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

423 points by intronextron 5y ago

reikonomusha 5y ago
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.”
- nefitty 5y ago
  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.”
  - samplatt 5y ago
    >“Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice, makes perfect.” That's word-for-word what my sensei says about karate.
    - mitko 5y ago
      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 https://twitter.com/themitak/status/838896881866588161?s=20
      - ipaddr 5y ago
        Is the world this small?
      - samplatt 5y ago
        Nope.
      - QuercusMax 5y ago
        It's an extremely common quote, often attributed to Vince Lombardi, the football coach. Nobody's sensei made it up.
  - SeriousM 5y ago
    > She also taught us not to “stop and start over” when we made mistakes. This is so true. I learn piano myself and I'm a trackmania gamer for years. Learning a piano piece (some bars or full length for easy pieces) is quite the same as learning a track layout in trackmania. You have to go through the whole, regardless of the speed to see at least where it leads you. And if you just restart after the slightest error, you will perfect just the begin of the track yet you will struggle every time once you reach the unknown parts.
  - lask 5y ago
    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.
  - thwave 5y ago
    My piano teacher used to say "It's not a video-game, you don't go back to the beginning of the level every time you lose."
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  I think playing songs / pieces does have value, especially if you're starting out, in that it trains your motor skills - finding the keys on a piano, strings on a guitar, etc. It won't make you a musician, but it'll get you up to party trick level. Anyway here's wonderwall.
- renox 5y ago
  Easier said than done: my son is learning guitar but it's the holidays. Not easy to make him practice during the holidays given that I'm not a musician..
- dfxm12 5y ago
  "Practice makes permanent" is a perfectly reasonable goal for someone who needs to perform the same set of songs many nights out of the year. Musicians don't always "make" music - that's not what it's all about. Musicians may only need to "play" music.
bloaf 5y ago
For art and music there are pretty clear and well defined skills that can be drilled. Anyone have suggestions for writing drills?
- macintux 5y ago
  That’s an interesting question. My completely uneducated idea: reproducing masters’ works. Take a novel, or something shorter, and type it up, thinking with each sentence, each page, why they wrote what they did, and what they left out.
  - thatcat 5y ago
    HS Thompson did this
- Jakob 5y ago
  Most writing drills are about reading critically: http://www.criticalreading.com/ http://www.criticalreading.com/ Look into universities and approaches from Professors: Jordan Peterson’s writing approach is based a lot on drill: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://jordanbpeterson.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Essay_Writing_Guide.docx https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://jordanbpeterson.co... Umberto Eco’s "How to write a Thesis"
- someguyinthe 5y ago
  I assume that’d be doing some subsection of writing, like focusing on dialogue, or describing a scene, etc. From what I gather, you’d want to focus on one thing and try and get really good at it, then you could write a short story as a “scrimmage” to see how you’ve improved as a whole
- okwubodu 5y ago
  I'm not a writer but I've used one drill where you set a theme and handwrite off the top of your head without pausing or erasing up to whatever set length. Like freestyling.
- vladTheInhaler 5y ago
  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.
TrispusAttucks 5y ago
> 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 double pluses. It seems so ridiculous. I'd rather them crush a worksheet of 20 problems that practices a single skill then 2 problems that try to include everything from reading to drawing just for a simple subtraction problem.
- kiba 5y ago
  Math used to be taught with more drill style. Now with common core every single problem is an epic quest of 10 frames and double pluses. It seems so ridiculous. I'd rather them crush a worksheet of 20 problems that practices a single skill then 2 problems that try to include everything from reading to drawing just for a simple subtraction problem. The problem with these 20 problems of basically the same identical challenge is that it's actually less effective than intermixing of different kind of problems, at least according to learning science. You and I may prefer 20 problems that practice straight subtraction, but that's not what the science says is actually the most effective learning strategy. You want different kind of problems in a problem set. It shouldn't be straight subtraction, but also additions, word problems, and so forth. This creates a level of desirable difficulty, which embeds knowledge more deeply than something that is very easy to do by rote.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    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.
    - wisty 5y ago
      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 mixed up with different topics or question types, kind of like how doing a kata is better than doing exactly the same punch 10x (obviously katas are not ideal either, at least not as the only tool). Really you need a bit of diversity, and IMO two of the big traps to fall into are overly homogenous drill work (which doesn't retain as well as mixed drills, but looks effective because anyone who doesn't eat their crayons can do it without thinking too hard) and one-off problems (do an assignment where you solve a heavily obfuscated problem once, then pretend that it's now something that students actually understand, when they've literally just answered one single question assuming they even did it themselves).
shusaku 5y ago
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 perspective on our hobbies. So did the author improve because sketching is a drill? Maybe even if they hadn’t done that they still would have gotten better.
- cjohnson318 5y ago
  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.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  You were practicing in your sleep.
- dcx 5y ago
