How I improve my painting skills by embracing frustration + Portrait Demo #artshorts #art #artsanddesign

Hello and welcome to my weekly painting vlog. Speedpaints and demos like this can make art look effortless, but we know that painting can be a source of great frustration. And when you've had days, weeks or months with seemingly no progress in your learning, that's an even greater frustration. But I think embracing frustration is the key to improving. If you're curious to know why I think that, so please keep on watching. First, this is my main learning approach that I want to share with you and that I will stick with a painting for longer than it seems appropriate or rewarding to do so. This is counter to most advice today, and it's definitely masochistic in a luxurious way, in that to do it, you need to have the time to do so. Before I elaborate, let me share with you a conversation I just had. Someone in my Discord study group said 80% of the work is done in the first 20%. And he said that positively, to discourage us from spending too much time on a single piece of work, because you might learn more if you did many paintings instead of focusing on one. And according to this popular mantra, the latter 80% of work is superfluous. And I agree with what he said, in that most of a painting's success as a work of art is built up in that first 20% of your time and progress. But I think a significant portion of learning can be found in the latter 80%. Because in that latter 80%, you commit to the structures and ideas you meshed out in the initial 20%, through rendering, through minute adjustments. And I often find that after many days of rendering a piece of work that was built on shaky foundations, I almost never repeat the mistakes that lead to those shaky foundations. Labouring in that latter 80% improved the clarity of foundation building that happens in the first 20%, at least for the next piece. And so even if it seems like a waste of time, this is why I will stick with a painting for much longer than it seems appropriate or rewarding to do so. I might just learn something through those long hours marching toward what only seems to be an inevitable failure. Now, working on the latter 80% is not fun. And maybe that's why you're frustrated. The 80% is inherently frustrating. And it's even more so when we begin to see that the foundations built in the 20% are leading you astray. But you have to stick with it. And so when I'm frustrated, I tell myself I'm learning. When I first started to paint eight years ago, a portrait like this might take me forever to do. Literally forever, because I could never get my first portraits to this degree of finish. But after lots of weeks, days, hours, years, with screaming, crying and swearing, nowadays, on a good day, I could flesh out a portrait in a few hours. And this one in particular took four hours. If I were to work on this portrait further, I'd probably polish the form of the brow bone and redefine the shape of the lower eyelids. Maybe work on the hair a little bit. I've spent like tens or hundreds of hours doing this on all of my previous portraits. It's a never-ending quest to better understand the form, the anatomy, the texture of these parts of the face. And I'm confident in saying that it's definitely partly because of this new link that even my sketching has gotten better as well. But frustration is a double-edged sword. And frustration may not only come from learning. Instead, sometimes I'm frustrated because of deadlines or because I can't meet my own expectations. And for some years, I had this recurring dread when it came to finishing a painting because I felt my process was too erratic and laden with mistakes. Unlike the frustration that arises from the challenges of long-drawn painting projects, this type of self-imposed frustration, on the other hand, is an obstacle to your learning. To be honest, when I'm frustrated today, I'm still not fully clear what kind of frustrated I am. I'm trying to build the emotional maturity to identify and work through bad frustration rather than to work because of it. And importantly, not to cease working completely because of a bad frustration day. Hopefully this demo was useful and my thoughts on frustration interesting and helpful. This is episode 7 of a weekly painting vlog I'm doing. Hope you'll like and subscribe. And if you're feeling frustrated, remember that it might just be a good sign actually.