Table of Contents
Intro
You aren’t Born an Artist. The age you start learning makes very little difference in how good you become past several years of training. While learning any skill can be easier as a youth for various reasons, learning anything has no age limit. Drawing, like any other skill, has to be learned over a period of time. It is not an innate ability that someone is born with. Some of the best artists in my grade school went on to never draw in their adult life.
Drawing skills require knowledge of the subject, deliberate practice and time for trial and error. This learning process doesn’t change based on what age you begin at. We all have to go through the same learning processes to arrive at the drawing goals, but there are various little ways those roads might change along the way. I’ve noticed that differences in learning tend to be more determined by your personality type than by your age. If you want to boost your art learning you can also check out this post on Learning to draw Faster.
When someone learns at a young age, they are in a state of mind where they are soaking up all the information in their environment. They are a sponge for any learning they find. Learning as a youth is also easier in that they have more time to explore their hobbies and nurture their growing skill. When you are an adult with a job and bills to pay. There are more responsibilities on an adult and therefore less time. Learning to Draw is fun and rewarding for beginners. And we making everything easy things to draw.
Advantages to Being Older
Because of their jobs, many know how to push themselves when they don’t want to. Sometimes you don’t feel inspired to practice drawing. It takes self control to do the things you know are necessary to achieve your goal. Obviously not all adults have this, but more adults have the ability to sit and calm their minds to learn than kids.
Adults tend to have more patience for the process than younger learners. with social media and tiktok, younger people’s attention span tends to be much shorter. Adults are used to waiting for the result they need and are careful about their choices when doing certain tasks.
- Knowledge.
- Adults tend to know more about the world from their life experience. They have more things in their mind to pull from to use as a motivator to draw. There are more subjects in an adult mind to bring into the art experience. A lifetime of experiences can bring a new dimension to your drawing practice.
- Money
- An older person can pay for more resources, like classes in real life or online. They can speed up the process with private tutoring in drawing. Children don’t tend to have the access to ways of learning that adults do. The programs that are offered, tend to be pricey. Although there are free videos to learn on YouTube, private instruction is the fastest way to learn and that always costs money to take.
Identify What You Think is Good
You want to know what you are aiming for. What do you consider “good” drawing. Take a look at several artists that you enjoy and pick out several examples of what you would consider excellent drawings. Preferably pick out drawings that you would love to draw like one day.
Proper Drawing Practice
Proper Practice over Time Learning.
I started drawing in my early 20s. It came with an internal feeling of doubt because my entire class has started when they were 5 years old. I was attempting to play catch up because I felt I had lost time. Proper practice beats years of poor practice any time. I don’t want to disparage anyone’s life experience, but when I went to life drawing sessions randomly around the city,
I would commonly see people in their 60s who were not very good at art. I’m not referring to people who did art as a loose hobby for a few years. One man told me he had been drawing since he was 3 years old. He had 57 years of drawing experience. It looked like he was a beginner.
I had seen people with 3 months of drawing experience who were more adequate. Why had he never progressed? There could be many reasons. It’s possible that he never tried to find out a better way to learn. And it’s also possible that he never had a teacher critique his art.
I had two defining moments that told me this. I went to San Diego Comic Con with my portfolio to get critiqued by a professional. I showed it to a concept artist that I had been following online for years. He looked at my art, and said everything I drew looked the same and without purpose. The characters I was drawing were without purpose.
This hit me harder than I thought, internally I was shocked and modified. Although I had gone there for the purpose of a critique, I didn’t realize my inner ego would be so hurt. At that point, I had been an artist for 7 years. I felt I had a pretty good grasp on things.
Enjoying the Learning Process
Are you learning because you want to impress others? This can give you learning clarity that most people don’t ever learn. Are you learning as a way of self-satisfaction?
Are you learning because it’s just cool and you want that skill? Finding your motivation can help you keep going on your drawing journey. Something I see more often than not at any age is when someone quits from frustration. What they don’t realize is that failure with bad drawings is all part of the process. In art learning, you will learn, then fail, then learn, then fail. My teacher used to tell me, “Your 1000th drawing will be good”. Remembering this always set me free from pressure. I don’t need to have pressure on myself to have every drawing be are good. It’s simply just learning.
Your reason to learning will drive your practice. If you rely on inspiration online, you’ll sporadically practice and never fully develop. Inspiration is for hobbyists. I’m assuming you want to improve at a steady pace, and more rapidly than the average hobby drawer.
Inspiration is like jumping from lily pad to lily pad. And if you use your drive, you’ll steadily practice on a schedule of your choosing. There was a point at which I was drawing for 6 hours a day, every day. Whether you draw that much as a child or an adult. you will see jumps in improvement.
Pressure can delay your learning by years sometimes as it did mine, so learn to enjoy what you are doing. Something I feel that develops with age is a disadvantage is resistance. The book. “the war of art” by steven pressfield talks about an internal mental state that seemingly prevents you from finishing creative tasks. He calls this invisible block resistance. Every creative person experiences it at some point, sometimes over and over. This frequently happens when you are going into uncharted territory. It’s very common in everyone, but I’ve seen this resistance more prevalent in older learners.
Your mind has subconsciously drawing mind created reasons that it just can’t learn something, even though the task at hand is doable. In my own learning, I was making great strides in my learning process for the first 2 years and then I was getting too good so fast that it scared me. Then I started to struggle through everything and my drawings were getting worse. I pushed harder and drew more hours than ever to get over the plateau, but it felt like the harder I tried, the worse I got. That was a product of the pressure I put on myself.
Drawing Age
Its best to view drawing in drawing/training age. So when I view someone’s art journey, it starts when they first really put in the hours to become a professional artist. If someone dabbles in art for a few years, I don’t count it as training. If they were to take a genuine art course and put in drawing daily, then that is most likely the beginning of their art drawing journey. For me its made up of 3 things:
- 1) decent instruction
- 2) allocated time
- 3) attempts at improvement through critique from others.
I take the years of training as the totality of their experience, not their actual age. I had a student start when he was 60 years old and by the third year he was better than most people who had been drawing since childhood. He really put in the practice time that most people never did and the learning process doesn’t have to be hard. It can be frustrating, but it doesn’t have to be torture. We aren’t lifting weights, so there is no wear and tear on the body. With art, there are no physical limitations.
In Conclusion
