Sooo basically everything I've been doing with my study time today was to keep on drawing yesterday's portrait and it has reached this kind of weird point that probably everybody knows where you are sitting in front of a drawing or painting and you ask yourself "...hmm is this done?" Same here.
I think the question if something is done or more importantly being able to answer it is crucial on how much you push yourself and ultimately how quickly you improve.
What I do when I am not sure if I am done or not is just ask myself "does this piece of work play in the same league that the artworks of my "art heros" do?". If yes, cool! If no, in order to improve you have to ask yourself "why not?". In my case the answer has been "no" with every single piece I have done so far in my life. It's simple, I am just not able to compete with my "artheros" yet. But being able to answer that question of "why doesn't my work look as good as theirs" in my opinion will give you the answer if you should keep going or not.
I feel there are basically just two answers to that question and you will just have to decide which one it is.
Either the answer is :
"my artwork does not look as good because I haven't pushed it far enough yet, if I keep going I might get there"
OR
"goddamnit I screwed up bigtime along the way and I am noticing it just now, crap".
In the first case you just keep going and literally just puuushing, pure musclework, try to sweat until you reach that next level where you end up noticing that you are doing something that you would not have though you could do until that point.
If you answer is the second one, well yea you screwed up at some crucial steps in the beginning where improving on it would ultimately need you to erase huge parts and repaint them.
While this miiiight be a good exercise from time to time and might boost your confidence experiencing that you are able to turn this shitty painting around and making it look good (and sometimes with clientwork it can't be avoided) I think that in order to maintain a process which is geared towards developping and progressing (with for me is getting more and more important as I develop as an artist) it is the best thing to just let it go and go on with the next painting or, if it can't be avoided repaint the entire thing from scratch.
In this case you go ahead and identify your mistake and deliberately try to avoid it the next time.
Now the way these principles apply to this tiny portrait study is that before I uploaded it I was really insecure about the question if this is done or not. But as soon as I reminded myself that this clearly does not look anything near the quality of the people's work I look up to when it comes to pencil drawing and rendering I noticed that I don't think I have screwed up bigtime here as well so far. The proportaions are pretty accurate, and so are the values.
Although I already have spent quite a bunch of time on this I think I miiiight if I just keep pushing this, refine the rendering and pay close attention to edges especially, get this to a degree of finish which miiiiiiight touch a level of quality that I would not have expected from me haha. So yea I will keep drawing on this and just keep my eyes open for that moment of:
"aaaaaaaargh I screwed up hours ago , there's no point in going on, this drawing for what it is, is done now!" Man I love this. Thinking about that stuff is almost as great as actually doing it :)
See you tomorrow
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