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Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

markusstrasser.org

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Re: Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

#101

Post by egypturnash »

> Drawing takes forever because you're exploring AND refining simultaneously.

> We don't "rehearse" a specific drawing, we solve a novel problem in real-time. There's no cached motor sequence to execute.

When you have been drawing long enough there are a lot of cached motor sequences to execute and modify. A lot of art training is simply filling this cache: spend a few hours every week drawing the human body from different angles, in a year or three you'll be able to make it up from pretty much any angle. Add in another twenty years of doing that and experimenting ways to make your tools do more of the work for you and you can dash off "sketches" that a beginner would consider finished paintings that took days to do.

Re: Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

#102

Post by TZubiri »

egypturnash wrote: post #101

> Drawing takes forever because you're exploring AND refining simultaneously. > We don't "rehearse" a specific drawing, we solve a novel problem in real-time. There's no cached motor sequence to execute. When you have been drawing long enough there are a lot of cached motor sequences to execute and modify. A lot of art training is simply filling this cache: spend a few hours every week drawing the human body from dif…

Right, but there's no point in repeating the exact same sequences unless you are practicing, in production you always do novel stuff, in both programming and drawing. This is unlike other disciplines like music or carpentry.

Re: Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

#103

Post by egypturnash »

turtleyacht wrote: post #2

How often is a drawing really trashed and restarted? There's the saying, "Plan to throw one away," but seems like it varies in practice (for software). There are even books about patching paintings, like Master Disaster: Five Ways to Rescue Desparate Watercolors. In architecture, it's understood the people, vehicles, and landscape are not as exact as the building or structure, and books encourage reusing magazine cli…

Pro artist here.

I trash and restart sketches that took a few minutes to do at most. It's very rare for me to get more than an hour or two in and discard it, I've explored and found a solid foundation long before I put that much work in.

If I was working in a studio environment there's the risk of things like "I spent a couple weeks painting that bg and animating that scene and it was absolutely gorgeous but it got cut when the we took a good hard look at the remaining budget and total runtime and cut the entire sequence it was part of" but that's another matter.

The Draw 50 process is solid. The classical techniques I learnt in training for animation are similar.

Re: Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

#104

Post by egypturnash »

creer wrote: post #78
turtleyacht wrote: post #2

How often is a drawing really trashed and restarted? There's the saying, "Plan to throw one away," but seems like it varies in practice (for software). There are even books about patching paintings, like Master Disaster: Five Ways to Rescue Desparate Watercolors. In architecture, it's understood the people, vehicles, and landscape are not as exact as the building or structure, and books encourage reusing magazine cli…

> Draw 50 For me, "draw 50" series is about letting loose, NOT about skill. On the contrary, it's about exploring the space of all the different ways a prompt can be worked with in an UN-literal manner. Overall drawing facility will improve merely as a byproduct. The ability to be whimsical and exploit drawing flaws, erm, deliberately, is the real prize. Different from "limbering up" exercizes like drawing your hand…

I am pretty sure "draw 50" refers to Lee J. Ames' "Draw 50 Somethings" series of wordless instructional books, where "something" ranged from "animals" or "athletes" or "dinosaurs" to "Beasties and Yugglies and Turnover Uglies and Things That Go Bump in the Night". Drawing fifty instances of a thing out of your head is a good exercise but completely different from those.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lee+j+ames+draw+50&t=osx&ia=images...

Re: Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

#105

Post by fluoridation »

Xmd5a wrote: post #72
fluoridation wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be surprised if anyone perceives quality like that. Like, are you saying that in a situation where there are only two examples of some type of work, it is impossible to judge whether one is much better than the other, it is only possible to say that it's better? What makes you think it works like this?

This insight, that perceived quality is relative, can be understood in a more literary way, in this fragment by Proust describing the Rivebelle restaurant: > Soon the spectacle became arranged, in my eyes at least, in a more noble and calmer fashion. All this vertiginous activity settled into a calm harmony. I would watch the round tables, whose innumerable assemblage filled the restaurant, like so many planets, such…

>Moreover, an irresistible force of attraction was exerted between these various stars, and at each table the diners had eyes only for the tables at which they were not sitting,

You're reading way too much into it. This is just a reprise of "the grass is greener on the other side". What it's saying is simply "a lot of diners were dissatisfied with their dishes and looked around to see what other people were eating".

>The relative nature of perceived quality indicates [...]