  The exact same thing just happened to me recently after a 10+ year break. Ranking systems seem to have shifted a little since I last played, but I feel like I'm playing easily 3-5 kyu better than I used to at my previous peak. I think this is a different process, though. My sense is that increased wisdom transfers very well to improvement in go. What is making me better is a better ability to prioritise, make judgments and tradeoffs, and manage risk, learned from the real world. This is nice but orthogonal to the techniques for improvement on a single skill. During the period I first started playing, I did a little exercise where I looked at the advice people give on how to get stronger. What I found was that while you'll hear all kinds of stuff thrown around, when you look specifically at what the very strongest players (go professionals) say, you get a super consistent answer: (1) do as much tsumego as you can stomach, and (2) play as many teaching games as you can with the strongest players you can find. This directly translates to drill and scrimmage!
yesenadam 5y ago
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!
- nobody_nothing 5y ago
  > I don't think those pictures are "drill, not scrimmage", in that they are themselves perfectly good works of art. I agree that they're nice, but the author's ultimate desire was to make paintings, not ink drawings, and therein lies the distinction between drill and scrimmage (I think). For him, the ink drawings acted as drills in service of the desired ultimate product (the paintings). For someone trying to get better at ink drawings, on the other hand, those ink drawings would count as scrimmage -- and I imagine the author would argue they should drill the sub-skills that make a great ink drawer (pen work, composition, perspective, shading, etc) separately from the ink drawings themselves. The artifacts produced by those drills may be beautiful, but they're still "drills" because they represent only a subset of the skills the author was ultimately after.
Jakob 5y ago
> 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.
- extrememacaroni 5y ago
  The sister's name? Albert Einstein.
  - ChoGGi 5y ago
    *Alberta
skadamou 5y ago
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.
Exuma 5y ago
Surprised to see his blog here, I am a huge fan. He is very excellent, and also his munsel color videos are very good.
brudgers 5y ago
The 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 execute paintings has to be there.
- runevault 5y ago
  I think the key is that you have to spend some time doing the entire thing, but you have to be willing to go back and rework your fundamentals in smaller chunks (examples from the article being anything from composition to eyeing distances to color mixing).
- rahimnathwani 5y ago
  The 'wax on, wax off' drill worked for Daniel Laruso in The Karate Kid.
  - yellow_lead 5y ago
    Yes, but that was a movie.
- temp234 5y ago
  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.
IncRnd 5y ago
There was a reason John Wooden is still revered as John Wooden. I was taught the difference between practice and play with a different phrase, "perfect practice makes perfect." I've applied that to every part of my life, because it's true.
fma 5y ago
If anyone wants more details, I'd recommend the following book... Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson
jtchang 5y ago
Anyone who plays an instrument knows the value of drilling. Yes it can be boring. But it is needed to get better. You really need to get down to each note and make it perfect before you can play the measure or piece.
mch82 5y ago
> 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 surface), then choosing which tools to use and how to use those tools to convey an experience to an audience. Art is about experimentation, exploration, communication. Art is about studying & talking with other artists to learn how they work, the processes they use, how they solve problems; sometimes copying them and then extending beyond. My point of view on this developed as I studied art in high school, through AP art, and then minored in fine art in college alongside my engineering degree. Plus many hours painting with my grandma and my mom.
- test_epsilon 5y ago
  What were the remaining reasons to paint realism after relatively cheap color photography came about ~100 years ago and before the iPad was made, out of curiosity?
  - thatcat 5y ago
    There wasn't any really, surrealism and abstract art developed slightly before that
- khazhoux 5y ago
  > 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.
- tweetle_beetle 5y ago
  > Art is about studying & talking with other artists to learn how they work, the processes they use, how they solve problems; Everything else makes sense to me, but isn't this a bit narrow? It implies that all art is the search for some higher truth, and that it can only be achieved as a communal effort. This academic, analytical approach would seem to fit your personal art career and that of many artists important to at history. But surely there is still artistic truth in the individual practising and experimenting for themselves, outside any scene or context. There are also examples of people doing this who are considered important to art.
killingtime74 5y ago
If I wanted to be a better entrepreneur or engineer what drills would I do? Talking to customers? Marketing?
natmaka 5y ago
This is not generic, it is not adequate for all disciplines. Painting establishes a relation between the painter and static entities (subject, colors...). They interact in many ways, however the painter is the main 'motor' and 'will'. Basketball is different because a player interacts with his teammates and opponents, he isn't the sole will at play. However I can see how experience may lead a coach to reckon that some individual ways (types of actions or reactions) are statistically better than other ones, either because their intrinsic rate of success is higher or because they benefit from teamwork, leading him to drill them in order to have them select the best ones and apply them properly. It may create a "team of robots" (sort of!) which may be crushed by an opponent team playing in a deliberately unusual (albeit not absurd) way, established to counter the particular automatic actions and reactions of the "robot team". Individual sports are different because there is no teamwork. Combat sports are particularly interesting because you need to scrim (spar) not simply to verify the effects of drills but in order to learn what no drill can effectively teach you: a certain mental state, coping with stress, simultaneously integrating many dynamic blurry variables (related to time & space)... Drill, barely spar and only use it to check what you gained from drills, then hop on a ring against a person who spared properly... and good luck to you (you will need it)!
