The Struggles Of An Amateur Artist

(Whee double post today...I think I need to be in some kind of stress situations in order to have some good posting ideas...ehem^^")

Okay, uhm...I draw quite a lot. Not as much as I once used to - *stares angrily at pile of uni tasks*- but still.
And those who still need to improve face problems that sometimes makes them want to give up on art. Especially when drawing humans.

Drawing eyes
Ah yes....the problem of drawing both eyes as beautiful as possible.
and what comes out?

This

One eye is Michelangelo and the other one freaking Picasso.
Now, forever and always. Sometimes we just can't manage to draw both eyes as beautiful as we want. Either the shape is completely off, or the eye is squinting or it's bigger or smaller or higher up or lower OR....
And then we spend the next hour on trying to make the eye as pretty as the other one and when we're done we notice that it's too small.
Which brings me to the next point:


Drawing hands
Okay, drawing hands is hard and will always be. Even for the most experienced!
So, us amateur artists try to perfect the pose, the shape and lighting of the hands. So what we do, is zoom in and concentrate on the hand(s).

And the result is mostly like this

You know Sally from "The Nightmare before Christmas"?
Teeny tiny hands like her. Or it's the complete opposite and the person has Wreck it Ralph hands.
If we draw with a computer program it's easy to regulate the size of the hands, but when we draw on paper everything was in vain. And we mourn the perfection that now will be forever lost because the next hand will never be as beautiful as the one before.

I'm not going to make an extra paragraph for the feet, let me just say that the problems are the same. Although the feet mostly look like they belong to Bigfoot.

"What do you do with your art?"
One of the most frequently asked questions. And one of the questions that we poor poor amateurs are actually asking ourselves, too.

We are not afraid of showing off our pictures on the internet on art websites but when it come to making money we back off. So, mostly our routine is
1) Draw picture
2) be proud of it
3) show it to parents an friends and put it on the internet
4) get praised
5) stare at it and improve so that one day we hate that picture ans ask ourselves why we were so proud of it.
6) Throw picture away or hide it somewhere at the bottom of drawing pile and also taking it off from the internet.
That's basically it.

But I don't want to be pessimistic! It takes a lot of time to improve, to try out colours and drawing styles. We go through different stages in our life and begin for example with drawing simple manga only to end up with maybe hyperrealism. We are totally into compurer proograms and fantasy creatures and end up with portraits, still life and oil paintings.
So one day everyone has enough courage to show their art to a publisher! Every big artist was an amateur once ;)