Improvement Efficiency
The Dragon’s Scales
In a far long gone-by event, I had caught myself staring at an even further gone-by drawing of a dragon. There was nothing spectacular about this drawing of a dragon. The pose was static. The perspective was bland, making the picture flat. The pencil shading was more or less standard.
Specifically though, I had remembered that at one point, this picture was one in which I had dedicated multiple uncounted hours. Now, while multiple hours may be incomparable to the time spent by some artists on some of their keystone masterpieces, a stale, unspectacular picture of a dragon did not seem to require such time.
At some point, this picture of a dragon had many rather semi-hexagonal scales strewn crudely through the entirety of its body in pencil. In the end though, this painstaking effort did not contribute to the appearance of the picture as the scales had mostly been smudged away by time. Even in the beginning, the scales felt to be a futile effort. Not because they smudged away. Such things could be prevented.
Purpose
The addition of the scales was only one that could enhance the specific picture and nothing more. The scales were not drawn out in a thoughtful way. Their main attraction was to draw the awe of viewers who sympathized with the time spent.
No stride in improvement of technical skill was made through the rendering of the scales. Perhaps muscle memory of drawing the semi-hexagonal shapes in a specific pattern was gained, but such was little reward for the effort spent.
When catching myself staring, thinking of the old scales on the dragon picture, I wondered why I had drawn the scales in the first place.
I knew I was not a fully-fledged and technically knowledgeable artist. Why had I spent my time with such idlings as drawing out the scales on a dragon?
Goal-Oriented
The thing I vividly remembered most was that through all those past days of doodling little scales on dragons and other fanciful such things, I believed my goal in art was to improve.
So, I sat there thinking of how many artists improved by doing studies. The main thing that separated me from them was that I had not made an attempt to analyze the appearance of the world around me as I sketched.
And, I simply sat there wondering. What kind of approach to improvement might be more effective than drawing scales on a dragon? How does one efficiently improve technical art skill?
All the same, I wonder whether a true practitioner of the form may ever need bother themselves with such things, and thus I wonder if one such as myself may be better suited in the classification of an observer of the art world. Then again, if the goal of an artist is to achieve realism, would not a practitioner do well to consider how to achieve the state of being capable of imitating the world?
In the end, all I can say is that if an artist’s goal is truly to imitate the real world, then it would seem that analyzing the appearance of the world through studies is truly the path to improvement.
December 29, 2008 at 12:38 am | Reflections | No comments