what's the most important thing you ever learned about art?

[Peter Coene]

Making art "realistic" is only half the battle. Making it "good" is another thing entirely, cannot be defined so easilly, and often is so fleeting that your best art will not be acheived by making it good, but by chasing after that ideal of "good" and falling short.

Anatomy is important... unless your job is to draw Lego minifigs.

Knowing the rules is important. An artist who knowingly breaks the rules appears edgy, while an artist who does so out of ignorance is just another crappy artist.

The saying that you can't put a shine on shit is not entirely true. You can take a piece of crap and shine it up with every fancy bell and whistle in your digital paint toolbox. It will be very pretty. But anyone with a trained eye will still know its crap.

[OmenSpirits]

what's the most important thing you ever learned about art?

I'm still learning.

[alesoun]

Play, experiment. Don't be afraid of failure.....

[OldJake666]

#1: Yes Jake, You SUCK at art!

#2: Draw moar.

#3: I don't even know how but one day I was painting and lighting suddenly just... clicked for me. I can't even describe it but it entirely changed my way of creating.

#4: Build up gradually using thin transparent layers.

[nickmarshallvfx]

'Dont paint a brush stroke without thinking about what you want that brush stroke to achieve.' Which ties in very closely to 'Don't put any brushstroke down unless you have a reason for it'.

Nick

[Mock]

That I know absolutely nothing compared to what I have yet to learn.

[rossipoo]

everything above and..

I learned that girl's bodies don't always look that hot as they do in maxim magazines =|

[JParrilla]

1. Just Draw!
2. Stop overthinking everything you do.. sometimes you have to just dive into it headfirst and not be scared
3. The road to being an artist has no end.. its the journey thats exciting

Not realizing these things halted my progress for a LONGGG time.. so dont forget them!

[Dethklaus]

Two things: Humility and Practice.
Had I never been exposed to either of those concepts, I would've more than likely ended up on the "worst of CA" thread by now.

[Samari]

Practice.

[Farvus]

I learned that thinking too much won't solve the problem (and yet I still fall into that trap).

[Kiera]

so obvious: Make a lot of art and make it with love
(the last part is difficult)

most important thing learned from this half year: Don't look for solutions but for possibilities

[Slash]

When drawing something, visualize it from all angles in your head.

Light moves in straight lines. Get a grasp of the forms in 3d space, and it becomes easier to approximate where light hits, gets blocked, bounces and scatters.

Practice makes perfect.

[NanoBlack]

Though I'm only in the early stages, there's one thing I have learned.

Always go that extra mile- if something doesn't look right, fix it. And keep on fixing it until it is right, that way, you'll never be disappointed in yourself.

[Shard]

nothing particularly important but recently i've been reading some bridgman stuff and apparently you cannot give a piece character using only curves..its indeed amazing how much better things look if you vary and insert some sharp angles to your curves/edges. I ignored this simple rule for way too long and always neglected my edges. some more love to this could make a great difference.

it makes it a lot easier to figure out the perspective of a face if instead of a circle you start with a cube..
generally squarifying organic shapes helps me loads to understand the lighting/shading, foreshortening and perspective.

art is as much thoughtful planning as it's "random happy accidents". find a way that works for you to generate ideas or to come up with stuff you wouldnt normally paint.

dont be attached to it..there is no point trying to fit a body in that finished head you got, rather than finding something that fits, start a pose from scratch and paste the head afterwards.
I found myself stuck lots of times just cause i've been holding on elements of a picture I was happy with but were actually preventing further developments..so if you get stuck sometimes its easier to ignore what you got for a while and start with a fresh perspective.

[RB2610]

Not to get to tied up in trying to cram detail and stuff in where it's not needed, it causes me to spend far too long on a piece, for example one of my final pieces for GCSE took many many hours partly because I drew everything in in as much detail as I could even though I would be painting over it. And I'd spend ages with a ruler and stuff trying to get sizes perfect, in most cases it's just unnecessary. And more recently with digital art I find when I should be doing a line drawing to start off my idea I end up going off and trying to shade it fully, which I could get away with by just underlaying the colour but I think it's probably a bad habit.

