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This is what happens when one guy practices art every day for nine years
- absconditus 15y agoHow is this relevant to HN?
- hyperbovine 15y agoHackers are like painters, didn't you get the memo.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- bgentry 15y agoHackers and Painters, by Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
- bbq 15y agoWell, we all know it takes 10,000 hours of conscious practice to become an expert. And if you buy the Hackers & Painters analogy, you'll see programming, marketing, bizdev, etc as arts. It can be hard to observe improvement in these areas; however in the link it's very easy to track the author's improvement. It's a quite visceral manifestation of improvement - you see the results of daily practice at a glance. It's a reminder to practice, to be better.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- danilocampos 15y agoI need to build a bot that detects and replies to these comments: "Because n people voted it so. 'On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.'"
- antirez 15y ago+1, and Honestly this is much more in topic for hackers than "how to avoid to get gamed by your VC in ten rules".
- scarmig 15y agoWait, there's more to hacking than funding and getting acquired?
- antirez 15y agohacking has nothing to do with money. It is a side effect that a few hackers will get rich. May will just contribute a lot of interesting things for a normal salary, possibly doing this great things in their free time.
- vwoolf 15y agoAgreed. Especially because these replies so seldom make an argument: they rarely say, "this shouldn't be on Hacker News for well-considered reasons x, y, and z." They (usually) just make assumptions about what should or shouldn't be on HN.
- Terretta 15y agoHe's hacking himself... with documentation.
- rsanheim 15y agoWow, talk about missing the point...
- jgmmo 15y agoPretty impressive. Just keeps pounding the 10,000 hrs rule into my head. I need to make a program a day for 9 years.
- bbq 15y agoIndeed. It's all too easy (for me) to fall off the horse and all too hard to get back on.
- maxogden 15y agohttp://calendaraboutnothing.com/ http://calendaraboutnothing.com/ is a neat tool for staying motivated
- nostrademons 15y agoInstead of making a program a day for 9 years, you're better off adding a feature a day to an existing program for 9 years. There's a limit to how good you can get when the scale of what you've done consists entirely of programs you can accomplish in a day. To get beyond that, you need to work on stuff that's bigger - programs that take years to build, and that take hundreds of engineers, and that explore every nook and cranny of their problem domain. In the process, you learn about managing large codebases, and refactoring, and scaling, and minimizing complexity, and deleting code, and tons of algorithms and data structures and problem-solving approaches, and communicating with a team, and being patient, and carrying on when you're not sure what the end product you're building will look like or if it'll be any good, and all sorts of other skills. You don't get that by practicing textbook algorithms and language syntax for 10 years.
- fgsgdsfg 15y agoCan someone convert this into a readable format? The image hosting appears to be spotty, it's on a message board, it's paginated, the dates are unclear, there are now hundreds of comments congratulating the guy, etc. etc. etc.
- jgmmo 15y agoTL;DR Guy is impressed by painters (and it sounded like a family member that was a painter too) so without any kind of art training he decided he wanted to learn the craft. He decided to make one new piece of art per day, and sometimes 2 per day on weekends. If you look at his first few pages of posts you see the 3d cube drawings he started with while he learned how to sketch and whatnot, and then skip to like page 50 which is years and years later you will see these masterful portraits of his wife, jugs of wine and grapes, all kinds of stuff. Apparently now he is a fulltime artist and doing the best he's ever done despite the economic climate. Also, you might want to disable flash on this forum it's posted on. Flashblock chrome extension is nice to have in this kind of situation.
- faheem 15y agoHere's a post that encapsulates his progress http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showpost.php?p=1789531&postcount=1892 http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showpost.php?p=1789531&...
- baddox 15y agoHis initial drawing are much, much better than anything I could currently muster.
- kerryfalk 15y agoHave you tried? I used to draw, a lot. As much as this guy but I was a lot younger. People often told me the same thing "I couldn't even draw a cup that looks like a cup!" Sometimes I'd get them to try and if they were a little bit patient they drew something that looked a lot like the first drawing of that mug (Usually not including the shading). I'm fairly confident that most people could draw that first mug if they really wanted to. The drawings 30 pages in though, that takes much more skill and patience. And it takes a long time to learn it.
