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How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
51–60 of 170 posts
Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
#52The premise of Wooden's methods is that the players already have a lot of experience playing basketball. Many many games by the time they got to UCLA. Informal and formal. And that's my caveat for this as advice on painting. If a person doesn't already have a history of painting, by which I mean starting and completing paintings as paintings, no amount of drill is going turn them into a painter. The willingness to ex…
Does anybody have any reading recommendations or thoughts on the topic of how people _with_ drilled or otherwise refined skills can turn into people who come up with and complete mature creative projects? In creative contexts I know a lot of people who get stuck on just drilling their skills forever or who want to be mature creative project-completers but mysteriously aren't getting it done. I've read a lot about how people get world-class good at things ("10k hours") but I don't think those books explain why one person successfully completes a unique comic, album, short film, or novella and another person struggles with that goal all their days, either only producing derivative work or never completing their work. Some of the focus on "10k'ing" your way to world class skill feels like a distraction from developing as an independent thing-finisher. Some incredible creative work has been completed by people with decent-but-not-world-class skill.
Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
#53> I paint realism in oils, mostly still life. I showed my grandma (98) a photo on an iPad. Her immediate reaction: “there’s no reason to paint realism anymore”. The method described in this article might work for realism in oils, but please don’t accept it as the exclusive way to create art. Art is about understanding the tools you’re using to create (for example how paint mixes, moves, dries, interacts with a surfac…
> The method described in this article might work for realism in oils, but please don’t accept it as the exclusive way to create art.
The method in this article applies universally to any art, music, any creative endeavor, and frankly even non-creative endeavors.
It can be reduced to this: take time to practice, improve, and eventually excel at specific skills/techniques that comprise your craft, with no regard for any sort of big picture during this focused practice.
Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
#54The premise of Wooden's methods is that the players already have a lot of experience playing basketball. Many many games by the time they got to UCLA. Informal and formal. And that's my caveat for this as advice on painting. If a person doesn't already have a history of painting, by which I mean starting and completing paintings as paintings, no amount of drill is going turn them into a painter. The willingness to ex…
I think you're extrapolating his advice into something it's not. He is advocating a way to improve (by focusing on narrow tasks and skills), and he never says this will turn your into a painter.
But if you are a painter (or whatever) then don't always be in "performance" mode, because that limits improvement.
Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
#55The premise of Wooden's methods is that the players already have a lot of experience playing basketball. Many many games by the time they got to UCLA. Informal and formal. And that's my caveat for this as advice on painting. If a person doesn't already have a history of painting, by which I mean starting and completing paintings as paintings, no amount of drill is going turn them into a painter. The willingness to ex…
Does anybody have any reading recommendations or thoughts on the topic of how people _with_ drilled or otherwise refined skills can turn into people who come up with and complete mature creative projects? In creative contexts I know a lot of people who get stuck on just drilling their skills forever or who want to be mature creative project-completers but mysteriously aren't getting it done. I've read a lot about how…
For art, it’s not skill or technique that makes someone an artist. It is simply the terrifying decision that what you make is art. Terrifying because the only gatekeeper to being an artist is you. Declare yourself an artist and you are. Call what you made art and it is.
Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
#56> 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…
When I was in middle school, we used the Saxon method of learning math. Every lesson set contained new concepts AND forced students to answer questions to old concepts. By the end of the year, we were fluent in all the concepts regardless of the last time they were taught in class, because we were constantly forced to solve equations from all parts of the book. We all loved that approach because it kept us in practice.
Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
#57> The practice has changed my brain.
> Here’s a few of the things that came off my easel since I got back to painting again:
This might be informative if he showed us some old painting from before he "changed his brain" so we can see the differences. But he didn't, so we are left wondering.
Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
#58All 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.”
Another important reason to not start over is to make it a habit to continue playing even when you make a mistake. If you are performing and you make a mistake, then you don't want to just keep on playing.
Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
#59> 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…
There's a big difference between the kind of learning that's effective in going from zero to knowing basics VS the kind that's effective in going from basics to mastery.
I don't think drill is an effective method for early-stage learning, because you don't have the mental framework to hang the new knowledge off yet.
Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are combining too many things. Focusing on 20 simple with increasing difficult problems builds visual memory, pattern matching which is lacking with a few compounds problems. The science must be missing some inputs because the current theory is lacking.
The current theory isn't particularly lacking, the average teacher (let alone layperson's) understanding of it is lacking. Plus there's dozens of rubbish theories that are sorely lacking so you have to find the researchers that actually do solid research. IIRC (see the above, it applies to random comments on the internet) drill work is more effective (but feels less effective to both teachers and students) if it's mi…
In first grade we were given a workbook for learning how to write the letters. There was one whole page of A, one page of B, etc. You had to write maybe 100 As in a row. The kids quickly figured out that the fastest way to do it was to first write the left slant 100 times, then the right slant 100 times and finally all the 100 crossbars. So yes, you do need a little variety to defeat such shortcuts.