5 ms·

This seems to be about how making a living as a painter is difficult. I've often thought that drawing or painting is difficult for ego reasons. Few things demo

This seems to be about how making a living as a painter is difficult. I've often thought that drawing or painting is difficult for ego reasons. Few things demonstrate my incompetence to myself better than failing to draw something. There is nothing I aspire to do that would be more uncomfortable than drawing or painting a self portrait. For these reasons, I've often thought about trying, but I'm scared.

dieselgate 3y ago
i've taken mechanical design courses where we kept a sketch book and had to do a sketch-a-day kind of thing. it's something you'll just naturally improve at the more you do it
crq-yml 3y ago
Learning some ability to draw and paint takes roughly the same amount of persistence as learning to write. That is, you have to recall what a struggle it was to hold the pencil and make a steady mark from the wrist...and then apply that to the kinds of marks you make for drawing, which can be longer, more varied, and use a different grasp on the tool. And then you also have to learn some "shape literacy" if you want to control how you see things. This is likewise comparable to learning to read in that there are ways of breaking down images to understand them as "letter", "word", and "sentence". When we know how to write but not to draw, we draw like we write, using motions from the wrist and observing things in terms of symbolic meaning - the human figure flattens out into a hand shape, an arm shape, an eye shape. But there's very little mystery to "what do you do about that" - you grab a book of exercises like Keys to Drawing or Natural Way to Draw, and you try to see the object you want to study through the exercise. Because we recognize silhouettes first, and we make marks as lines first, contour drawing is a typical starting point for practicing both "seeing" and "doing", and that's something you can spend many months on just by itself. If you want to force a designed result, rather than the result from your eye and hand, you start to apply technology, and that can mean a very old technology like using a grid and rulers(as old as the ancient Egyptians), or it can mean digital tools and tracing over photos.
- oblib 3y ago
  crq-yml, I think I accidentally down voted your comment. I apologize for that. There doesn't seem to be a way for me to undo that.
  - darkerside 3y ago
    Look for the undown link
    - oblib 3y ago
      It disappeared.
- EpiMath 3y ago
  Excellent comment. I'm one of those people who always thought: "I can't draw". Now I understand that for me it is a matter of practice. I started with Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    Also, everyone says "I can't sing." Most people can learn to be decent at it. A few really are tone-deaf, but not all that many.
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago
      I was trained in singing in elementary school and then again in high school. I made an honor choir or two. (This would be a significant accomplishment if I was female, which I am not. They'll take pretty much any boy who can hit the right notes.) Years ago I recovered from a cold except that the phlegm in my throat didn't go away. It is still with me. If I try to sing, my voice will just cut out on certain pitches, and sometimes I'll get a gurgling effect from the phlegm. I would like to be able to sing again. :(
      - 3y ago
inopinatus 3y ago
A stroke of the brush does not guarantee art from the bristles, but you don't need to be talented to draw something. As with most skills, it can be learned.
scarecrowbob 3y ago
Well since you've identified it as a problem and the real consequence of failure is just to have to keep doing stuff until you're better at it... maybe just do it? I get that's easier said than done, but as a random on the internets all I can do is encourage you to try- because simply becoming okay with failing at things is a useful skill. So, as a rando of the internet, consider this a challenge/ encouragement: do it and fail, and learn to embrace the fail, for if you can learn to suck at stuff with grace, the world will open itself to you. :D I say that as a person who really had embraced the suck: it's a valuable skill that you can learn just by being bad at stuff and paying attention to different aspects as you fail.
petee 3y ago
One method is to do quick sketches on bits of paper, and just mentally plan on throwing them away, regardless. It helps lift the subconscious weight of thinking someone else might see how bad it is, or that you've ruined some final product. Resketching the same thing repeatedly helps too, just nit pick what you hated about the last iteration and try again. I've been doing that often as I pick up art again. Early, I had started a portrait of my late dad but because I initially tried to make it good, I felt resistance to doing more out of fear of ruining what I worked so hard already for (which is fairly blocky and cartoonish anyway hah)
- boppo1 3y ago
  I'm good at drawing. You're exactly right. Making drawings that you care enough to put a sincere effort into, but won't mind throwing away after, is key. When a pianist practices, they don't record every time. The nature of drawing is such that practice is intrinsically recorded, but it is better to treat it the way the pianist does. The only ones you keep are the important ones, the hundreds rest are throwaways just for the practice. It's a cheeky-powerful feeling when I go out with newsprint and charcoal and draw in public at a museum or downtown then crumple it and toss it in a bin. People who notice are aghast because my work is pretty good. But I can just do it again.
FabHK 3y ago
> This seems to be about how making a living as a painter is difficult. Eh? It's a review of a biography of the impressionist painter Claude Monet (whose "almost [...] last written words were a shaky scribble in the autograph album of Paul Valéry’s daughter, Agathe: ‘All I can say is that painting is terribly difficult.’"), with some introductory remarks about severe corruption in the art scene ("that nexus of artist, dealer, critic and curator") which the author traces to the "critical mass" in that sector that arrived with the impressionists.
marttt 3y ago
Priit Pärn, a legendary cartoonist and animation director from Estonia [1], has used an excellent term, "mileage of the line". I DeepL-translated (with rough editing) a couple of excerpts from interviews he has given. First excerpt: Q: How is your inner self-critic working, are you satisfied with the results of your work? PP: Yeah, I think I'm a very good drawer. One of the best. Q: How long do you estimate the mileage of your line at the moment? PP: For "Gabriella", I tried to calculate how many final frames I drew, about 10 000 to 15 000, 50 cm of line for one frame, so five to seven kilometres for one film. It's the kind of consistent drawing neccessary for an animator to keep his hands in. A beginner animator who is at the beginning of the road with the search for their own line and is making a film is forced to draw hundreds or thousands of drawings with the same rudimentary line. A cartoonist is not limited by his own predetermined rules, he can experiment and search. In most cases, one has reached a line of one's own by the age of about 35. --- Another excerpt from another interview (rough translation again): "It has come with decades that you can draw without any preparation in all sorts of angles and dynamic positions. And it also emerges from somewhere that you can draw in whichever way you want, but it's still your drawing. This requires a very high degree of thoughtful line mileage, which means you have to think while you're at a line." (Priit Pärn is actually a trained biologist, so his way of reasoning is always very precise and synthetic, clearly influenced by an education in the natural sciences. Always a joy to read his interviews. Quite obviously, in addition to his views on the technical process of drawing, this level of analytical thinking also manifests in the hyper-multi-layered black humour and visual language of his animations [2, 3]. A national treasure for Estonia for sure.) 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priit_P%C3%A4rn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priit_P%C3%A4rn 2: A short animated commercial, 1988 Cannes Bronze Lion winner: https://invidious.protokolla.fi/watch?v=NkCuh8K4L8s https://invidious.protokolla.fi/watch?v=NkCuh8K4L8s 3: More stuff: https://invidious.protokolla.fi/playlist?list=PLeD_epa2UKjtxgLxLGpJWwueQ-wL3DIOa https://invidious.protokolla.fi/playlist?list=PLeD_epa2UKjtx...