- baddox 15y agoNo, I haven't really tried (because I'm not interested in it). I realize now that this guy probably practiced a lot before the initial posts on that forum thread, but I was just pointing out that his initial attempts are always significantly better than what my initial attempts would be.
- kerryfalk 15y agoBut that's what I was suggesting, if a person really wants to try doing it I'm confident they could draw that first mug with no initial practice. Obtaining the rest is just time and passion.
- vwoolf 15y agoI'm fairly confident most people could do most things if they really wanted to, but it seems like most people don't. This is partially a function of time—no one has the time to do everything in the world—but I do wonder about the people who seemingly don't do anything well, or who don't believe they can do anything well. It often seems like they haven't really tried.
- deleted 15y ago
- Corrado 15y agoCheck out his website[1] for quicker loading examples of his more recent work. [1]http://www.jonathanhardesty.com/ http://www.jonathanhardesty.com/
- zmanji 15y agoI found the detail on this face: http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showpost.php?p=2660638&postcount=2018 http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showpost.php?p=2660638&... to be really good. If you go to later posts you can see how the painting evolves.
- muyuu 15y agoHis wife here, painted in a similar style (2 hours): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIP_ACdivFQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIP_ACdivFQ
- nzjames 15y agoThis reminds me a lot of Penny Arcade, I started reading it 10 years ago for the video game commentary but I've really enjoyed watching the quality of the writing and comics improve to such a world class level over time.
- trafficlight 15y agoReading that first year of Penny Arcade is night and day from the material they put out now.
- masklinn 15y agoThis is not uncommon in comics all over the world. There are also a number of mangas exposing this evolution of the artist, two of the most flagrant ones are Kazushi Hagiwara's Bastard!! and Kentaro Miura's Berserk.
- jaredsohn 15y agoInterestingly, he's pretty close to (but still under) the ten year mark for getting mastery that Peter Norvig wrote about in an essay about mastering programming. (http://norvig.com/21-days.html http://norvig.com/21-days.html). (This was before the rule changed to 10,000 hours.) It could be interesting for someone more knowledgable about art to indicate at what point he hit 'mastery' (assuming that has already happened) and to then estimate how many hours it took him to get there.
- alnayyir 15y agoDeliberate practice can bring that number way down.
- michael_dorfman 15y agoThat's the number for deliberate practice. In other words, every hour of deliberate practice brings the number down exactly one hour.
- alnayyir 15y agoNo.
- delinka 15y agoYour mastery of language to articulate your point has brought me to a new level of understanding. My reply to you is "yes." Additionally, I'd like to point out that indeed every hour of deliberate practice does reduce the amount suggested by one hour. Unless you have mastered manipulation of space-time, of course.
- jaredsohn 15y agoThe OP mentioned two numbers: 10 years and 10,000 hours. I think alnayyir is trying to say that deliberate practice can bring down the 10 year number (which I agree with and is why the rule switched from saying 10 years to saying 10,000 hours) and michael_dorfman is interpreting that statement to be referring to the 10,000 hours number. My point in the OP was to show that by having a large amount of data, this provides a nice example for understanding why the rule was changed. (But for it to be a good example, it would require someone knowledgeable about art to look over his prior works and pinpoint when exactly he became a 'master' (although this may be a hard thing to do) and to then estimate how many hours of practice was spent to get there.)
- artursapek 15y agoVery impressive stuff. His work is reminiscent of some of the best stuff I see in my charcoal classes at RISD. A very important thing worth noting is he switched from mostly digital art to completely traditional; there is just no matching with a tablet/mouse what one can do with real materials.
