How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
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How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
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Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
#2All of this advice is equally true with practicing a musical instrument. You will not get better if you just play songs/pieces fully over and over. You can, and often do, get worse. And it’s hard, because making music is what it’s all about.
I don’t know who said this quote originally, but in the piano world, one says “practice doesn’t make perfect; practice makes permanent.”
Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
#3For art and music there are pretty clear and well defined skills that can be drilled.
Anyone have suggestions for writing drills?
Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
#4For art and music there are pretty clear and well defined skills that can be drilled. Anyone have suggestions for writing drills?
That’s an interesting question. My completely uneducated idea: reproducing masters’ works.
Take a novel, or something shorter, and type it up, thinking with each sentence, each page, why they wrote what they did, and what they left out.
Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
#5> But drill isn’t popular. It’s widely seen as boring. Worse, there’s a body of opinion, especially in education, that considers it an ineffective way to practice. That’s a shame, because it’s the most effective way to build your skills.
This resonated with me as I watch my kids go through school.
Math used to be taught with more drill style. Now with common core every single problem is an epic quest of 10 frames and double pluses. It seems so ridiculous. I'd rather them crush a worksheet of 20 problems that practices a single skill then 2 problems that try to include everything from reading to drawing just for a simple subtraction problem.
Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
#6I’m not going to disagree with the author’s main point, I’m sure doing drills is very important. But I do question their personal example. When I was in high school, I played a lot of go. But then I stopped playing for a few years. When I started again, after shaking off the rust I was a much better player. And I wasn’t doing any “drills” during those years of off time. Sometimes I think we just need a fresh perspective on our hobbies. So did the author improve because sketching is a drill? Maybe even if they hadn’t done that they still would have gotten better.
Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
#7For art and music there are pretty clear and well defined skills that can be drilled. Anyone have suggestions for writing drills?
Most writing drills are about reading critically: http://www.criticalreading.com/
Look into universities and approaches from Professors:
Jordan Peterson’s writing approach is based a lot on drill: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://jordanbpeterson.co...
Umberto Eco’s "How to write a Thesis"
Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
#8For art and music there are pretty clear and well defined skills that can be drilled. Anyone have suggestions for writing drills?
I assume that’d be doing some subsection of writing, like focusing on dialogue, or describing a scene, etc. From what I gather, you’d want to focus on one thing and try and get really good at it, then you could write a short story as a “scrimmage” to see how you’ve improved as a whole
Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
#9For art and music there are pretty clear and well defined skills that can be drilled. Anyone have suggestions for writing drills?
I'm not a writer but I've used one drill where you set a theme and handwrite off the top of your head without pausing or erasing up to whatever set length. Like freestyling.
Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
#10All of this advice is equally true with practicing a musical instrument. You will not get better if you just play songs/pieces fully over and over. You can, and often do, get worse. And it’s hard , because making music is what it’s all about. I don’t know who said this quote originally, but in the piano world, one says “practice doesn’t make perfect; practice makes permanent.”
In middle school, my orchestra teacher taught “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice, makes perfect.” It’s a lot easier to perfect atomic-level techniques than an entire composition.
She also taught us not to “stop and start over” when we made mistakes. I think that is sort of like “don’t try to optimize early, get the code working then refactor later.”