Drawing Someone Over and Over Again

John Wooden died in 2009. But if yous're a basketball coach today, you're still living in his shadow.

And for good reason. Wooden'south record equally a basketball game coach for UCLA remains unmatched. He was notorious for his attending to detail, downwardly to training his players how to put on their socks and lace their shoes correctly. He wrote books that applied his winning formula on the court to life in full general, and his TED talk of 2001, The Divergence Between Winning and Succeeding, has over four million views.

His methods accept been studied extensively by people who hope to replicate his success in other areas, but with mixed results. In fact, few manage to come shut.

Why?

According the book Practice Perfect, nearly of Wooden'south imitators fail to recognise the well-nigh important factor that contributed to his amazing results:

His obsession with do.

We've all heard the ofttimes-quoted "10,000 hour" rule that Malcolm Gladwell borrowed from K. Anders Ericsson and then popularised in his bookOutliers. If nosotros want to become better at something, we need to practise it a lot.

But that'due south not even one-half the story.

Just doing something a lot will not guarantee improvement. Depending on the way that thing is done, it may actually take the reverse effect. Because the 10,000 dominion, in the simplified grade nosotros usually find information technology in handy quotes in web log posts or on Facebook, misses the deviation between operation and practise.

And that difference is key.

The difference betwixt performance and do

Operation is:

1. The employment of a lot of different skills together, at the same time. If you lot're painting, y'all're having to think about values, castor control, colour, technique, limerick, drawing – all together.
2. Creating something finished. For us, that means a drawing, painting, or sculpture. That also ways pressure, since we tend to judge ourselves by the results.
3. Repeated mistakes.It'southward too easy to fall into the same patterns, the same idiosyncrasies, when performing. Very ofttimes, that tin mean repeatedly doing things in a way that doesn't result in improvement at all. Retrieve about drawing accuracy. If you repeatedly misjudge distances besides big, just never check to see that you're doing that, you will further ingrain the bad addiction past doing it more often.You get better at doing something badly.

Do is:

1. Doing i thing at a fourth dimension in a very focused mode. Instead of trying to go the drawing and the colour correct at the same time, yous might be practising simply judging distances past eye (which will ameliorate your drawing accuracy), or mixing color, or matching values.
2. Done purely for the sake of comeback. The intended result is not a beautiful painting or cartoon, it is improvement in the skills that the creation of a beautiful painting requires.
3. Repeatedly doing information technology right. By using feedback to make sure that y'all correct habitual mistakes and practice doing things the right fashion, yous ensure improvement over time.

Those short lists requite united states a practiced idea of the difference, only that'due south not the whole story either. Because there are two ways to practice; ane is extremely effective, the other much less so – only is the one nearly commonly done.

These approaches are scrimmageand drill.

The departure between scrimmage and drill

Scrimmage attempts as much as possible to replicate the weather of performance, but under more than controlled conditions. For painters, an instance might exist painting a small still life that you can complete quickly, or doing a block-in for a portrait.

But it'due south not where you lot develop your skills. The big drawback of scrimmage is that, like performance, it allows you to persist in bad habits. Because, equally with performance, you're employing and integrating a lot of different skills at one time. You don't know what y'all're doing right and what you lot're doing wrong.

Drill, on the other manus, means isolating a specific skill – judging the distance between ii points, say, or matching a perceived value equally closely as you tin – and practising it repeatedly, with feedback, so that you tin see what you lot're getting right and what you're getting wrong.

If you practice matching values for a while, you'll probably find – as I and many of the people I piece of work with at Creative Triggers found – that you consistently estimate them too light. That'due south a addiction that yous can correct, and that correction results in real improvement.

But drill isn't pop. Information technology's widely seen as wearisome. Worse, there'south a torso of stance, especially in didactics, that considers information technology an ineffective way to practice. That's a shame, considering it's the nearly effective fashion to build your skills.

Wooden used drill much more often, when his contemporaries were concentrating on scrimmage. Wooden only used scrimmage to evaluate the results of drill. So if you want to meliorate your painting, and you're prepared to practice, you'd be well brash to eschew making paintings and so much – fifty-fifty modest, "practise" pieces – and drill instead.

Merely surely art is different?

You may be thinking that art is very different from sport, and Wooden's example doesn't travel well to our field. You might recollect that art springs from the soul, that you can't practice inspiration, and that talent and practice are different things.

Yous'd exist wrong. And unfortunately, you'd exist preventing yourself from making progress with that mindset. I don't want that for yous. I desire yous to accomplish your goals with your art, to realise your dreams, as much as I want to realise my own.

Practising drawing and painting obeys the same bones rules as every other homo activity. Those rules are established past the way our brains work when we're learning something new and developing our skills. Those rules are the same whether y'all're learning to shoot hoops or create a beautiful limerick.

Here'due south an case a petty closer to dwelling house.

How drilling composition improved my paintings

For 5 years, I didn't paint.