dieselgate 3y ago

i've taken mechanical design courses where we kept a sketch book and had to do a sketch-a-day kind of thing. it's something you'll just naturally improve at the more you do it

crq-yml 3y ago

Learning some ability to draw and paint takes roughly the same amount of persistence as learning to write. That is, you have to recall what a struggle it was to hold the pencil and make a steady mark from the wrist...and then apply that to the kinds of marks you make for drawing, which can be longer, more varied, and use a different grasp on the tool. And then you also have to learn some "shape literacy" if you want to control how you see things. This is likewise comparable to learning to read in that there are ways of breaking down images to understand them as "letter", "word", and "sentence". When we know how to write but not to draw, we draw like we write, using motions from the wrist and observing things in terms of symbolic meaning - the human figure flattens out into a hand shape, an arm shape, an eye shape. But there's very little mystery to "what do you do about that" - you grab a book of exercises like Keys to Drawing or Natural Way to Draw, and you try to see the object you want to study through the exercise. Because we recognize silhouettes first, and we make marks as lines first, contour drawing is a typical starting point for practicing both "seeing" and "doing", and that's something you can spend many months on just by itself. If you want to force a designed result, rather than the result from your eye and hand, you start to apply technology, and that can mean a very old technology like using a grid and rulers(as old as the ancient Egyptians), or it can mean digital tools and tracing over photos.

oblib 3y ago
crq-yml, I think I accidentally down voted your comment. I apologize for that. There doesn't seem to be a way for me to undo that.
- darkerside 3y ago
  Look for the undown link
  - oblib 3y ago
    It disappeared.
EpiMath 3y ago
Excellent comment. I'm one of those people who always thought: "I can't draw". Now I understand that for me it is a matter of practice. I started with Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  Also, everyone says "I can't sing." Most people can learn to be decent at it. A few really are tone-deaf, but not all that many.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    I was trained in singing in elementary school and then again in high school. I made an honor choir or two. (This would be a significant accomplishment if I was female, which I am not. They'll take pretty much any boy who can hit the right notes.) Years ago I recovered from a cold except that the phlegm in my throat didn't go away. It is still with me. If I try to sing, my voice will just cut out on certain pitches, and sometimes I'll get a gurgling effect from the phlegm. I would like to be able to sing again. :(
    - 3y ago

inopinatus 3y ago

A stroke of the brush does not guarantee art from the bristles, but you don't need to be talented to draw something. As with most skills, it can be learned.

