you know that showing your work to others for feedback can be just as daunting as creating the work itself. The piece is already somewhat precious to you, and sometimes one or two vague statements leaves you feeling more bewildered than when you started. “I don’t know, it just doesn’t look right” or “I don’t know, it just feels off” isn’t particularly helpful when you’re still learning to judge those things for yourself. The truth is, the effectiveness of feedback begins long before anyone has responded to your request for it. It begins with what you choose to show, at what stage you choose to show it, and the nature of the question you ask when you show it.
When feedback has direction, it’s a powerful refinement tool. Otherwise, it’s just noise. Knowing when to ask for feedback isn’t always, “I’ve finished this piece. What do you think of it?” Sometimes it’s better for the beginning artist to share the block-in stage of their work rather than the final product. It’s easier to make changes at this stage, and the overall structure of the piece is more apparent. If the proportions are off, or if the pattern of light and dark could be better, now is the time to catch it, rather than after you’ve spent hours rendering details. Share one piece at a time, and attach one specific question to it. Ask if the overall form appears correct, if the composition feels right, or if the shadow pattern is functioning as intended. In most cases, a specific question will garner a specific response.
Perhaps the worst thing you can do when asking for feedback is to ask for a general response. When you say, “What do you think of this?” you’ll almost always get a general response. You might hear, “I love your style,” when what you really need to hear is, “Your perspective is off.” You might hear, “You’re trying so hard!” when what you really need to hear is, “Your values need more control.” A better approach is to decide on one aspect of the piece that you specifically tried to accomplish, and to draw attention to it. “I was trying to draw cleaner ellipses. How did I do?” or, “I was trying to separate warm light from cool shadows. Did I succeed?”
When you know what you were going for, the feedback becomes more useful, because it’s addressing a conscious decision you made. It’s also important to distinguish between correction and preference. Not every suggestion is created equal. Someone might say, “That jar is leaning to the left, when it should be straight up.” Someone else might say, “I would make those colors brighter.” One is pointing out a structural problem. The other is expressing a preference. The beginning artist will often take both suggestions as being equally important, and will end up repainting the whole thing. Try to read feedback in layers. The first thing to look for are suggestions that pertain to proportion, value, edges, or composition. You can worry about the style later.
Once the underlying structure of a piece is sound, style has a much better context. One simple tool for making feedback more effective is a post-feedback review. After each suggestion, before you do anything else to the piece, take a minute to write a couple of sentences in plain language about what you heard. You might write, “I need to make my shadow areas into bigger shapes,” or “My background is too high contrast,” or “My hand is too small in proportion to my cup.” Then, compare what you’ve written with your own observations. If both you and your reviewer have pointed to the same problem, then correct it in your next study, rather than trying to fix it in the current piece.
This is important, because most improvement happens through repeating studies, not through salvaging a problem piece. There’s a simple 15-minute feedback cycle you can go through between longer studies that might help. Take five minutes to look at your piece in conjunction with the subject or reference you’re using, and write one question about it. Take five minutes to consider one suggestion from someone else, or one note you’ve made to yourself. Take five minutes to make a small correction study of the issue you’ve identified, like redrawing the object with better proportion, or repainting the shadow with better value. This helps keep feedback practical, rather than theoretical. Instead of gathering a lot of suggestions, you turn each suggestion into a small study of its own. That’s where you begin to develop your judgment.