/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

I've never been, just wanted to ask about people's experiences with it.
Was it worthwhile to go? How much did you improve from when you entered vs when you graduated? How much of that improvement was due to teacher instruction and how much of it was just due to drawing a lot? How easy was it to get useful, personalized critiques on your work?

>tfw drew for 5 hours today
Feels good.

I just lost faith in the religion of the aesthetic experience and the artistic genius. There is no such thing as "misunderstood genius" in art, it is incomprehensible to speak about the quality of a work of art independent of the sum total of the effects it has on people (basically, its popularity). The elevation of art to some quasi-transcendental gateway to eternal truths about beauty and the human condition is a very recent invention of the 19th century Romantic movement, intended to serve as a way of replacing waning religious faith in Christianity. An artist is just an entertainer, on par with a circus clown, he's certainly not an intellect on par with a scientist or a mathematician. If you're chasing artistic "greatness" then you've merely been deluded by a new-age religion. It's obvious to anyone who looks how arbitrary and corrupt the process of artistic canonization is.

Someone please console me.

>>3249127
"Beginner" covers a really wide range of skill sets, all the way from someone who can only draw stick figures to someone who has made some pretty good drawings in the past but still has fundamental weaknesses that they need to iron out. My personal working definition of when someone is no longer a beginner is "can you consistently produce finished drawings that you wouldn't be ashamed to show to other people." That definition is dependent on how developed your own personal taste is, because you could just be an idiot with poor taste who's not embarrassed to show other people complete shit that you drew, but assuming that your own taste is passable, I think that's a good definition.

So people stay beginners for a long time. It takes at least a year of constant work to stop being a beginner, maybe even two or more. The good news is that everyone can advance past the beginner stage and into the stage of competence with enough study and practice.

>you inherently understand principles I just can't wrap my head around
There's only one principle that you need to understand in order to start drawing, and that's that you have to draw what you literally see, not what you think you see. Consider this picture of a qt anime girl. If I asked you to draw her head and hat, you might just draw a circle with an oval on top of it, because your mind sees her head and thinks "that's basically a circle" and you see her hat and think "that's basically an oval". This would produce a flat and 2D look that often plagues beginner drawings, because if you look closer, that's actually not what the original drawing looks like at all. Her head (as represented on the 2D plane of the drawing) isn't a perfect circle, but is instead lopsided; her right cheek (our left) is physically above her left cheek on the 2D plane, which causes her head to look tilted. Same deal with her hat. Drawing is just accurately observing what you see and copying it.