I finally listened to that one art teacher who told me to stop blending so much

Last month I posted a sketch of a cat here that looked like a potato with ears. Someone commented that my shading was muddy because I was overblending with my finger. They said leave the marks alone and let the pencil do the work. So for my last 3 drawings I forced myself to stop smudging and just layer hatching instead. The difference is huge, my stuff actually looks like drawings now instead of smeared messes. Has anyone else had a single piece of feedback that totally changed their whole process?

2 comments

2 Comments

maryadams11d ago

Stop blending so much" - said no one to me until I was 30 years old and had produced approximately 847 smudgy grey blobs that I called drawings. Now I just aggressively hatch and pretend I meant to do it that way.

barbaragarcia11d ago

Got a friend who spent like 6 months in a charcoal phase back in 2017. Every portrait she did looked like someone had just gotten the worst news of their life, just all smeared and shadowy. She finally asked an instructor why people kept saying her subjects looked "haunted" and the guy just handed her a kneaded eraser and walked away. Now she does these super tight crosshatch drawings of dogs and it's like a completely different person made them.