- williamcotton 15y agoAll of the life drawings, anatomy lessons, and lighting studies were incredibly important. He was able to easily apply these understandings to a new medium, so by the time he switched over he quickly excelled. I feel that if he'd started earlier with paint he would have blasted off once he saw the impact of his own work. I appreciate this from a technical standpoint. It sort of shows the "man behind the curtain" of creating two dimensional visual art pieces, especially because you can see it in such a condensed format. We've all seen progressions of an artists body of work in art publications and curated shows, but what makes this rewarding is we get to see all of the early, average attempts. It's not like we could pick up a book on Picasso and see his first 2000 drawings, but if we could, we would gain the instructive aspects of watching an artist progress.
- markerdmann 15y agoThe site seems to be under a lot of load. In case anyone (like me) is having trouble viewing the images, I wrote a quick script to scrape the images: https://s3.amazonaws.com/markerdmann.com/paintings.tar https://s3.amazonaws.com/markerdmann.com/paintings.tar The naming format is "page_X_image_X.jpg". EDIT: Here's a video slideshow of the images: https://s3.amazonaws.com/markerdmann.com/Paintings.mov https://s3.amazonaws.com/markerdmann.com/Paintings.mov http://vimeo.com/29510470 http://vimeo.com/29510470
- sycr 15y agoThanks for this - a video was the first idea that came to my mind.
- jimmyjim 15y agoJust out of plain curiosity, could I please see the scraping script?
- markerdmann 15y agoDefinitely. Here's the script: http://markerdmann.com/blog/2011/09/24/image-scraping-example-using-the-ruby-mechanize-library/ http://markerdmann.com/blog/2011/09/24/image-scraping-exampl... Just let me know if there's anything I need to clarify.
- kaybe 15y ago
- anonInd 15y agoThis is exactly why i come to HN for. Stay classy HN
- pycassa 15y agosomeone should do the same with programming
- Bo102010 15y agoI went from 0 knowledge of Python to what I feel is quite a good handle by working on Project Euler nearly every day for just over a year now. Highly recommended!
- suivix 15y agoI suppose if you work full-time as a developer, you could figure out how many days you've worked and multiply it by the typical number of hours you program per day. However, part of this is you need to deliberately trying to get better, so that should be taken into account. Also your knowledge of the overall system architecture, if you are working on a complicated project such as an OS, can be as important as your coding ability to get things done.
- larve 15y agoI've started something similar 1.5 years ago, but with drawing, as painting is not really my thing (maybe it will). It is kind of my concept that to learn any skill/art/job/whatever, you have to want it really really hard, copy/copy/copy/copy the masters, and not judge yourself at all while doing it. I think that's one of the big reasons that kids learn so fast, they want it, they have no apprehension whatsoever about what they are doing, and very importantly too, nobody tells them anything about the quality of the stuff they do, while with adults it's all to easy to get nervous about not being good, or being too good, or whatever. I didn't capture my output all to regularly, but I filled about 18 notebooks (that's about 3000-4000 pages) + a shitload of drawings. Because I never keep anything I produce, it's hard to measure, but I think I did an additional 500 drawings on different media. My very early stuff is at: http://flipflipflop.tumblr.com/archive/2010/5 http://flipflipflop.tumblr.com/archive/2010/5 , in fact the very first picture I drew when I set out to do this. Please note that a lot of stuff that looks "good" is copied from somewhere on the internet. I joined a local figure drawing class, but that's about all the "formal" training I got. I read about 80 books from the library though, got a lot from the internet, followed a lot of lectures from TAD, etc... Here is stuff that I do currently: http://larvecode.tumblr.com/ http://larvecode.tumblr.com/ The journey is super cool, and my ideas kind of seem to come together as well.