- odshoifsdhfs 5y ago
  I did this in boxing. My coach was very fond of drills. I remember my first week (5 trainings a week) he only taught and drilled me how to move. No punchs, nothing. Just the various movements, rotation, how to shift weight, etc. I did it for about 3 months like this, with maybe, maybe a 30-45 minute spar session per week (and at this time, I was doing 3 trainings a day during week, 2 on saturdays). Had my first fight around the 3-4 month mark and won it without much difficulty. I see this now that I am learning padel tennis. Been playing for a year or so, but I hardly do any games, mainly practise/drills with my coach (4 times a week). Maybe 2 games a month. I started in September not even knowing how to play, to surpass most people in my trainings, since the drills make me play in games as I practise, since it was drilled so much, while 95%+ of the people do one movement in practise, then get to a game and change it all, reduce speed, or just hit it wrong because they end up 'practising' more the matches with wrong technique/no correction, vs the folks that repeat the same movement 1000 times with correction. In a few months I may even get my beginners coaching certificate. As Bruce Lee said: “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
deleted 5y ago
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wombatmobile 5y ago
> 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.
MikeLumos 5y ago
Recently I've been thinking the exact opposite things. Many novice artists get too hung up on doing "exercises", because they're easy, straightforward, and comfortable (compared to doing the real thing). They waste a lot of time without improving all that much, because repeating exercises out of context can quickly become mindless, people tend to lose sight of the real purpose (making good drawings/paintings), and instead keep drawing boxes to "practice" perspective or get better at drawing straight lines. I think what you need is a combination of what he's calling "scrimmage" and "drill". To develop skills the fastest - try to do the thing that is as close to the specific real thing you want to do as possible. If you want to design characters - spend most of your time designing characters. You won't find a way to grow faster than by doing exactly what you want to get good at. Then you can analyze your artwork, find the skills you're the weakest at, and deliberately practice them. But still, do it in the context of doing the real thing.
- GistNoesis 5y ago
  While watching an acrobat show, I came to the realization that there is probably a better way to develop skills. These acrobats were realizing dangerous performances, where mistakes must not happen even when doing the show thousands of times. And also it must have been possible to practice it right on the first time. My answer to that is imagination, search for the proper mindset, and switching to it. You have to try to imagine the thinking of someone who can do things naturally. It's kinda like in "the pretender" TV-show. It's one layer of indirection added to the more traditional "imitate the master" practicing technique. Some tasks are best handled when you have a specific internal representation. Often when you start from scratch, you don't have the right one, and through experience, blood and sweat, you refine it until you discover the representation that works well for the task. But when you have a representation that kind of work but is missing something, you get stuck in plateau which practice (both "scrimmage" and "drill") only reinforce. For example, with our acrobats, are they visualizing the actions in their head they are about to do ? Do they see themselves in 3D as a first person character, or in third player view ? Are they feeling the movements in their head ? Can they do the movements without doing them ? Can they create mental variations of the movements ? How do they handle the motion blur that our novice eye experience ? How do they evaluate the risks ? Acrobats often are born into; and people do things without knowing exactly how they do them. So you'll have to practice observation to understand (how, why, when,...) they do what they do. While practice is still necessary, it becomes a mere reality check for the performances you have mentally imagined doing a thousand times.
mauritzio 5y ago
Imho he did not be became better at "painting" but he made better designs for paintings. He trained one important aspect of the whole piece of art, the design. The aspect of applying paint was not trained, so that probably has not improved.
- username90 5y ago
  A skilled painter isn't just someone who is good at applying paint the way he wants, similarly as how a skilled writer isn't just someone who writes the words he intends to write. The skill includes all aspects required to make great pieces.
  - mauritzio 5y ago
    In the end there is just paint/words. The question how to find and apply the right/wanted paint/words involves many aspects. By training one aspect it doesn't improve the other, but it may or may not improve the overall outcome.
Cyril_HN 5y ago
I think people forget that the purpose of performance is one of two things: 1. To perform for its own sake. 2. To drill the specific skill of live performance. If you don't want to do either of those things, it is not an efficient way to improve. You must perform to hone the skill of performance, but you should not perform to practice other skills. Caveat: sometimes you can't drill multiple skills together and performance is the only context where you can. However, performing with that in mind is very different to performing generally.
praptak 5y ago
If you want to start painting (or at least the subset of the painting skills required to draw stuff), I suggest "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards. It has some simple drills and presents just enough of the underlying theory to make you understand what the drills are for.
Nevermark 5y ago
