There are lots of things you may want to get good at: Things required
for your job, hobbies, games, social-interaction, creative arts,
cooking, managing time, managing money, making scale matchstick
replicas of famous architecture.
Whatever you want to do and do well, it's im****tant not to make your
education too narrow, or put all your eggs in one basket. For example
you can read all the books you want about drawing but there's a lot
you won't learn until you start drawing for yourself. The physical
skills and spatial awareness that you need to make a picture work, and
your own particular strengths and weaknesses won't become apparent
without practice.
That doesn't mean that reading about drawing won't help. A lot of
useful techniques or exercises can be learned from the experience of
other people, and someone with great skill and accuracy might still
have a very limited drawing style until their eyes are opened by the
examples of others.
Habits matter as well as skills and knowledge. If you only do rough
drafts of something before moving on to something else then you won't
end up refining your work or learning as much as you could from what
you've just done. If you draw every part of every drawing at the same
speed then some parts won't get the detail that they need while others
will take up more time than they should. If you wait until the idea is
perfectly clear in every detail in your mind before you start drawing
then you may never get started, or you may only be able to work on the
most simple of pictures. On the other hand if you never stop to think
or re-*****s how the picture should look and just continue making
marks on the paper then you may end up with messy, cluttered work that
you don't like no matter how much you work on it.
Besides your ability at the specific task, there are other things you
need to learn to make drawing a rewarding and balanced part of your
life. Any activity can conflict with others. If you spend too much
money on drawing supplies then it will conflict with other things you
need money for. You could instead do most of your stuff with cheap
pencil and only choose some things to refine with more expensive inks
and paints. You could also spend too much time on your drawing, or do
it at the wrong times when you've got im****tant things to attend to
that are more urgent, while really the drawing could wait. The reverse
of using too much time and money is also possible, and if you don't
make enough room in your life to draw, then other things will trample
all over it.
One of the most useful things you can do, is execute complete drawing
projects, big and small, from start to finish. This tests all of the
things you need to learn about drawing in real-world conditions. You
could do a lot of little drawing exercises to refine your skills, and
you could make grand plans for the kinds of big, complete drawings
that you'd like to finish, but these two things alone won't teach you
about the time-management, re-drafting, refinement, persistence and
balancing with other parts of your life that are required to complete
real-life projects.
It can be very useful to engage in exercises where the product doesn't
really matter and the only goal is learning and practice, but when you
move to real-life projects there are often obstacles you didn't
expect. Theoretical knowledge can also be very useful, but when
applying this knowledge to real-life projects you will get a much
clearer idea of what the more im****tant things are that you've
learned, and what else you need to learn.
So in the same way that you have to get out of the parking lot and
drive the streets with your supervisor before you'll be able to pass
your driving test, and in the same way that after years and years of
schooling, doctors have to be an intern for another year before
they're allow to practice medicine by themselves; you have to embark
on real drawing projects to properly learn to apply the things you've
learned about drawing.
Real-life achievement is the final and ultimate test for anything you
want to be good at doing, but to do well on that test you need to
focus on all of the kinds of education mentioned: You need to develop
theoretical knowledge, practical skill and entrenched good habits.
Furthermore you need to focus on making the pursuit fit in with the
rest of your life, which requires another set of knowledge, skills and
habits.
It might seem like this is a lot to attend to, but neglecting any one
of these things will lead to frustration, setbacks and wasted time. If
your performance at something is failing due to lack of skill, and you
try to fill the gap with more knowledge, then you will be wasting your
time and get frustrated. Likewise if you're highly skilled but
ignorant of many of the techniques and strategies that exist for doing
what you want then you'll be held back. If you're very good at all
aspects of a particular activity except that it frequently comes into
conflict with other things in your life, then you won't get the
enjoyment and results that you would otherwise be able to get.
In short, learning to be good at something requires several kinds of
learning. If you cover them all then you can improve a lot and enjoy
doing so. If you neglect any of them then you will expend too much
effort for too little reward.
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