- kerryfalk 15y agoI personally didn't take formal training until several years into my drawing and even then it's wasn't great training (High school art class). Although I'm sure it helps I personally have always found that I learn far more by just spending more time bashing my head against the wall trying to do it myself. The trick is to just do it a lot and don't ever give up. Eventually it works. I like your new stuff, interesting style. I agree wholeheartedly that to learn a skill and do it well you have to really want it and spend a lot of time doing it. I really wanted to be an artist when I was 8 through about 16. I stopped drawing cold turkey and didn't keep anything I drew but I did end up drawing two things in the last twelve years (!). The lessons I took from learning how to draw were invaluable though. You can learn anything you want as long as you a) really want it; and b) bash your head against the wall long enough to achieve it. Here are the two drawings I mentioned: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.17270830489.47657.635750489&l=f005e0ee23&type=1 http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.17270830489.47657.6... After not picking up a pencil for half a decade for the first one I was fairly happy with the result. Good luck on your journey.
- mason55 15y agoSo inspiring... and... I want to cry when I look at what I've done with the last nine years. Tagged with "inspiration" in delicious
- texel 15y agoThis is fascinating. I think a really interesting project for someone (other than me) would be to collect each image, and have a whole bunch of people rate each one on a subjective scale from, let's say, 1 to 100. Then, draw a scatter plot of the ratings against time. I wonder what curves might show up? I also wonder whether there are any other datasets that might be used to determine if there's any common thread between learning processes like this.
- georgieporgie 15y agoAbsolutely fascinating, and inspiring me to get out the sketch pad I've had laying around for years...
- melling 15y agoHe mentioned getting a Wacom Intuos tablet. I've been considering getting one, or maybe this new device: http://9to5mac.com/2011/08/30/wacom-introduces-inkling-tablet-for-sketchy-people/ http://9to5mac.com/2011/08/30/wacom-introduces-inkling-table... This video turned me on to the Wacom: http://www.ctrlpaint.com/home/category/hardware http://www.ctrlpaint.com/home/category/hardware He discusses tablets at about the 2m mark.
- denzil 15y agoIt seems that the Inkling tablet can be only used to transfer pictures you draw on it to computer. If that's true that leaves out working in graphics editing software, which is a quite big limitation. If you only want to get drawing to computer a scanner might be a better choice. And it won't limit your choice of drawing tools.
- biot 15y agoIf you're just getting started and don't need any professional features that the Wacom might have, consider Monoprice's line of tablets: http://www.monoprice.com/products/subdepartment.asp?c_id=108&cp_id=10841 http://www.monoprice.com/products/subdepartment.asp?c_id=108... They cost a small fraction of a comparable Wacom tablet.
- madiator 15y agoCan it be used as a mouse in Win7 and does it even work with Ubuntu? Cannot seem to find the info..
- Arcanum-XIII 15y agoIf you want to draw, buy a Wacom — even a cheap one. All the other are really crappy device that will make you miserable — and then, they will not last. If it's to learn to draw, don't bother with a tablet : take a pencil, and draw !
- tomelders 15y agoI've used a Wacom for about 7 years now. An A4 Intuos 2... and I've only just realised my tablet is that old. I remember it took about 40 minutes to get used to. Now, I use it all the time, for everything, not just design or illustration. Using a mouse for anything is painfully slow. Trackpads are better, but for speed and accuracy, nothing beats a tablet.
- john2x 15y agoI've been looking for that thread for a long time. I remember seeing it a few years ago when I was getting into drawing myself. But I sort of got lost along the way. Ended up spending more time on coding than drawing. I guess one can only focus on so much. But it's still definitely something I want to get into.
- pheaduch 15y agoThere are internal and external roadblocks when trying to learn a new skill as an adult and sadly both become reinforcing. Externally I think there's a lot of cynicism from other people wondering why you are bothering trying to learn something new as an adult. They doubt that you can do it for various reasons including the favorite that you're too old to learn and that you must have started when you were five because the brain is so ripe. But I always thought that belief was illogical, especially if you believe learning itself is an actual skill. If learning is a skill as much as say drawing, then you should only become better at trying new things as you get older.