After sitting in a cold graveyard as it was getting dark in the middle of winter sketching a church I quickly learnt to speed up and just sketch things as a sketch rather than a full blown piece when I don't need to

[The Pariano]

Keep It Simple, Stupid!

[яequiem]

I've learned even the ugliest piece of art is beautiful.

[Costau D]

Patience

[Linguini]

You just have to love what you're doing.

On a side note, I found this thread that has a lot of awesome advice, both for art and for life:
The best piece of advice you ever received...

[mwillustration]

it's all about shapes and values.

[Nibras]

Most Important thing I learnt to date is that:

Art is fun, it's for yourself to enjoy. It's to push your self to the limit and see how far you can go.
Drawing isn't a race to improve the fastest or to get that future job, drawing is my most loved hobby and something I really cherish so I should focus on drawing for enjoyment above everything else.

When you love what your doing, there's no hardwork just alot of fun

[Black Spot]

If it works don't break it.

[Shmaba]

You get as much out of it as you put in.

[ArtZealot]

Don't be afraid to murder your darlings.

[Hexokinase]

When going for formal rendering, real life does not have any outlines (Loomis also demonstrates this wonderfully in Figure Drawing For All It's Worth IIRC.

Viewing angle and proximity to subject can dramatically alter its appearance.

If you can't draw an imaginary creature, sculpting the important planes in clay can help solidify your understanding and serves as a good reference.

[Prometheus|ANJ]

Here's a few things which are hard to do but I try always to do.

...go back and fix if there's something which bothers me. Sometimes a few strokes are all that's needed. If I've spent 2hrs on the design, taking 10 minutes to correct the mistakes / little things which still bother me is totally worth it. If I post online it can feel good knowing that the [too short arm] or whatever has been fixed. If I don't fix, then I feel ashamed every time I see the image...

...kill my darling. Sometimes I have a good detail, or a detail I think is good, but it still bothers me. Perhaps it just doesn't work in the context with the other stuff that's going on. also, just because I've spent time on something doesn't mean it's somehow increasing the quality. I'm just a mammal making marks on a board.

...remove the unnecessary. If a detail or line does not contribute it must die or change into something meaningful or quiet. It is easy to add but difficult to take away. People will look at the details and structures and try to make sense of them. I try to go over my designs and figure out which details are just meaningless fillers taking up space which could be used for something neat.

Often when designing stuff like spaceships which have 'greebles' (random tech stuff) I start doing meaningless noise, and I have to back away and figure out how to get a good silhouette and suggest a meaningful structure of the tech details. An analogy could be music where you have a theme, certain instruments, an overall shape, and also rhythm in the detailed parts. BAM BAM BAM ... dirudiru-lutt. Whatever. Not F7GrkFd5gsSvjksRg0krt.

...throw away the first sketches and iterate the design. Sometimes a design comes out pretty good right away, but I've found that redrawing it makes it much more fluid, because I've learned to draw it. It doesn't take much time to make another rough. Don't fall in love with the first draft. You won't know if it's strong until you've let it do battle with a few other variants.

...flip/mirror, even if I can't see any problems. Every time I flip the problems show themselves, and I'm surprised every time. I think my eyes are a little skew.

[sanakris]

The most important things I learned about art is that perserverance is key, always keep your eyes open even when your not drawing, observation is a major skill when drawing.

[D.Labruyere]

the most important thing I've learned this year is that whatever you do:

fuck yeah!

[TASmith]

Let's see... After all the problems in our world have been worked out, we're all happy, healthy, and peaceful, and working merrily in whichever industries... what will be left to do here on Earth? What will everyone do in their free time? Art. Art is the only reason I can see for living. What about other leisure activities such as sports or walking in nature, etc? I see that as art, as creative as sketching, actually. What about loving the people you're with? I see art as an expression of that which you care about - your loved ones, issues important to you, etc. So art is love (it's also poetry as Kev says). You don't love people so you can make art about them. You make art about them because you love them.

Bearing that in mind, the technical aspects of art making are only one crucial aspect. You have to devote just as much time in developing what you actually want to say. With no clear message, your art will just be, at most, pretty pictures. Oh, and art is a hell of a lot of work. I imagine many students give up not because the technique is so hard to learn, but they realize part way through that they have nothing they want to say.