scarecrowbob 3y ago

Well since you've identified it as a problem and the real consequence of failure is just to have to keep doing stuff until you're better at it... maybe just do it? I get that's easier said than done, but as a random on the internets all I can do is encourage you to try- because simply becoming okay with failing at things is a useful skill. So, as a rando of the internet, consider this a challenge/ encouragement: do it and fail, and learn to embrace the fail, for if you can learn to suck at stuff with grace, the world will open itself to you. :D I say that as a person who really had embraced the suck: it's a valuable skill that you can learn just by being bad at stuff and paying attention to different aspects as you fail.

petee 3y ago

One method is to do quick sketches on bits of paper, and just mentally plan on throwing them away, regardless. It helps lift the subconscious weight of thinking someone else might see how bad it is, or that you've ruined some final product. Resketching the same thing repeatedly helps too, just nit pick what you hated about the last iteration and try again. I've been doing that often as I pick up art again. Early, I had started a portrait of my late dad but because I initially tried to make it good, I felt resistance to doing more out of fear of ruining what I worked so hard already for (which is fairly blocky and cartoonish anyway hah)

boppo1 3y ago
I'm good at drawing. You're exactly right. Making drawings that you care enough to put a sincere effort into, but won't mind throwing away after, is key. When a pianist practices, they don't record every time. The nature of drawing is such that practice is intrinsically recorded, but it is better to treat it the way the pianist does. The only ones you keep are the important ones, the hundreds rest are throwaways just for the practice. It's a cheeky-powerful feeling when I go out with newsprint and charcoal and draw in public at a museum or downtown then crumple it and toss it in a bin. People who notice are aghast because my work is pretty good. But I can just do it again.

FabHK 3y ago

> This seems to be about how making a living as a painter is difficult. Eh? It's a review of a biography of the impressionist painter Claude Monet (whose "almost [...] last written words were a shaky scribble in the autograph album of Paul Valéry’s daughter, Agathe: ‘All I can say is that painting is terribly difficult.’"), with some introductory remarks about severe corruption in the art scene ("that nexus of artist, dealer, critic and curator") which the author traces to the "critical mass" in that sector that arrived with the impressionists.

marttt 3y ago

Priit Pärn, a legendary cartoonist and animation director from Estonia [1], has used an excellent term, "mileage of the line". I DeepL-translated (with rough editing) a couple of excerpts from interviews he has given. First excerpt: Q: How is your inner self-critic working, are you satisfied with the results of your work? PP: Yeah, I think I'm a very good drawer. One of the best. Q: How long do you estimate the mileage of your line at the moment? PP: For "Gabriella", I tried to calculate how many final frames I drew, about 10 000 to 15 000, 50 cm of line for one frame, so five to seven kilometres for one film. It's the kind of consistent drawing neccessary for an animator to keep his hands in. A beginner animator who is at the beginning of the road with the search for their own line and is making a film is forced to draw hundreds or thousands of drawings with the same rudimentary line. A cartoonist is not limited by his own predetermined rules, he can experiment and search. In most cases, one has reached a line of one's own by the age of about 35. --- Another excerpt from another interview (rough translation again): "It has come with decades that you can draw without any preparation in all sorts of angles and dynamic positions. And it also emerges from somewhere that you can draw in whichever way you want, but it's still your drawing. This requires a very high degree of thoughtful line mileage, which means you have to think while you're at a line." (Priit Pärn is actually a trained biologist, so his way of reasoning is always very precise and synthetic, clearly influenced by an education in the natural sciences. Always a joy to read his interviews. Quite obviously, in addition to his views on the technical process of drawing, this level of analytical thinking also manifests in the hyper-multi-layered black humour and visual language of his animations [2, 3]. A national treasure for Estonia for sure.) 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priit_P%C3%A4rn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priit_P%C3%A4rn 2: A short animated commercial, 1988 Cannes Bronze Lion winner: https://invidious.protokolla.fi/watch?v=NkCuh8K4L8s https://invidious.protokolla.fi/watch?v=NkCuh8K4L8s 3: More stuff: https://invidious.protokolla.fi/playlist?list=PLeD_epa2UKjtxgLxLGpJWwueQ-wL3DIOa https://invidious.protokolla.fi/playlist?list=PLeD_epa2UKjtx...