My whole point is that I don't buy quality is purely perceived relatively. If you start a sentence like this, whatever comes after is irrelevant.

You've brought up food, so let's go with that. If I'm a blank slate and I eat a certain food, am I unable to decide whether I like it or not until I eat a second, different food? Are the sensory signals my brain receives just a confounding mystery in the absence of further stimulation, to the extent that I can't even tell sweet from bitter?

Re: Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

#106

Post by senderista »

bluGill wrote: post #97
nradov wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I learned from theater set construction is that you can slap some gaffer's tape and paint over any flaws, and the audience will never notice.

Except for others who do that type of work and so know what to look for. I have a friend who does trim work in mansions - I can't take him to a restaurant near me because the trim work is terrible and he can't help but stare at it the whole time - nobody else notices.

Sounds like my dad (a former finish carpenter). He was never able to hold down a job because of his perfectionism. The union carpenters he worked with had a slogan: "If you can't see it from the freeway, nail it."

Re: Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

#107

Post by TZubiri »

turtleyacht wrote: post #2

How often is a drawing really trashed and restarted? There's the saying, "Plan to throw one away," but seems like it varies in practice (for software). There are even books about patching paintings, like Master Disaster: Five Ways to Rescue Desparate Watercolors. In architecture, it's understood the people, vehicles, and landscape are not as exact as the building or structure, and books encourage reusing magazine cli…

In art, while there are mistakes that can really make a drawing "wrong", there is a much wider array of valid end-states. Which is why Generative AI managed to make art way before it managed to write code.

An example of this is Bob Ross' school of incorporating mistakes into the piece. Surely it's something that would fly way less in some types of drawings like anatomical ones, but especially when the motif is fantastical or even abstract, there's fewer possible mistakes to make, so there's less reason to throw something away.

Re: Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

#109

Post by egypturnash »

TZubiri wrote: post #102
egypturnash wrote: post #101

> Drawing takes forever because you're exploring AND refining simultaneously. > We don't "rehearse" a specific drawing, we solve a novel problem in real-time. There's no cached motor sequence to execute. When you have been drawing long enough there are a lot of cached motor sequences to execute and modify. A lot of art training is simply filling this cache: spend a few hours every week drawing the human body from dif…

Right, but there's no point in repeating the exact same sequences unless you are practicing, in production you always do novel stuff, in both programming and drawing. This is unlike other disciplines like music or carpentry.

I have been drawing professionally for about a quarter of a century and it is my experience there are a lot of sequences that recur. A hand is a complex piece of anatomy but you really only need a mental library of a few dozen poses to meet most needs, for instance. You don't repeat it exactly every time, it's easy to change the angle a little, the lighting needs to adapt to the scene, some hands are dainty and some are big meatslabs, but that's all about as easy to adjust on the fly as, say, shifting the rhythm of a rock song you know well into a big band swing groove.

You also learn a discipline we artists call "construction", wherein you can quickly break any object down into a few basic shapes that are incredibly easy to reason about in 3d, and quickly layer details atop that.

Also consider a daily comic strip. How many times do you think Charles Schultz drew Charlie Brown in a single year? How many of those drawings were largely similar to each other? Now that's serious production work. Animation's similar, you probably have a wider range of angles and motion than in a 1970s newspaper comics page but you are still drawing the same character a zillion times and your hand learns stuff and spits it back out without any conscious thought on your part.

Re: Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

#110

Post by creer »

egypturnash wrote: post #104
creer wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Draw 50 For me, "draw 50" series is about letting loose, NOT about skill. On the contrary, it's about exploring the space of all the different ways a prompt can be worked with in an UN-literal manner. Overall drawing facility will improve merely as a byproduct. The ability to be whimsical and exploit drawing flaws, erm, deliberately, is the real prize. Different from "limbering up" exercizes like drawing your hand…

I am pretty sure "draw 50" refers to Lee J. Ames' "Draw 50 Somethings" series of wordless instructional books, where "something" ranged from "animals" or "athletes" or "dinosaurs" to "Beasties and Yugglies and Turnover Uglies and Things That Go Bump in the Night". Drawing fifty instances of a thing out of your head is a good exercise but completely different from those. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lee+j+ames+draw+50&t=…

Oh cool! Yeah it made me think of these internet challenges "I'll draw and post 1 portrait a day for the next year" or whatever. And art classes "give me 20 sheep". Where it's fine to start "literal" but you are encouraged to get bored of that quickly and become more creative with it.
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