Why ♥ your sketchbook again?
Because you can keep wild animals in it.
You can keep people, ideas, wishes... tickets... you can keep a place and a time.
If you want to be an artist you have to learn to observe and learn from reality. The difference between those who doodles and those who get the jobs is that the ones who get the jobs are observant people.
Being creative and original does not exclude hard practice. Your imagination is a variation of something that already exist in nature so you have to learn the rules really well if you want to break them.
If you break them before you learn them it shows and your artwork will look amateurish.
Drawing from life - objects, people, animals, landscapes - is a good way to train your eye/hand coordination.
You cannot know what something looks like if you don't see it first and learn to reproduce it. If you need to draw the ellipse on an imaginary cup you have to observe what a real ellipse looks like.
If you draw by guessing and you draw what you think things should be like... it will show. Brain getting in the way of hand&eye (who are a prefect married couple) will always create troublesome problems for your art.
People who work in the artistic field will notice, will see all of your technical problems and wonder: can this person understand what he/she sees?
Never take your skills for granted, practice to improve them, try different and new things continuously but never stop going to the zoo to draw animals, even though zoos are sad, scary places, never stop drawing people sleeping on the bus or the train, never stop drawing buildings and perspective.
Drawing is a language if you don't practice that language you will loose the lexicon and the grammar.
Observation is the grammar and creativity is the lexicon.
Observe, draw and imagine. Look twice and draw once. Don't fall in love with your drawings... especially your sketches. Keep them rough and simple, try to capture the gesture, the angle, the motion, try to capture life. Understand the mechanics of the anatomy, understand the motion, feel it.
Only if you understand you can reproduce and be creative. Only if you learn proportions you can push them around and play with shapes. Only if you observe light you will be able to apply color theory.
Everything you think you can create anew it already exist in nature under a different form (cope with it, you are copying already, might as well use good reference!)... the most imaginative fantasy creature, the tallest dragon... they already exist in nature: a piece is attached on an animal, another piece is attached on another one. Our creativity is derivative and cannot live without understanding.
You can draw an eye in one thousand different ways... but it will always be, at the core, an eye.
So an eye, a standard boring eye, is the grammar, light reflects in a certain way because of its shape and the material is made of... and you can derivate your lexicon and make it long, golden, thick, oval, glassy, metallic, whatever... but it will always be an eye in a material you know the existence of.
So deal with it: practice and reality, if you want to be an artist, you cannot do without. :)
