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This is what happens when one guy practices art every day for nine years

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Re: This is what happens when one guy practices art every day for nine years

#91

Post by InclinedPlane »

Vivtek wrote: post #41
jaredsohn wrote: post #19

Interestingly, he's pretty close to (but still under) the ten year mark for getting mastery that Peter Norvig wrote about in an essay about mastering programming. ( http://norvig.com/21-days.html ). (This was before the rule changed to 10,000 hours.) It could be interesting for someone more knowledgable about art to indicate at what point he hit 'mastery' (assuming that has already happened) and to then estimate how…

From my standpoint looking at his current work, he's definitely at mastery.

He's good, but he's no Renoir, Da Vinci, or Degas.

Re: This is what happens when one guy practices art every day for nine years

#92

Post by icegreentea »

melling wrote: post #46

He mentioned getting a Wacom Intuos tablet. I've been considering getting one, or maybe this new device: http://9to5mac.com/2011/08/30/wacom-introduces-inkling-table... This video turned me on to the Wacom: http://www.ctrlpaint.com/home/category/hardware He discusses tablets at about the 2m mark.

If you just want to give stuff a try, go look for a used Graphire (kinda hard to find now), or a used Bamboo. You can usually grab a decent (8x6) sized one for like 50-80 bucks on craigslist.

Loosing the title sensitivity, and some of the pressure precision is no loss if you're just starting out and not attempting really hardcore painting/airbrushing.

Re: This is what happens when one guy practices art every day for nine years

#93

Post by bootload »

adamzochowski wrote: post #81
bootload wrote: post #53

Atelier. I had to look that up. Turns out it's French for "artist workshop" . [0] Why not just use the plain English equivalent? But that's not what was interesting. Digging around I noticed http://www.classicalartonline.com Did everyone miss this? Making a dollar in art is difficult. It's so difficult that markets exist to make art to order, to solve some problem. Usually selling a product. Advertising. This really…

But atelier is already a perfect valid English word. Sure, it came from French, but it is now part of English language. Complaining about it would be like complaining that word 'Robot' is a Czech word for work/worker.

"... Display of superior knowledge is as great a vulgarity as display of superior wealth — greater indeed, inasmuch as knowledge should tend more definitely than wealth towards discretion and good manners. ..." [0]

Perfectly valid Adam, but clearer if you use a simpler non-romantic, common use replacement. The objective is to communicate, not impress.

[0] Fowler, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Modern_English_...

Re: This is what happens when one guy practices art every day for nine years

#94

Post by cubicle67 »

bootload wrote: post #93
adamzochowski wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But atelier is already a perfect valid English word. Sure, it came from French, but it is now part of English language. Complaining about it would be like complaining that word 'Robot' is a Czech word for work/worker.

"... Display of superior knowledge is as great a vulgarity as display of superior wealth — greater indeed, inasmuch as knowledge should tend more definitely than wealth towards discretion and good manners. ..." [0] Perfectly valid Adam, but clearer if you use a simpler non-romantic, common use replacement. The objective is to communicate, not impress. [0] Fowler, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Modern_En…

I think the flawed assumption you're making here is that because the word is new to you the motivation behind the author using it is to impress. It's entirely possible that this is a word well known and in standard usage within the original target audience (which is not us)

Re: This is what happens when one guy practices art every day for nine years

#95

Post by bootload »

cubicle67 wrote: post #94
bootload wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... Display of superior knowledge is as great a vulgarity as display of superior wealth — greater indeed, inasmuch as knowledge should tend more definitely than wealth towards discretion and good manners. ..." [0] Perfectly valid Adam, but clearer if you use a simpler non-romantic, common use replacement. The objective is to communicate, not impress. [0] Fowler, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Modern_En…

I think the flawed assumption you're making here is that because the word is new to you the motivation behind the author using it is to impress. It's entirely possible that this is a word well known and in standard usage within the original target audience (which is not us)

"... It's entirely possible that this is a word well known and in standard usage within the original target audience (which is not us) ..."

'Us', isn't 'me' who does come from a fine/technical art background.

The distinction is subtle. If the writer means train artists with zeal then 'Atelier Method' would be the correct term but Atelier as a place to work? I would have thought "studio" would have been a better choice, derived from Italian, "studio" and Latin, "studium" (and "studere", to "study" & "zeal"). Note the French derivation, Atelier also translates to studio of "fashion designer" and "alchemist" or "wizard". This use is old and not used much.

Re: This is what happens when one guy practices art every day for nine years

#96

Post by derefr »

sliverstorm wrote: post #43
Vivtek wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my standpoint looking at his current work, he's definitely at mastery.