I see skill learning as a combination of understanding and fluency. Understanding requires time to play and explore something. It enables slow but powerful problem solving into new territory. But fluency requires practice. And it’s benefit is quick and accurate automatic responses, freeing up the brain to tackle novel things much faster. Together they work really well. and the repetition in obtaining fluency can also push understanding deep into stable memory where it will remain accessible years later. I have seen a lot of education where only one side was emphasized. When kids are pushed for time, neither side gets done well. I don’t think anyone learning anything should move on to more difficult tasks until they both really understand and become fluent at the prerequisites. But that would take education off it’s cohort centered time schedules. That system is so ingrained in most of our non-online education systems.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
Leetcode it is, then.
chris_st 5y ago
As much as I agree with a lot in this article, I totally don't understand the "Code Kata" thing promoted by Uncle Bob Martin and others. I understand drilling a specific skill in the arts, but writing the same piece of code over and over just makes no sense at all (and yeah, his example was solving the "Bowling Score" problem every time). So, anyone do code katas and like/recommend them? If so, what does it teach you? Do you do the same problem over and over, or tackle different problems?
- sha256kira 5y ago
  I dont like them per say, but they worked for me when I had to learn data structures and algos under a lot of pressure. What I noticed (and what I tell my students now) is that they can help you get to a point where you get enough muscle memory to start to watch yourself coding in real time and think critically about what you're doing when your doing it.
- tsumnia 5y ago
  I don't personally do katas, but I would recommend them. As a disclaimer, I've written a research paper on the use of typing exercises to help learn CS [1]. For typing exercises, I consider it akin to building muscle memory at getting comfortable with code syntax with a variety of examples. I look at katas in a simple fashion, small scale problems designed to get you comfortable with building mental models in your head. There is also research out of Utah on giving super small coding drills with good results [2]. When it comes to teaching it, the biggest hurdle is that you need to build a lot of small, unique exercises. This is still drilling, just now focusing on making the techniques flexible to different problems. I use the analogy of drilling technique in martial arts, but you could consider that training with a different partner to understand how the technique works with a new body type. The trick I've found useful is to collect a number of textbooks to review when thinking up practice ideas. If the textbook is good, it typically has "real world" examples modeled with the topic - for example, one I built the other day looked at creating bigrams from a list of words. [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3373165.3373177 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3373165.3373177 [2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3372782.3406259 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3372782.3406259
blindmute 5y ago
I think it's unfortunate that drills in art have been culturally moved away from recently. There is an active sentiment in the amateur art community that drill is bad, and that you should just draw/paint/whatever things that you enjoy, and you'll just naturally improve over time. This is part of why you see countless online artists who draw for thousands of hours and still can barely manage a likeness. There are very few activities for which scrimmage improves you faster than drill. Whether it's sports, art, chess, video games, cooking, or anything else, doing the actual activity is a relatively poor way to improve at it.
egypturnash 5y ago
This reminds me of the time I picked up a brush for the first time in something like a decade and was surprised to find that all the time I’d spent drawing stuff with my Wacom tablet meant that I was able to put the ink exactly where I wanted it to, while thinking a lot about how much pressure I was putting on the brush to make its line width change organically. The last time I’d used one was when I was still struggling with properly constructing forms on the page. You do a thing long enough and it sticks in your head in some surprising ways. Though I wonder how much the constant churn of this year’s hot language and framework gets in the way of that for programmers. I’m glad I went into art instead.
kixiQu 5y ago
Maybe this is just sticking out for me because I'm currently working on my visual art skills, but -- making an illustration or piece of visual art involves a lot of separate skills. It's like if someone did a million algorithms problems in Python, then went back to Java and touted the headline "I got better at Java without writing Java". You got better at executing on the whole thing you're trying to do in Java, sure, but your Java-specific skills didn't get better, so -- what are we impressed by? For any given person those algorithms problems might or might not have been the most helpful thing to sink effort into. I know a lot of artists struggle with issues that are best addressed by scrimmage-type practice, not drilling. "It’s the most effective way to build your skills" is totally defensible for specific skills, not overall success. A lot of artists misidentify what the skills are they need to improve. Executing on whole pieces forces you to reckon with your weak points, not just iterate endlessly on the skill you think would be cool to be super good at. > Constantly performing without ever practising is how amateurs approach things in other fields. Amateur golfers never drill, they just play. And being an amateur is fine. Painting for a hobby is fine. This is honestly not true IME. Maybe realist oil painting draws a different sort than the more illustrative creators I know of -- but I know so many people who sketch constantly but never step beyond into more polished works because they're terrified of their weak points. Finally, "repeated mistakes" as a distinction between performance and practice is just straw man nonsense. Wanting to improve efficiently involves continuous iteration on what you're doing, no matter what methods you're going about. Find me someone who agrees with the idea that it's better to execute on whole works and that this constitutes accepting repeating your mistakes, or defend with some data the idea that drilling necessarily involves more reevaluation of your progress (hint: I've known pianists ruin their tendons with technical exercises done wrong).