At that place were a few reasons for that. Nosotros were about to adopt our first child (the offset of two, every bit it turned out). The back sleeping room in our minor, ii-bedroomed house just outside London that had served equally my studio was surrendered to brand room for the impending little ane.

At the same fourth dimension, my freelance work dried up and so did my married woman's. But the bills still needed paying.

And so I went dorsum to a full-time day job. I'd lost my working space and my painting time. The easel and paints were packed away, and nosotros embarked on a wholly unlike journey. Three years subsequently, merely as the dust was beginning to settle, we adopted our 2d little male child.

The event of all this on my painting was that I didn't really try to create paintings once again until very recently – in fact, until I was fabricated redundant last September from said day job and found myself with a footling fourth dimension on my easily. You could say that life has been interesting lately!

So I found myself with a little time to paint, and the living room now doubles equally a studio space now and again. I'm dorsum at the easel for the first time in over five years.

Can I still paint?

I expected to be very rusty when I first picked upward a brush. I expected to struggle. Just I was surprised to detect that I paint only every bit well as I did before I stopped. In fact, I think I'thousand painting ameliorate. And I call up I know why.

For the final five years, although I didn't pigment, I did get into a habit of drawing regularly. For much of that time, I was deliberately practising something very specific: composition. I was lucky enough to find a book that was filled with some very effective exercises designed to develop sensitivity to spacing, proportion and pattern – Composition,by Arthur Wesley Dow.

The Dow book exemplifies the concept of  drill. Each practice isolates a specific area of composition and places accent on practising repeatedly to develop skill at information technology. The exercises are simplified. For months on end, I did aught but simple line drawings of plants, and and then took crops of those drawings and repeatedly refined them past tracing. I've done literally hundreds of these simple little drawings. I credit this practice with developing my sensitivity to spacing and proportion.

I likewise did some practice with line quality and value design (which Dow calls notan). One style I did this was by redrawing the same elementary flick of a lily 100 times, in 2 values.

That's drill, non scrimmage. Here are the specific skills I was working on:

1. Motor control skills. Quite a lot of the do I did was with a Chinese brush and ink. If you lot haven't tried it, I can tell you it's a really challenging medium to work with – way harder than oils to control. Creative triggers members are often surprised at how tough it is even to draw a directly line with a Chinese brush and ink.
2. Pattern. Earlier all this practice, I used to remember that I spent quite a bit of time thinking about the design of my paintings – despite existence disappointed when they oft didn't come up out well! I thought that because the design of a painting before painting it was enough. I'd paint a few thumbnails, retrieve about the values. But I hadn't done whatsoever of intensive practice that stretched the skill itself. I hadn't done any drill.

Now I take. So when I call up about starting a painting, my more than developed "pattern" mental networks come into play before I fifty-fifty pick upward a brush. And when I'm sitting at the easel and painting, I don't have to devote quite then much brain power to brush control or value design or proportion equally I proceed, because some of that processing has get automatic for me.

The do has changed my brain.

Here'due south a few of the things that came off my easel since I got dorsum to painting once more:

I know I shouldn't exist surprised by the fact I tin can improve through drill. After all, that'south what the neuroscientists are telling us: That what we repeatedly do changes the wiring of our brains.

Still, when you encounter information technology happen, information technology is a footling surprising. I haven't been painting for 5 years. But in that time, I've adult my design skills to the betoken where I now think differently about moving picture making. And for the ameliorate. I'chiliad not saying that I'm brilliant at either of these two things, past the way. Just that I'm better at them than I was five years ago.

What I hope yous take from this:

The offset thing I hope you have from this is that no matter whether you have the opportunity to devote all your time to your art or not, never stop cartoon. Never stop. Because yous don't know when opportunity might find you over again. And when it does, you'll not only exist set for it, you'll be further along.

The primary point is this: If you want to go ameliorate, seriously better, try staying away from performance for a while. Constantly performing without ever practising is how amateurs arroyo things in other fields. Amateur golfers never drill, they only play. And existence an amateur is fine. Painting for a hobby is fine.

Merely if you really want to ameliorate, expect at it like a professional. Even better, look at it like a professional sportsperson at the peak of their game. They don't but perform, they practice. They drill. And they know the deviation.

When you're thinking well-nigh practising, make sure yous include these three things, and yous won't go far wrong:

1. Isolate a specific skill.
2. Incorporate a feedback mechanism. If you're practising values, for example, practice matching local values and test your results. That will keep you from repeatedly practising doing something incorrect.
3. Drill more scrimmage.

I've included the following quote in posts more once earlier, and I'thou including information technology once again because it's so true, and then relevant here. When in his senior years, world famous 'cellist Pablo Casals was asked why he nevertheless practised every day. He said:

"Because I think I can see some improvement."

Best wishes and thanks for reading,

Paul

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Source: https://www.learning-to-see.co.uk/how-to-get-better-at-painting-without-painting-anything

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