Observations I Made From 2 Years of My Art Journey — Part 1
5 Brief Yet Powerful Points
I have been learning to draw for 2 years now. It has been quite a ride, and I am looking for more in the future.
To celebrate this 2nd anniversary I decided to take out some time and retrospect on my journey so far.
I usually have two methods of writing. One would be a normal conversation with you, where I would be telling things I know to you. Another would be writing for myself, usually to get a better understanding of an idea, or to document things for me to refer to in the future.
This post has been written based on the latter one.
I intend to document all the things I observed from my behavior while learning, and break it down, to understand its working and probably use it in the future as tools, and perhaps you can too.
Out of these, a few I could understand, and the rest I couldn’t, yet.
I don’t know how much I have improved. Even after comparing my artworks, I give my progress very little credit. So I rely on people’s thoughts about my work, and that isn’t ideal, but that’s how it is for now.
1. Get Started
Most of the learning happens in Action. Thinking is critical, but it in solitude isn’t.
Many plans, desires, activities, or whatever one wishes to do mostly get buried in their mind, and rarely so happens that it gets a chance to coexist with them in the real world.
I can list a lot of things I had thought of doing in my life but didn’t take the minimal first action required to get it started, and thus I never got to explore them.
However, it wasn’t the case for drawing. I still don’t know what came in my mind that I started drawing out of nowhere, but I am grateful for it.
I remember back in my first year of college, I was referring to a list of hobbies on Wiki in an attempt to find something that would help me get out of the feeling of directionlessness.
Here’s the mistake I did.
Instead of choosing a skill and testing it out for a few days or weeks, I would imagine in my mind, how I would feel if I were to try that hobby, and analyze if I would like it.
I ran out of all the options eventually and ended up thinking I just don’t like anything.
A better way to approach it is with this analogy:
Think of this scenario as getting yourself a toy, and you here, are a baby.
If I keep 10 toys in front of you, there will be diverse opinions about all the toys forming in your mind. Now you wouldn’t just stare at them from a distance, examine your thoughts, and bore yourself. Your job would be to crawl your way to them and start playing with anyone of them. Only then will you know if it’s worth playing with.
And don’t worry if you spend time playing with the toy and find yourself not enjoying it much. If that’s the case, throw it out of the window, and catch another one.
You are not obliged to stay loyal to any toy.
All the skills and fields of study are your games. Play with them for a specific amount of time, and see if it entertains you. If it doesn’t, you know what to do. Eventually and hopefully you will find your favorite one.
One thing to make sure of in this process is to give your best, only then will you know the truth.
Extra thoughts on this point at the end of the post.
2. Manifestation Notes
I used to write a lot of texts for myself. It would be of appreciation, motivation, goal-oriented, or something similar. To avoid embarrassment, I chose not to show all of them, but here are a few I picked for you.
To be fair, I am not sure of how this has helped me, or if it even works.
It’s just that I do like practicing it sometimes, although I haven’t done it for quite some time, would love to get back on it.
3. Perfect Practice Makes Perfect
“Making the same mistake again is a mistake wasted” — Ankur Warikoo
Mistakes are bound to happen in any action you perform. Whether it’s a sketch you have made, a song that you have composed, a food item you have cooked, or any X work that you have done.
Learning from the mistakes makes them meaningful.
A shift of attitude must happen from worrying about making no mistakes to learning from the mistakes.
Once you can grasp this point, you will be mindful of the wrong things you do, and start rectifying them. Thus, preventing you from repeating the same mistakes, tiring yourself in circles, and make progress for yourself.
You start to be in peace with failures, once you change your relationship with them.
4. Study Professional’s work
Every master was once a beginner, and in the quest of achieving mastery, they leave behind the greatest treasure, their Trail.
Their Experience, their Mistakes, their Failures, their Success, their Choices, their Work, their Routine, their Process, their Knowledge, their Opinions, their Reasoning, their EVERYTHING.
And your interest as a learner must lie in this unparalleled worthy asset.
You have, with you, their map, and not an ordinary map I must say, but the one that has all the paths that are taken by them, and even those which aren’t.
That not only hints you in the right direction but also alerts you about the wrong routes.
Both of them are equally valuable.
Edit: Also, keep an eye on work of those who are least skilled. I had many instances when studying master’s work didn’t feel enough. Only after I went through some of the beginners work like me, I understood the concept better. Because I had the chance to compare the works.
All these lessons can significantly cut off and boost your mistake and learning rate respectively.
It gives you a checkpoint to start with. So you don’t have to start the pursuit of mastery all over again. You don’t have to figure out everything from scratch, again.
How freaking awesome is it that we are capable of learning from others’ wandering?
5. Make Notes
Writing feedback, mistakes, the rectification of those mistakes, process, key points, and the rest helps in structuring the knowledge when learning.
It also acts as a reference.
Continuation of the First Point
When I had just passed a month or so on this journey, I started having an interest in making comics. One of my online friend artist, back then suggested me to not think much, and just start making comics
The idea was that once I just start doing it, I would eventually figure out the next steps.
But I chose to focus on learning than making comics, and that did a few things for me.
- I started falling in love with drawing in general
- It opened up different fields of interest, like Animation, Story Boarding, etc
- It mitigated my interest in comics.
And this made me realize that,
Permutation of choices we make, crafts a unique future for us.
I am glad I didn’t choose to start making comics, or else I wouldn’t have learned many things. But then, I think I would have had gratitude for something else if I had chosen that path.
That’s it for this post. See you in the next one.
Take cares,
Byes.
