The best wsay would be to follow some drawing program in a school or academy.
Lack of structure in a learning process is one of the main reasons for slowing down this learning process. The other main reason is lack of patience. It takes years to learn to draw and paint properly. Most wellknown artists will say something like 10.000 hours of practice or 10 years, etc.
Hereās how I got into it:
Year 1:
[ol]
[li]perspective (2-3 months),[/li][li]contour (1 month to 6 weeks),[/li][li]form (light and shadow, as in values) for the rest of the year, practiced on plastercasts of heads.[/li][/ol]Year 2:
[ol]
[li]Anatomy: bones (2months or so)[/li][li]Anatomy: muscles (another 2 months or so)[/li][li]Anatomy and applying everything I learned in the first year to it: the rest of the year. (On plastercasts of heads, torsos and other body parts, and full body plastercasts.[/li][/ol]Year 3 and 4:
[ol]
[li]Life drawing at school (2, 3 nights a week)[/li][li]Life drawing outside school[/li][li]Drawing from imagination[/li][li]Some digital color studies[/li][li]Anatomy from every available resource from time to time, because it must be refreshed as much as possible.[/li][/ol]
To have a solid structure during the first year is most important I think.
Once I was joining the life drawing classes, there wasnāt much structure anymore and it becomes really hard to see which areas of your knowledge and skills need improvement. If you havenāt had a structured 1st year, I think itās must be even harder, because in the first year I learned to be self- critical.
I am certain that there are many other ways to do it, and I am certainly not claiming this method to be the best there is. Iām merely stating the path Iāve walked during my first years of learning how to draw. For instance, weāve hardly had instruction about gesture and the importance of flow. I consider this a major flaw in my academyās instruction plan. Luckily, I was motivated enough to not be satisfied with school alone, and I went to study in my own time (as much as I could) and discovered Vilppu, Loomis, Hogarth etc.
One important thing about studying on your own would be not to study different methods at the same time. If you want to study Loomis and Hogarth, study one of them first for a while and only go on to the next one when you are done with the first one.
[i]ā
But I do feel that style is very important, and yes, though a good painter can paint in any style I think itās important to have something recognisable about your art. All of the artists I admire have distinct styles that are instantly recognisable, as do a lot of good artists. It may be the way they draw faces, or their certain way of painting or shading the image, but there is always something that marks it as their style.
So far I have jumped between so many different kinds of painting, whether it be the way I go about drawing the figure or how I shade it, and I have to say Iām not very pleased that there is nothing that would make a person go āHey, Ilenora drew that!ā as all my images look so different. I donāt think that a good thing at all 
[/i]
Itās true that every experienced artist has his or her own way of expressing him/herself.
One can spend years and years trying to mimic someone elseās way of working, and I admit that itās fun to do and sometimes helps one a bit along the way. But when you donāt throw most of these āstylesā away and only keep what is of use to you, you are merely copying an artist, rather than developing your own ālanguageā.
As a self respecting artist, you want to express your feelings and thoughts, the way you want to, not the way your idols do it. Think about it 
Here I will be displaying various sketches, practise art, designs, concepts, etc. My updating will be sporadic, depending on what other projects I work on at the time. For now I will mostly be uploading style sketches - images that are done to try and get a certain unique style to my art.