423 points by intronextron 5y ago

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.”

nefitty 5y ago
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.”
- samplatt 5y ago
  >“Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice, makes perfect.” That's word-for-word what my sensei says about karate.
  - mitko 5y ago
    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 https://twitter.com/themitak/status/838896881866588161?s=20
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      Is the world this small?
    - samplatt 5y ago
      Nope.
    - QuercusMax 5y ago
      It's an extremely common quote, often attributed to Vince Lombardi, the football coach. Nobody's sensei made it up.
- SeriousM 5y ago
  > She also taught us not to “stop and start over” when we made mistakes. This is so true. I learn piano myself and I'm a trackmania gamer for years. Learning a piano piece (some bars or full length for easy pieces) is quite the same as learning a track layout in trackmania. You have to go through the whole, regardless of the speed to see at least where it leads you. And if you just restart after the slightest error, you will perfect just the begin of the track yet you will struggle every time once you reach the unknown parts.
- lask 5y ago
  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.
- thwave 5y ago
  My piano teacher used to say "It's not a video-game, you don't go back to the beginning of the level every time you lose."
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I think playing songs / pieces does have value, especially if you're starting out, in that it trains your motor skills - finding the keys on a piano, strings on a guitar, etc. It won't make you a musician, but it'll get you up to party trick level. Anyway here's wonderwall.
renox 5y ago
Easier said than done: my son is learning guitar but it's the holidays. Not easy to make him practice during the holidays given that I'm not a musician..
dfxm12 5y ago
"Practice makes permanent" is a perfectly reasonable goal for someone who needs to perform the same set of songs many nights out of the year. Musicians don't always "make" music - that's not what it's all about. Musicians may only need to "play" music.

bloaf 5y ago

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

macintux 5y ago
That’s an interesting question. My completely uneducated idea: reproducing masters’ works. Take a novel, or something shorter, and type it up, thinking with each sentence, each page, why they wrote what they did, and what they left out.
- thatcat 5y ago
  HS Thompson did this
Jakob 5y ago
Most writing drills are about reading critically: http://www.criticalreading.com/ http://www.criticalreading.com/ Look into universities and approaches from Professors: Jordan Peterson’s writing approach is based a lot on drill: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://jordanbpeterson.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Essay_Writing_Guide.docx https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://jordanbpeterson.co... Umberto Eco’s "How to write a Thesis"
someguyinthe 5y ago
I assume that’d be doing some subsection of writing, like focusing on dialogue, or describing a scene, etc. From what I gather, you’d want to focus on one thing and try and get really good at it, then you could write a short story as a “scrimmage” to see how you’ve improved as a whole
okwubodu 5y ago
I'm not a writer but I've used one drill where you set a theme and handwrite off the top of your head without pausing or erasing up to whatever set length. Like freestyling.
vladTheInhaler 5y ago
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.

TrispusAttucks 5y ago

> 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 double pluses. It seems so ridiculous. I'd rather them crush a worksheet of 20 problems that practices a single skill then 2 problems that try to include everything from reading to drawing just for a simple subtraction problem.

kiba 5y ago
Math used to be taught with more drill style. Now with common core every single problem is an epic quest of 10 frames and double pluses. It seems so ridiculous. I'd rather them crush a worksheet of 20 problems that practices a single skill then 2 problems that try to include everything from reading to drawing just for a simple subtraction problem. The problem with these 20 problems of basically the same identical challenge is that it's actually less effective than intermixing of different kind of problems, at least according to learning science. You and I may prefer 20 problems that practice straight subtraction, but that's not what the science says is actually the most effective learning strategy. You want different kind of problems in a problem set. It shouldn't be straight subtraction, but also additions, word problems, and so forth. This creates a level of desirable difficulty, which embeds knowledge more deeply than something that is very easy to do by rote.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  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.
  - wisty 5y ago
    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 mixed up with different topics or question types, kind of like how doing a kata is better than doing exactly the same punch 10x (obviously katas are not ideal either, at least not as the only tool). Really you need a bit of diversity, and IMO two of the big traps to fall into are overly homogenous drill work (which doesn't retain as well as mixed drills, but looks effective because anyone who doesn't eat their crayons can do it without thinking too hard) and one-off problems (do an assignment where you solve a heavily obfuscated problem once, then pretend that it's now something that students actually understand, when they've literally just answered one single question assuming they even did it themselves).

shusaku 5y ago

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 perspective on our hobbies. So did the author improve because sketching is a drill? Maybe even if they hadn’t done that they still would have gotten better.