Maybe compared to your personal skills, but do you really think he is a master painter now? Not to criticize his work in any way, but I was always under the impression mastering a fine art was essentially a life's work.

If you want to be completely pedantic about it, a master craftsmen is simply a person who has created, and successfully defended, a masterpiece (basically the medieval craft/trade-guild equivalent to a, well, Master's thesis.) This happened pretty early in life (you didn't enter a guild in full good standing until you became a master), so an arbitrarily-selected "master" wouldn't be nearly as experienced/talented as the few that come to mind when you think of the term.

Re: This is what happens when one guy practices art every day for nine years

#97

Post by egypturnash »

jnorthrop wrote: post #67

Its great to see this person's progression! He is obviously very talented and has a real gift. I went through a similar progression as a child. My mother worked as an art teacher at the local YMCA while I was growing up. After school each day I would take the bus to the Y and sit in on her art classes. I became a pretty proficient artist -- technically speaking anyway -- but I never really developed into what I would…

Learning to come up with "original" ideas is a skill too. It can be practiced and exercised.

For instance... Wrote down ten adjectives, ten nouns, and ten verbs. Roll a d10 thrice. Then draw whatever that corresponds to. Like a "robot hamster farming". Then do a few more rolls.

There are many other exercises for your creativity; this is just what comes to mind at 3am after a long day.

Re: This is what happens when one guy practices art every day for nine years

#98

Post by josephg »

larve wrote: post #66
kerryfalk wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally didn't take formal training until several years into my drawing and even then it's wasn't great training (High school art class). Although I'm sure it helps I personally have always found that I learn far more by just spending more time bashing my head against the wall trying to do it myself. The trick is to just do it a lot and don't ever give up. Eventually it works. I like your new stuff, interesting…

Nice ones :) The thing that annoys me about this hacker / painter stuff is that it really boils down to: do something with passion, and you will discover unknown depths, whatever the field may be. That's pretty much where every comparison stops. Recipe to learn a new skill: 1) get the book called "the art of XXX", written by someone who has been doing XXX for the last 60 years, and which has good typography (no shit)…

> 3) do the exercises that seem incredibly futile in the second chapter, and do them over and over and over and over all your career.

I got halfway through that paragraph thinking it was crap because it didn't apply to programming, then realised that you're absolutely right.

In programming, the thing we do every day is we write tiny algorithms to do simple things. The abstractions come and go, but the simple "I need to remove a trailing slash on this string" sort of problems are (to me) the everyday practices. Everything else falls out of those little problems - the need for abstraction, the need for tools, the need for tests, the need for libraries, etc.

Imagine I offer you two applicants. They're both fresh out of collage applying for an engineering role. The first one has never heard of MVC and has never actually used TDD. But you ask him to implement a binary search on a whiteboard and he goes to town. The other one will happily explain all the details of the visitor pattern, but when you ask him to manually reverse a string in his favorite language, he can't do it.

I don't know about you, but I'd hire the first programmer in a heartbeat. Its much easier to learn design patterns when you know how to code than the other way around. Maybe its the same with shading in art, and scales in music. But, thats definitely how it works with programming.

Re: This is what happens when one guy practices art every day for nine years

#99

Post by Su-Shee »

This is so immensely interesting and useful what the guy documented here... and thanks to Mark Erdmann, it's perfectly illustrated.

What you really see here is not just "his progress" but how he actually did it:

* He went back to the classics (greek statues, classic poses, perspective etc) to really learn the ropes

* he practiced over and over again, often the same subject again and again

* even if his taste seems to lie with those scifi/fantasy-style figures, he nevertheless trained to sketch poses, the human body, faces, muscles and so on

* his strokes become more confident year by year

* he needs less strokes on a sketch to make the viewer see something recognizable

* he judges his work repeatedly

* he lived with being a beginner for quite some time but didn't give up

If some of you might remember Douglas Crockford's JavaScript lessons series - he stressed the "knowing the history" quite a lot - quite similar to many "how to become a great developer" howtos stress to know a language like Lisp. (Basically our version of "learning the classics"...)

The same applies btw for what writers documented about their progress and journey to become good writers: "know the classics" and "do it every day".

For the folks interested in the science side of "becoming an expert", please consider Ericsson's "Expert Performance" (Cambridge University Press) - that's the source/foundation of the notion of "a decade" and the "10000 hours of deliberate practice" comes from. (And a very interesting read...)

Re: This is what happens when one guy practices art every day for nine years

#100

Post by SHIFTHAPPENZ »

read on page 5 or so that he was 22 when he started. i'm 22, too. shit i will really stop wasting time with pc games and stuff.

time is the fire in which we burn...

edit: of course this are just my thoughts right now. i suppose i won't have the persistence

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