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I 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 sur

I 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.

larve 15y ago
Nice ones :) The thing that annoys me about this hacker / painter stuff is that it really boils down to: do something with passion, and you will discover unknown depths, whatever the field may be. That's pretty much where every comparison stops. Recipe to learn a new skill: 1) get the book called "the art of XXX", written by someone who has been doing XXX for the last 60 years, and which has good typography (no shit) 2) skip the intro and first chapter, which is almost always "XXX has taught me a new way to see the world, XXX is a way of life, blablabla" 3) do the exercises that seem incredibly futile in the second chapter, and do them over and over and over and over all your career. In music, that's your scales / hitting just one note deliberately / tempo exercises (I studied jazz bass), in drawing its those shading exercises and figure drawing or just hatching that you can see the guy in the mentioned thread doing over and over (cast drawing / painting). That's stuff you still see masters doing after 60 years. They don't do the crazy fancy whizzbang stuff, they practice pretty much what the beginner has to practice on the first day. Also, it's almost always something very physical, not mind-related. My only real comparison in programming would be: "practice typing", but that only helps for the first few months I guess. After that, more like having a routine of learning new things or practicing existing data structures or so. 4) do it and do it and do it and never worry about finding your own voice or not being good enough or being better than someone else or having envy or getting frustrated. Just do it and when you don't feel like it then at least do the boring exercise stuff and then go out and enjoy the sun or something. that's it. nothing magical to it. no silver bullet. don't buy the expensive guitar, go for the one that keeps in tune and the amp that doesn't distort. go for the ballpoint pen. you will know when the expensive tool is right when you know it's right.
- josephg 15y ago
  > 3) do the exercises that seem incredibly futile in the second chapter, and do them over and over and over and over all your career. I got halfway through that paragraph thinking it was crap because it didn't apply to programming, then realised that you're absolutely right. In programming, the thing we do every day is we write tiny algorithms to do simple things. The abstractions come and go, but the simple "I need to remove a trailing slash on this string" sort of problems are (to me) the everyday practices. Everything else falls out of those little problems - the need for abstraction, the need for tools, the need for tests, the need for libraries, etc. Imagine I offer you two applicants. They're both fresh out of collage applying for an engineering role. The first one has never heard of MVC and has never actually used TDD. But you ask him to implement a binary search on a whiteboard and he goes to town. The other one will happily explain all the details of the visitor pattern, but when you ask him to manually reverse a string in his favorite language, he can't do it. I don't know about you, but I'd hire the first programmer in a heartbeat. Its much easier to learn design patterns when you know how to code than the other way around. Maybe its the same with shading in art, and scales in music. But, thats definitely how it works with programming.

larve 15y ago

Nice ones :) The thing that annoys me about this hacker / painter stuff is that it really boils down to: do something with passion, and you will discover unknown depths, whatever the field may be. That's pretty much where every comparison stops. Recipe to learn a new skill: 1) get the book called "the art of XXX", written by someone who has been doing XXX for the last 60 years, and which has good typography (no shit) 2) skip the intro and first chapter, which is almost always "XXX has taught me a new way to see the world, XXX is a way of life, blablabla" 3) do the exercises that seem incredibly futile in the second chapter, and do them over and over and over and over all your career. In music, that's your scales / hitting just one note deliberately / tempo exercises (I studied jazz bass), in drawing its those shading exercises and figure drawing or just hatching that you can see the guy in the mentioned thread doing over and over (cast drawing / painting). That's stuff you still see masters doing after 60 years. They don't do the crazy fancy whizzbang stuff, they practice pretty much what the beginner has to practice on the first day. Also, it's almost always something very physical, not mind-related. My only real comparison in programming would be: "practice typing", but that only helps for the first few months I guess. After that, more like having a routine of learning new things or practicing existing data structures or so. 4) do it and do it and do it and never worry about finding your own voice or not being good enough or being better than someone else or having envy or getting frustrated. Just do it and when you don't feel like it then at least do the boring exercise stuff and then go out and enjoy the sun or something. that's it. nothing magical to it. no silver bullet. don't buy the expensive guitar, go for the one that keeps in tune and the amp that doesn't distort. go for the ballpoint pen. you will know when the expensive tool is right when you know it's right.

josephg 15y ago
> 3) do the exercises that seem incredibly futile in the second chapter, and do them over and over and over and over all your career. I got halfway through that paragraph thinking it was crap because it didn't apply to programming, then realised that you're absolutely right. In programming, the thing we do every day is we write tiny algorithms to do simple things. The abstractions come and go, but the simple "I need to remove a trailing slash on this string" sort of problems are (to me) the everyday practices. Everything else falls out of those little problems - the need for abstraction, the need for tools, the need for tests, the need for libraries, etc. Imagine I offer you two applicants. They're both fresh out of collage applying for an engineering role. The first one has never heard of MVC and has never actually used TDD. But you ask him to implement a binary search on a whiteboard and he goes to town. The other one will happily explain all the details of the visitor pattern, but when you ask him to manually reverse a string in his favorite language, he can't do it. I don't know about you, but I'd hire the first programmer in a heartbeat. Its much easier to learn design patterns when you know how to code than the other way around. Maybe its the same with shading in art, and scales in music. But, thats definitely how it works with programming.