- bootload 15y agoAtelier. I had to look that up. Turns out it's French for "artist workshop". [0] Why not just use the plain English equivalent? But that's not what was interesting. Digging around I noticed http://www.classicalartonline.com http://www.classicalartonline.com Did everyone miss this? Making a dollar in art is difficult. It's so difficult that markets exist to make art to order, to solve some problem. Usually selling a product. Advertising. This really isn't art but design. Fine art doesn't solve any problem other than the artists own. As a result, fine art can be an acquired taste and difficult to sell. So how would you go about making a business online with fine art? That was an idea pg had and became "The Artix Phase" [1] before Viaweb. Art galleries online. At the time the idea didn't work. That's what makes "classical art online" interesting. Learning art online would be difficult though. A lot of the learning happens as a tutor looks over your shoulder, sees the result & makes suggestions in technique, subject and a multitude of other related tasks that make up the craft. The learning happens in the dynamic of pupil, tutor. It's personal and I don't know how you make this process scale without a tutors presence. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atelier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atelier [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html
- access_denied 15y ago> Why not just use the plain English equivalent? Because french is the language of the artiste. It's a tradition, a convention.
- adamzochowski 15y agoBut atelier is already a perfect valid English word. Sure, it came from French, but it is now part of English language. Complaining about it would be like complaining that word 'Robot' is a Czech word for work/worker.
- bootload 15y ago"... Display of superior knowledge is as great a vulgarity as display of superior wealth — greater indeed, inasmuch as knowledge should tend more definitely than wealth towards discretion and good manners. ..." [0] Perfectly valid Adam, but clearer if you use a simpler non-romantic, common use replacement. The objective is to communicate, not impress. [0] Fowler, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Modern_English_Usage#Quotations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Modern_English_...
- JL2010 15y agoWow, now that I think about it, I haven't committed 9 years to anything remotely productive yet. Coming on 5 years with electronics, programming, and guitar/music (started all of these in college!). The electronics and programming are part of my job(s) but I'm at least happy to be pursuing music purely out of my own interest and doing it nearly every day. Would be interesting to see how I've progressed in these fields in another 4 years or so...
- forkrulassail 15y ago"Nothing in this world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. ~ C Coolidge
- gnosis 15y agoI've read many quotes by a variety of famous people about persistence (see below). But none of them have had a tenth of the impact of seeing this artist's 9 year effort compressed in to a 17 minute slideshow. What he has achieved, how far he's had to travel, how hard he must have had to work, and how persistent he clearly was is nothing short of inspiring. ---- "Godlike genius.. Godlike nothing! Sticking to it is the genius! I've failed my way to success." --Thomas Edison "What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it." -- Doris Lessing "Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lives solely in my tenacity." -- Louis Pasteur "enough shovels of earth, a mountain. enough pails of water, a river" -- chinese proverb
- SHIFTHAPPENZ 15y ago"It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer." - Albert Einstein Y'all right, only I just don't have the energy. I say. But maybe I have. You know, it sounds great to be a good painter (or musician or stuff) but then you (at least me) ends with "how is this worth the energy spend, isn't everything irrelevant in the end? why would i care? it is not relevant." Sometimes i conclude that the only goal of being a good xyz is to be admired by others. If it wouldn't be for others then it would be for me. But, say, when i was the last man on earth, would i say "yeah, 40 years of painting every day.. i'm good now, that was worth it"... Would I? Working on my skills just to get better would lead me to the (maybe right) feeling that I am better than others, making me looking down on others. I really don't want end up looking down to others (and envy those who are better than me). Can someone understand me? I read the forum that the artist was really frustrated often. I know that. Is everything really worth the hassle? :/
- morrow 15y agoFor those who keep mentioning the 10,000 hour rule, I wonder if anyone has heard of any tools for tracking this number? As in, a tool for logging hours spent practicing different subject areas with the specific goal of reaching 10,000 hours. I wonder, too, if you could quantify smaller subsets of the 10,000 to provide more immediate feedback and goals along the way.
- tianshuo 15y agoDefinitely Inspiring!!
- parallel 15y agoThe lesson I'm taking from this is be ok with slow progress and early failures. The trap I fall into is being discouraged too easily and giving up. What this guy has done is the opposite. He just kept going and got good.
