You might reach a point in your drawing where, no matter how much you draw, you don’t seem to be getting any better. You’re filling up your sketchbook. You’re putting in the time. But all your faces seem a little wooden, your objects a little two-dimensional, and your drawings all seem to look the same. If you’re a beginning artist, this can be discouraging. But it’s more likely a sign that your practice has become too rote. Simply repeating the same motions can lull you into the belief you’re putting in the work while avoiding your weaknesses. What gets you improving again is drawing with a diagnosis.
A plateau can start with simply drawing the same way every day. Maybe you start by outlining something and then shading it, and then erasing your guidelines to get a tidy drawing. That’s not necessarily a bad process, but it is a process, and if you’re always starting and stopping in the same way, you might be giving yourself too little room to actually diagnose your problem. If your proportions are off, it won’t matter how long you spend on details. If your forms are flat, it won’t matter how dark you shade. Instead, pick one area you’re struggling with and organize your drawing around it. If you have trouble getting your objects to stand up straight, maybe spend a whole day just drawing perspective lines and checking verticals. If you can’t get your portraits to look three-dimensional, try focusing only on the transitions between planes of light and shadow. Sometimes temporarily restricting yourself to a narrower scope will allow you to discover more than a full drawing with lots of variables.
Another common pitfall during a plateau is focusing on the end result. One of the big pitfalls for beginning artists is feeling like they need to finish every drawing, even when the real problem is somewhere in the middle. Even if your final drawings are awful, there might still be something you can learn from them. And even if your final drawings are terrific, they might also be masking flaws in your drawing. Instead of focusing on making impressive drawings, try focusing on whether you learned something new about your weaknesses. Even if it’s rough, a study that helps you realize why your jaws are tilting the wrong way or your cups are too flat is more useful than a neatly rendered drawing where you made the same mistake.
Another technique that can help during a plateau is a shift in scope and speed. If you normally spend forty minutes on a single, fairly detailed drawing, try spending forty minutes on four small studies instead. Try drawing the same object from a slightly different angle, or try drawing the same pose with the same hand position four times. Working small means that you’re no longer invested in saving every drawing. It also means that if you have trouble with something, you’ll see your errors repeated more quickly, because repetition makes things more obvious. If you’re always connecting the thumb to the hand too far down, or if the far side of a box is always wider than it should be, you’ll begin to recognize that specific error. And that’s the first step to getting better.
If you want to give yourself a little kickstart, there’s a quick fifteen-minute exercise that can help break the plateau feeling. Spend five minutes observing a very simple object and then try to capture only its largest few forms, without worrying too much about the details. Then spend five minutes comparing your drawing to the object and noting where the width, angle, or position of something went wrong. Finally, spend five minutes drawing that same object again, this time applying the corrections you just noticed. This is a valuable exercise because it compresses that loop of observing, noting, and applying. Too many beginning artists observe their errors only after they’re done drawing, and then don’t spend enough time applying that knowledge to new work.
If your drawing still seems stuck, elicit feedback. But ask a specific question. Don’t ask someone what they think about your entire drawing. Ask them whether your value structure is working, or whether your proportions look right, or whether the form is turning like you want. General feedback can leave you spinning, but if someone points out a specific problem, you know what to attack in your next session. Instead of throwing your drawings away, keep a few of your failed drawings. Look at them as clues. They can reveal to you where you’re hurrying, where you’re guessing, and where you’re losing patience. You’ll get moving again when your practice starts to become less about making drawings and more about spotting exactly where you’re going wrong.