cjohnson318 5y ago
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.
ipaddr 5y ago
You were practicing in your sleep.
dcx 5y ago
The exact same thing just happened to me recently after a 10+ year break. Ranking systems seem to have shifted a little since I last played, but I feel like I'm playing easily 3-5 kyu better than I used to at my previous peak. I think this is a different process, though. My sense is that increased wisdom transfers very well to improvement in go. What is making me better is a better ability to prioritise, make judgments and tradeoffs, and manage risk, learned from the real world. This is nice but orthogonal to the techniques for improvement on a single skill. During the period I first started playing, I did a little exercise where I looked at the advice people give on how to get stronger. What I found was that while you'll hear all kinds of stuff thrown around, when you look specifically at what the very strongest players (go professionals) say, you get a super consistent answer: (1) do as much tsumego as you can stomach, and (2) play as many teaching games as you can with the strongest players you can find. This directly translates to drill and scrimmage!

yesenadam 5y ago

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!

nobody_nothing 5y ago
> I don't think those pictures are "drill, not scrimmage", in that they are themselves perfectly good works of art. I agree that they're nice, but the author's ultimate desire was to make paintings, not ink drawings, and therein lies the distinction between drill and scrimmage (I think). For him, the ink drawings acted as drills in service of the desired ultimate product (the paintings). For someone trying to get better at ink drawings, on the other hand, those ink drawings would count as scrimmage -- and I imagine the author would argue they should drill the sub-skills that make a great ink drawer (pen work, composition, perspective, shading, etc) separately from the ink drawings themselves. The artifacts produced by those drills may be beautiful, but they're still "drills" because they represent only a subset of the skills the author was ultimately after.

Jakob 5y ago

> 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.

extrememacaroni 5y ago
The sister's name? Albert Einstein.
- ChoGGi 5y ago
  *Alberta

skadamou 5y ago

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.

Exuma 5y ago

Surprised to see his blog here, I am a huge fan. He is very excellent, and also his munsel color videos are very good.

brudgers 5y ago

The 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 execute paintings has to be there.

runevault 5y ago
I think the key is that you have to spend some time doing the entire thing, but you have to be willing to go back and rework your fundamentals in smaller chunks (examples from the article being anything from composition to eyeing distances to color mixing).
rahimnathwani 5y ago
The 'wax on, wax off' drill worked for Daniel Laruso in The Karate Kid.
- yellow_lead 5y ago
  Yes, but that was a movie.
temp234 5y ago
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.

IncRnd 5y ago

There was a reason John Wooden is still revered as John Wooden. I was taught the difference between practice and play with a different phrase, "perfect practice makes perfect." I've applied that to every part of my life, because it's true.

fma 5y ago

If anyone wants more details, I'd recommend the following book... Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson

jtchang 5y ago

Anyone who plays an instrument knows the value of drilling. Yes it can be boring. But it is needed to get better. You really need to get down to each note and make it perfect before you can play the measure or piece.

mch82 5y ago

> 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 surface), then choosing which tools to use and how to use those tools to convey an experience to an audience. Art is about experimentation, exploration, communication. Art is about studying & talking with other artists to learn how they work, the processes they use, how they solve problems; sometimes copying them and then extending beyond. My point of view on this developed as I studied art in high school, through AP art, and then minored in fine art in college alongside my engineering degree. Plus many hours painting with my grandma and my mom.

test_epsilon 5y ago
What were the remaining reasons to paint realism after relatively cheap color photography came about ~100 years ago and before the iPad was made, out of curiosity?
- thatcat 5y ago
  There wasn't any really, surrealism and abstract art developed slightly before that
khazhoux 5y ago
> 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.
tweetle_beetle 5y ago
> Art is about studying & talking with other artists to learn how they work, the processes they use, how they solve problems; Everything else makes sense to me, but isn't this a bit narrow? It implies that all art is the search for some higher truth, and that it can only be achieved as a communal effort. This academic, analytical approach would seem to fit your personal art career and that of many artists important to at history. But surely there is still artistic truth in the individual practising and experimenting for themselves, outside any scene or context. There are also examples of people doing this who are considered important to art.

killingtime74 5y ago

If I wanted to be a better entrepreneur or engineer what drills would I do? Talking to customers? Marketing?

natmaka 5y ago

This is not generic, it is not adequate for all disciplines. Painting establishes a relation between the painter and static entities (subject, colors...). They interact in many ways, however the painter is the main 'motor' and 'will'. Basketball is different because a player interacts with his teammates and opponents, he isn't the sole will at play. However I can see how experience may lead a coach to reckon that some individual ways (types of actions or reactions) are statistically better than other ones, either because their intrinsic rate of success is higher or because they benefit from teamwork, leading him to drill them in order to have them select the best ones and apply them properly. It may create a "team of robots" (sort of!) which may be crushed by an opponent team playing in a deliberately unusual (albeit not absurd) way, established to counter the particular automatic actions and reactions of the "robot team". Individual sports are different because there is no teamwork. Combat sports are particularly interesting because you need to scrim (spar) not simply to verify the effects of drills but in order to learn what no drill can effectively teach you: a certain mental state, coping with stress, simultaneously integrating many dynamic blurry variables (related to time & space)... Drill, barely spar and only use it to check what you gained from drills, then hop on a ring against a person who spared properly... and good luck to you (you will need it)!

