Every artist’s sketchbooks get filled with mistakes way before they get filled with drawings we like. And that’s something we should celebrate, because mistakes are the most helpful kind of feedback in drawing. In a way, your mistakes are showing you where in your drawing the vision, the control, or the structure went off course. A line that curves too early; a face whose features are jammed upwards; a cup whose top is tilted the other way from where it’s supposed to be, it’s not that these are indications you’re bad at drawing. No, these are clues on a page. When your mistake pages are clues instead of failures, they make learning so much more effective. Your page is no longer asking “is this good?” and is instead pointing out the next thing to work on.
One great thing to get into is knowing what kind of mistake you made. Sometimes a mistake is in the proportions. Maybe the neck is way too long, or the eye too wide, or the nose too small. Sometimes the mistake is the angle. It doesn’t have to be too much, the line could change a bit and the whole shape becomes off. Maybe your line is too fast and your line has just become a decoration that isn’t helping your drawing to improve. When you finish a drawing and don’t like it, don’t rush to erase it all right away. Instead, take a moment to look at what kind of mistake it is. Are the proportions wrong, say, is the jar too wide? Is it the angles? For example, is the arm’s slope wrong? Did the artist put her eyes too far apart, or do the light areas of the arm ignore the arm itself? If your mistake gets named, you can get a handle on it. Your correction moves from being an emotional task into a technical one.
One of the mistakes that happens a lot is correcting what is on the surface but not fixing the underlying form. For example, a head can look strange and the artist keeps redrawing the eyes over and over instead of going back to check the big shapes on the head and the center lines on the face. Similarly with objects like a hand, you can keep adding a finger here and a finger there, but you’ve been redrawing over a bad palm shape the whole time. So, to correct a mistake, move backwards before you move forwards. If you think the big shape was off on the original, go back and check the height and width, angle and position. If you had to draw the container over again, then go ahead. After that, add the detail inside that container shape again. You might feel slower doing it that way, but this approach is faster in the end because you don’t spend time polishing a shape that isn’t working.
Turn mistakes into a focused study by following this method: Spend 5 minutes drawing something, just a mug, a shoe, a hand, whatever. Set your pencil down and look at your drawing for 2 minutes. Look for one mistake that impacts the whole drawing. Spend the next 4 minutes drawing the same subject again with that one correction in mind. In the final few minutes, compare the two sketches and write a brief note to yourself in the margin. Something very clear like, “Top ellipse is too open” or “the handle started too high”. This note is important because it helps you make it to the next step with the right focus in your head, which helps your memory to learn faster and faster.
When you find yourself repeating a mistake, stop and focus on just that one issue rather than getting stressed over the whole drawing. If it’s proportion that you are always getting wrong, then try a few days just doing measurements from one object in height and width. If it’s that you aren’t confident with your lines, then try drawing the same line from point A to B several times over until you can draw the same line, not scratchy, every time. If it’s that your shading isn’t clear, you can put the shading aside for now and stick to shapes with only light and shadow. The best improvement you will make is by choosing one issue you are struggling with and isolating it and getting better at it. Trying to work on multiple problems at once is frustrating because your brain can’t focus on what is wrong when you don’t narrow the focus.
You will find that after a bit of drawing and practicing, the drawings that you like the least are the most helpful for improvement. Your sketches show you what you have seen but didn’t catch, and what you haven’t yet been able to control in your hand. Keep some of them. Put the dates on them. Then in a week or so come back to that sketch and draw the same shape again and check your drawing, see if you caught the same mistake again. This is more useful than trying to draw the best drawing ever every time you set down to draw. Refinement is something that happens when you take notice of what you’re drawing, make an adjustment, and then try again with more precision than you could before. That one mistake that you felt discouraged from might be the very thing that helps you stand up your next line to be clearer and more alive on the paper.