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How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

learning-to-see.co.uk

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Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#11

Post by yesenadam »

I don't think those pictures are "drill, not scrimmage", in that they are themselves perfectly good works of art. Actually, I like them more than his paintings, a lot more. Strange article, as if he didn't notice the black and white works are art too.[0] He never stopped practising art, making art.

[0] Well, not so strange in this world where ink drawings generally/often/usually/popularly aren't considered Art in the way oil paintings are. Imagine if piano music wasn't considered real music, not like orchestral music!

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#12

Post by vladTheInhaler »

bloaf wrote: post #3

For art and music there are pretty clear and well defined skills that can be drilled. Anyone have suggestions for writing drills?

You might be interested in Peak, by Anders Ericson. The author mentions him briefly, but the book is well worth reading. He looks at the case of Benjamin Franklin, and some of the strategies he used. In brief, he found pieces of writing that he especially admired, and transformed them in various ways, then tried to reproduce the original from the transformed versions. The version that seemed the post practical was to create a cue for each sentence, and attempt to reproduce the original wording from the cue. Another was to scramble the sentences of the piece and try to put them back in what felt like the most logical order. These seem pretty mechanical and rote, but they tie into an overall approach Ericson lays out called deliberate practice.

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#13

Post by daniel_iversen »

bloaf wrote: post #3

For art and music there are pretty clear and well defined skills that can be drilled. Anyone have suggestions for writing drills?

I'm quite sure there was a great example in the book "Talent is overrated" that goes through this with one of the early US presidents. Basically this guy wasn't much of a writer but then he employed the "deliberate practice" technique to methodically study, pull apart, rewrite and review+correct some of the great writings of the day, to improve his own writing. And ultimately he ended up apparently being a great writer. I guess there's a science to most things.

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#14

Post by samplatt »

nefitty wrote: post #10
reikonomusha wrote: post #2

All 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.”

>“Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice, makes perfect.”

That's word-for-word what my sensei says about karate.

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#15

Post by totetsu »

bloaf wrote: post #3

For art and music there are pretty clear and well defined skills that can be drilled. Anyone have suggestions for writing drills?

Have a look a the writing for academic purposes material for second language learners.. there are books that break down writing into a process with stages that can be drilled.

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#16

Post by Jakob »

> Repeatedly doing it right

I have a funny story about that: When my sister struggled with Math at school, I let her solve equations she struggled with.

Unbeknownst to her, every test equation I gave her was identical to the previous one, but she didn’t notice because she focussed only on solving it.

After repeating this more than five times, she was astonished that all results were equal. Between the 5th to 10th times of solving that identical equation, she became very good at it.

Afterwards, I showed her that all equations were identical. She aced the school test the following day.

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#17

Post by cjohnson318 »

shusaku wrote: post #6

I’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 perspect…

I think his stress on the value of drawing is accurate. Art is like programming, a large part is language agnostic and transferable between languages.

With representational painting, the most important thing is to have a good sketch underneath, then have a coherent value design, and finally, have a good color design and brushwork. If you didn't nail the perspective or proportion, everything else is trash. Similarly, if you didn't nail your values, then no amount of color or brushwork will save you.

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#18

Post by skadamou »

This is an aside but I recently studied for the MCAT and I think my commitment to drilling Anki flash cards every single day was a big factor in my success. I did full length practice tests and practice problems too like they tell you to do but the amount of focused knowledge I was able to cram into my head by rote drilling w/ Anki really put me over the top. I'd never used Anki before and the way it forces you to look at what you're bad at over and over again until you get it right is very helpful.

I could image making an Anki deck of colors and using that to drill color values as this author suggests could be really useful.

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#19

Post by aaron5 »

bloaf wrote: post #3

For art and music there are pretty clear and well defined skills that can be drilled. Anyone have suggestions for writing drills?

I have one that I think helps - of course I made it up, so I'm biased.

Take a passage from a book you think is written well. For each sentence, ask yourself what, in your own terminology, the sentence is doing - what's the function of the sentence. For example, "a person reacts bodily" or "a decision is made involving time".

Then write your own passage for an entirely different story, wherein each sentence accomplishes the same function as what you encoded from the other passage.

For example, I did this to begin a children's story, taking my template from the first page of The Reader by Bernhard Schlink.

THE READER by Bernhard Schlink

When I was fifteen, I got hepatitis. It started in the fall and lasted until spring. As the old year darkened and turned colder, I got weaker and weaker. Things didn't start to improve until the new year...

LULLABYE by P Aaron Mitchell

When the moon first appeared my little Zienna hid from it. The moon waited to see her for about 18 minutes, which is a long time for the moon. The moon felt for her with its beams but she just hummed to herself in the molasses jar. When the moon looked the other way she climbed out...

Maybe the relationship isn't obvious to anyone else, and that's okay. It's still good practice - you force yourself to tell your own story in a cadence that matches (at least to you) that of a strong writer.

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#20

Post by mitko »

samplatt wrote: post #14
nefitty wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.”

>“Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice, makes perfect.” That's word-for-word what my sensei says about karate.

Four years ago my sensei invited another sensei for a seminar and the other sensei said nearly exactly the same thing, but I never heard my sensei say it. Is your sensei Fujishima?[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/themitak/status/838896881866588161?s=20

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