The reason for this is that you can’t get better without knowing how you should improve.

The reason for this is that you can’t get better without knowing how you should improve. It’s possible to practice for hours every day but still not improve if you don’t know what to practice. Feedback helps you see your work objectively and points out to you what you can improve on. Plus, you’re more likely to fix something when someone else has told you that you need to fix it rather than if you had to identify the problem yourself. In illustration, there are a lot of subtle changes you can make to a piece (proportion, value structure, color palette, etc.) that can completely flip around the way a viewer perceives an image. This makes feedback especially important.

Getting good feedback is the most important thing you can do to improve. It’s better than practicing. It’s better than watching tutorials. It’s better than memorizing the fundamentals. Without it, you simply can’t compete with artists who do get feedback. The reason for this is that they will be able to identify their mistakes, figure out why they are mistakes, and avoid them in the future. You can only get so far by copying others. You need to understand why the decisions they made in a piece were right and why other decisions would have been wrong. Feedback helps you to understand this.

It also helps you to feel more confident about your work. If someone gives you a few suggestions of things you can improve in a piece, then you know that the rest of it is good and you should feel good about it. If someone says you did a terrible job and there’s nothing to salvage, then you should realize that that’s okay and just do something else instead. There’s no use dwelling on your mistakes. All you can do is move forward. This is another reason why getting feedback is so important.

It makes you accountable for always moving forward. If you’re in a class, you know you have to make another piece for next class. If you post your work online, you feel pressure to create more work so you can have something to show people who found you through your last piece. So long as you have some system in place to make sure you always feel like you need to make another piece, you’ll be fine. It doesn’t matter what that system is. Many artists have gotten where they are today simply because they had a friend they showed their work to. This friend made them feel like they always needed to have something new to show him. It gave them a purpose. So they always made new work.

Feedback is the key to improvement. There’s no better way to put it. If you want to get better, you need to get feedback. If you want to be the best, you need to get better feedback than everyone else.