Find a really great piece of art online, save its image to your computer. Then open the image, look at it, and wonder, "How the hell is it even possible to paint colors and textures like this?"
Now zoom in. Those ripples on the water? Those soft strands of hair? Those shifting patches reds and blues on human skin? Those blades of grass? The entirety of the piece's complex and beautiful interpretations of light and shadow? It's all LINES and SQUIGGLES.
Up close, everything looks like BABY MODE MS PAINT BULLSHIT. Every detail that pulled you into the piece and took your breath away is actually RANDOM-LOOKING ASSORTMENTS OF COLOR AS APPLIED BY A FINGER PAINTING CHIMP. How could anyone think to arrange it all like this? How the hell does it all add up to a coherent, aesthetically-pleasing painting?
Is my perception of light fucked? Too complicated? Too unclear? What is optics? Do I even understand physics or have I been PLAYING MYSELF THIS WHOLE DAMN TIME, STRUGGLING TO IMPROVE MY OWN ART WHILE NOT ADOPTING AN ACTUAL ARTISTIC MINDSET?
Literally the first thing they tell you in middle school art class is that we often aren't truly SEEING the things around us, just LOOKING at them. The amount of times you've looked at something is positively correlated with the amount of details that get filtered during sensory processing—this is the main reason why people struggle drawing human bodies despite inhabiting such a body and being surrounded by other human bodies for most of their lives. When you engage with artistic theory and/or take an art class, you learn how to perceive and draw humans figures through abstraction, by capturing the gist of the form and dynamics of a body with representational lines, curves, shapes, and polyhedrons. Everything in art is founded on abstraction, and it takes surprisingly little to convey whatever you're trying to depict if you're strategic with abstractions. It's similar to how scientific and mathematical models aim to reproduce complex physical phenomena: they take in as few parameters as they can get away with to capture the essential behavior.
The fundamentals build up skill over time. You get better at seeing, perceiving, and analyzing the world around you, breaking everything up into simple patterns and somehow getting closer to depicting it accurately (both in terms of hardcore realism and aesthetic goals, aka getting better at making something look good and more accurate to your mental vision of it). At its core, improving at art involves unshackling yourself from the filters, assumptions, and heuristics, looking beyond the energy-conserving cognitive shortcuts. Look beyond yourself, and you might just get a little closer to seeing things as they actually are.
Alright then, seems like a pretty straightforward technique. I'll try it out now...
...
...
...
...Wow this looks like shit
