Receiving feedback on your work is so important if you want to improve. Presenting your work to others can be scary though. Drawing can be intensely personal, so it’s understandable that you might get defensive about it.

In this post I want to share some things I’ve learned about feedback that might help.

Types of feedback

I often share my work on various social media platforms (not just WordPress), which leaves me open to a broad range of comments from experienced artists, amateurs like myself, and everyone inbetween.

Many of these people will be complete strangers. So you have to grow a thick skin and prepare yourself for a degree of puerile trolling, but you also get some absolute gems.

Feedback I’ve received could be loosely grouped into the following four categories:

• Generic and nice: Short comments like “that’s good” etc, which are nice, but don’t tell you what is good about your drawing. These make up about 90% of comments. It’s good to get these comments, but they don’t really help you improve.
• ‘Banter’: These comments can be confusing to decipher, without knowing the poster, but aren’t usually malicious. They’re just there as a joke to get a laugh. I don’t mind these too much, and they can be funny, but again they don’t help you improve. They probably account for 5% of responses.
• Trolling comments: mentioned above, best ignored or reported to the admins, if appropriate. Thankfully these are rare, usually less than 1%.
• Gems: These are responses that discuss a particular aspect of your drawing and they’re the real gems where you can learn and improve. They may often be critical, so initially they may hurt your pride, but stop, and really try to understand their point of view. It’s here where you can really learn and improve. One good response to these comments is to thank the person for the feedback and ask them what they would do differently. This shows that you’re not being defensive and genuinely want to know how you can improve. These types of comments probably account for less than 5% overall, but they’re gold dust.

Conclusion

I shared the image below recently with the caption “I won’t say who it’s meant to be. If people can’t guess, it means I need to practise more!”

This encouraged people to comment and engage with the drawing. I had a mixture of responses from the types above (mostly positive), and received a couple of gems.

One person criticised the eyes – and they were spot on. The tilted head meant that I had misjudged the eyes slightly. It’s funny how obvious it appeared after someone pointed it out, but I just didn’t see it when I was drawing.

The second gem was about shading, and again, they are right. Shading is a great way to create depth and make a drawing pop. I’ve been a bit too light in places with this drawing and it shows. I understand why. It’s because I do a lot of rubbing out and correcting. pressing on too hard makes it difficult to erase.

Feedback can be tough love, but seek it out – ALWAYS. You will learn. You will improve!