odshoifsdhfs 5y ago
I did this in boxing. My coach was very fond of drills. I remember my first week (5 trainings a week) he only taught and drilled me how to move. No punchs, nothing. Just the various movements, rotation, how to shift weight, etc. I did it for about 3 months like this, with maybe, maybe a 30-45 minute spar session per week (and at this time, I was doing 3 trainings a day during week, 2 on saturdays). Had my first fight around the 3-4 month mark and won it without much difficulty. I see this now that I am learning padel tennis. Been playing for a year or so, but I hardly do any games, mainly practise/drills with my coach (4 times a week). Maybe 2 games a month. I started in September not even knowing how to play, to surpass most people in my trainings, since the drills make me play in games as I practise, since it was drilled so much, while 95%+ of the people do one movement in practise, then get to a game and change it all, reduce speed, or just hit it wrong because they end up 'practising' more the matches with wrong technique/no correction, vs the folks that repeat the same movement 1000 times with correction. In a few months I may even get my beginners coaching certificate. As Bruce Lee said: “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

wombatmobile 5y ago

> 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.

MikeLumos 5y ago

Recently I've been thinking the exact opposite things. Many novice artists get too hung up on doing "exercises", because they're easy, straightforward, and comfortable (compared to doing the real thing). They waste a lot of time without improving all that much, because repeating exercises out of context can quickly become mindless, people tend to lose sight of the real purpose (making good drawings/paintings), and instead keep drawing boxes to "practice" perspective or get better at drawing straight lines. I think what you need is a combination of what he's calling "scrimmage" and "drill". To develop skills the fastest - try to do the thing that is as close to the specific real thing you want to do as possible. If you want to design characters - spend most of your time designing characters. You won't find a way to grow faster than by doing exactly what you want to get good at. Then you can analyze your artwork, find the skills you're the weakest at, and deliberately practice them. But still, do it in the context of doing the real thing.

GistNoesis 5y ago
While watching an acrobat show, I came to the realization that there is probably a better way to develop skills. These acrobats were realizing dangerous performances, where mistakes must not happen even when doing the show thousands of times. And also it must have been possible to practice it right on the first time. My answer to that is imagination, search for the proper mindset, and switching to it. You have to try to imagine the thinking of someone who can do things naturally. It's kinda like in "the pretender" TV-show. It's one layer of indirection added to the more traditional "imitate the master" practicing technique. Some tasks are best handled when you have a specific internal representation. Often when you start from scratch, you don't have the right one, and through experience, blood and sweat, you refine it until you discover the representation that works well for the task. But when you have a representation that kind of work but is missing something, you get stuck in plateau which practice (both "scrimmage" and "drill") only reinforce. For example, with our acrobats, are they visualizing the actions in their head they are about to do ? Do they see themselves in 3D as a first person character, or in third player view ? Are they feeling the movements in their head ? Can they do the movements without doing them ? Can they create mental variations of the movements ? How do they handle the motion blur that our novice eye experience ? How do they evaluate the risks ? Acrobats often are born into; and people do things without knowing exactly how they do them. So you'll have to practice observation to understand (how, why, when,...) they do what they do. While practice is still necessary, it becomes a mere reality check for the performances you have mentally imagined doing a thousand times.

mauritzio 5y ago

Imho he did not be became better at "painting" but he made better designs for paintings. He trained one important aspect of the whole piece of art, the design. The aspect of applying paint was not trained, so that probably has not improved.

username90 5y ago
A skilled painter isn't just someone who is good at applying paint the way he wants, similarly as how a skilled writer isn't just someone who writes the words he intends to write. The skill includes all aspects required to make great pieces.
- mauritzio 5y ago
  In the end there is just paint/words. The question how to find and apply the right/wanted paint/words involves many aspects. By training one aspect it doesn't improve the other, but it may or may not improve the overall outcome.

Cyril_HN 5y ago

I think people forget that the purpose of performance is one of two things: 1. To perform for its own sake. 2. To drill the specific skill of live performance. If you don't want to do either of those things, it is not an efficient way to improve. You must perform to hone the skill of performance, but you should not perform to practice other skills. Caveat: sometimes you can't drill multiple skills together and performance is the only context where you can. However, performing with that in mind is very different to performing generally.

praptak 5y ago

If you want to start painting (or at least the subset of the painting skills required to draw stuff), I suggest "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards. It has some simple drills and presents just enough of the underlying theory to make you understand what the drills are for.