- jnorthrop 15y agoIts great to see this person's progression! He is obviously very talented and has a real gift. I went through a similar progression as a child. My mother worked as an art teacher at the local YMCA while I was growing up. After school each day I would take the bus to the Y and sit in on her art classes. I became a pretty proficient artist -- technically speaking anyway -- but I never really developed into what I would call a creative artist. I just didn't have that "gift." My brother did (and does) however. The lesson I learned is that anyone can learn to draw and be able to reproduce what they see fairly well (it is really just techniques) but to actually create takes something beyond technical skills. You have to have a vision and courage to express it. MindCandyMan has it.
- khafra 15y agoEven at the start, he was drawing significantly better than I can--but he actually did put in the 10,000 hours of focused practice (with feedback from a forum-full of artists to focus him) so I don't think you can attribute it all to native talent.
- jnorthrop 15y agoIt certainly isn't all native talent. He does have a gift though, but, as with all gifts, you need to develop it.
- Arcanum-XIII 15y agoBeing not gifted are an excuse to not do something. MindCandyMan was not good at the beginning, but he stick with it. I've seen him struggle, but never loosing is focus : draw. He's doing the hard work everyday. He has the courage to do it.
- jnorthrop 15y agoI didn't mean to give an excuse not to try. What I didn't articulate is that I got to a point (after many years) where I recognized my limitations. My brother and I would draw the same subject and mine would be an accurate representation (and certainly nothing to be ashamed of) but my brothers would always carry an interesting twist to his. I don't have that same vision and that's OK. I don't have the physical size to be a football linebacker either. Not everyone can be Picasso but that isn't an excuse for not trying.
- mortenjorck 15y agoThis is basically how I learned one of my great loves, composing music. Ten years ago, I was goofing around with an old copy of Cakewalk and clumsily aping elements of cinematic soundtracks in General Midi with a keyboard at my parents' house. I just kept at it, though, observing how the pieces worked together in music I liked, developing an ear for harmony, composing lots of throwaway stuff and a few occasional good ones. Over the years, I acquired a bit of synth hardware, took a tiny bit of music in college, later moved from hardware to soft synths, picked up bits of music theory and sound engineering, and never stopped making things (at least for long). I still don't consider myself a master by any means, but I enjoy what I compose. Perhaps most importantly, it's a creative process I find incredibly rewarding, even if I'm not scoring any indie games or films.
- Su-Shee 15y agoThis is so immensely interesting and useful what the guy documented here... and thanks to Mark Erdmann, it's perfectly illustrated. What you really see here is not just "his progress" but how he actually did it: * He went back to the classics (greek statues, classic poses, perspective etc) to really learn the ropes * he practiced over and over again, often the same subject again and again * even if his taste seems to lie with those scifi/fantasy-style figures, he nevertheless trained to sketch poses, the human body, faces, muscles and so on * his strokes become more confident year by year * he needs less strokes on a sketch to make the viewer see something recognizable * he judges his work repeatedly * he lived with being a beginner for quite some time but didn't give up If some of you might remember Douglas Crockford's JavaScript lessons series - he stressed the "knowing the history" quite a lot - quite similar to many "how to become a great developer" howtos stress to know a language like Lisp. (Basically our version of "learning the classics"...) The same applies btw for what writers documented about their progress and journey to become good writers: "know the classics" and "do it every day". For the folks interested in the science side of "becoming an expert", please consider Ericsson's "Expert Performance" (Cambridge University Press) - that's the source/foundation of the notion of "a decade" and the "10000 hours of deliberate practice" comes from. (And a very interesting read...)
- SHIFTHAPPENZ 15y agoread on page 5 or so that he was 22 when he started. i'm 22, too. shit i will really stop wasting time with pc games and stuff. time is the fire in which we burn... edit: of course this are just my thoughts right now. i suppose i won't have the persistence
- cerebrum 15y agocool