Nevermark 5y ago

I see skill learning as a combination of understanding and fluency. Understanding requires time to play and explore something. It enables slow but powerful problem solving into new territory. But fluency requires practice. And it’s benefit is quick and accurate automatic responses, freeing up the brain to tackle novel things much faster. Together they work really well. and the repetition in obtaining fluency can also push understanding deep into stable memory where it will remain accessible years later. I have seen a lot of education where only one side was emphasized. When kids are pushed for time, neither side gets done well. I don’t think anyone learning anything should move on to more difficult tasks until they both really understand and become fluent at the prerequisites. But that would take education off it’s cohort centered time schedules. That system is so ingrained in most of our non-online education systems.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

Leetcode it is, then.

chris_st 5y ago

As much as I agree with a lot in this article, I totally don't understand the "Code Kata" thing promoted by Uncle Bob Martin and others. I understand drilling a specific skill in the arts, but writing the same piece of code over and over just makes no sense at all (and yeah, his example was solving the "Bowling Score" problem every time). So, anyone do code katas and like/recommend them? If so, what does it teach you? Do you do the same problem over and over, or tackle different problems?

sha256kira 5y ago
I dont like them per say, but they worked for me when I had to learn data structures and algos under a lot of pressure. What I noticed (and what I tell my students now) is that they can help you get to a point where you get enough muscle memory to start to watch yourself coding in real time and think critically about what you're doing when your doing it.
tsumnia 5y ago
I don't personally do katas, but I would recommend them. As a disclaimer, I've written a research paper on the use of typing exercises to help learn CS [1]. For typing exercises, I consider it akin to building muscle memory at getting comfortable with code syntax with a variety of examples. I look at katas in a simple fashion, small scale problems designed to get you comfortable with building mental models in your head. There is also research out of Utah on giving super small coding drills with good results [2]. When it comes to teaching it, the biggest hurdle is that you need to build a lot of small, unique exercises. This is still drilling, just now focusing on making the techniques flexible to different problems. I use the analogy of drilling technique in martial arts, but you could consider that training with a different partner to understand how the technique works with a new body type. The trick I've found useful is to collect a number of textbooks to review when thinking up practice ideas. If the textbook is good, it typically has "real world" examples modeled with the topic - for example, one I built the other day looked at creating bigrams from a list of words. [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3373165.3373177 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3373165.3373177 [2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3372782.3406259 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3372782.3406259

blindmute 5y ago

I think it's unfortunate that drills in art have been culturally moved away from recently. There is an active sentiment in the amateur art community that drill is bad, and that you should just draw/paint/whatever things that you enjoy, and you'll just naturally improve over time. This is part of why you see countless online artists who draw for thousands of hours and still can barely manage a likeness. There are very few activities for which scrimmage improves you faster than drill. Whether it's sports, art, chess, video games, cooking, or anything else, doing the actual activity is a relatively poor way to improve at it.

egypturnash 5y ago

This reminds me of the time I picked up a brush for the first time in something like a decade and was surprised to find that all the time I’d spent drawing stuff with my Wacom tablet meant that I was able to put the ink exactly where I wanted it to, while thinking a lot about how much pressure I was putting on the brush to make its line width change organically. The last time I’d used one was when I was still struggling with properly constructing forms on the page. You do a thing long enough and it sticks in your head in some surprising ways. Though I wonder how much the constant churn of this year’s hot language and framework gets in the way of that for programmers. I’m glad I went into art instead.

kixiQu 5y ago

Maybe this is just sticking out for me because I'm currently working on my visual art skills, but -- making an illustration or piece of visual art involves a lot of separate skills. It's like if someone did a million algorithms problems in Python, then went back to Java and touted the headline "I got better at Java without writing Java". You got better at executing on the whole thing you're trying to do in Java, sure, but your Java-specific skills didn't get better, so -- what are we impressed by? For any given person those algorithms problems might or might not have been the most helpful thing to sink effort into. I know a lot of artists struggle with issues that are best addressed by scrimmage-type practice, not drilling. "It’s the most effective way to build your skills" is totally defensible for specific skills, not overall success. A lot of artists misidentify what the skills are they need to improve. Executing on whole pieces forces you to reckon with your weak points, not just iterate endlessly on the skill you think would be cool to be super good at. > Constantly performing without ever practising is how amateurs approach things in other fields. Amateur golfers never drill, they just play. And being an amateur is fine. Painting for a hobby is fine. This is honestly not true IME. Maybe realist oil painting draws a different sort than the more illustrative creators I know of -- but I know so many people who sketch constantly but never step beyond into more polished works because they're terrified of their weak points. Finally, "repeated mistakes" as a distinction between performance and practice is just straw man nonsense. Wanting to improve efficiently involves continuous iteration on what you're doing, no matter what methods you're going about. Find me someone who agrees with the idea that it's better to execute on whole works and that this constitutes accepting repeating your mistakes, or defend with some data the idea that drilling necessarily involves more reevaluation of your progress (hint: I've known pianists ruin their tendons with technical exercises done wrong).