Fortified!
My order of paper from McClain’s arrived packed in enough cardboard to make a fort.
So I did.
Current project’s hanging there in the background.
That’s all.
Archive for the ‘Artist’s Process’ Category
Fortified!
Monday, October 17th, 2011Why, yes, I have been hiding from the internet under a rock
Thursday, August 12th, 2010
The internet is rather tricky
Engineer vs. Artist Smackdown for Control of My Mind
Tuesday, July 20th, 2010The more work I do as an engineer, the less work I do as an artist.
I do, essentially, have two jobs.
From 8-5, Monday through Friday, I am a Mechanical Engineer, licensed by the State of California and everything.
I design very practical things in practical ways. If you ever go to the bathroom in Yosemite Valley, your waste most likely leaves the valley through my pump station. A few of you might drink tap water from plants I helped design and build.
Right now I’m busy designing the replacement heating, cooling, and ventilation systems for a large helicopter repair hangar. Last time I was at the hangar it was full of partially disassembled Blackhawk helicopters. Cool!
When I say “busy”, I really mean “really busy”. I took Saturday off last weekend, but was in the office for 13 hours on Sunday. The weekend before I put in about 25 hours between Saturday morning and Sunday night.
Deadlines are keeping me this busy, I have a lot to get done, and not quite enough time to do it all. Still, It needs to get done. Not doing it isn’t really an option.
For the last few weeks, my mind has been calculating pressure losses, looking up electrical load data, sizing ducts, and drafting equipment details.
It is left brain work, and when I get home, I have nothing left, and nothing goes right.
There’s a painting I started 3 weeks ago sitting on my work bench next to my desk. The paint on my pallette has grown a thick skin that I will have to eventually scrape off.
Every day, I look at this painting, and then think about how I should work on it, and I am neglecting it. I just can’t wrap my head around it though.
I can’t wrap my head around how to apply paint to the canvas right now, I can’t think about the risks I take with presentation when I paint, or the emotional resonance I may be trying to capture.
It’s a good thing, that I’m stuck in my left brain right now. I need my left brain, at least until the end of the day when this project submittal goes out.
I don’t just get stuck in left field though. The same thing happens on the right.
When I start digging into art, and get deep into my right brain activities, I have a hard time switching gears to crank out some rough and dirty engineering work. My job suffers when I am productive at night making art.
It’s quite a conundrum!
I think that the answer is to focus on the more “left-brained” stuff during the week. I can prepare paper, edition prints, even print during the week, keeping it nice and left. No creative stuff though. No image development, no painting, no “artsy” stuff. Keep it analytical.
Friday night, switch gears and swing out to the right for the weekend, and let myself hang out in that mode for two and a half days.
I think I have been trying to switch gears too fast, faster than I am naturally capable of.
Anyway, I’ll test this out, and see how it works for me.
Three Insights about Deliberate Practice and Art
Thursday, July 8th, 2010This is a rather “practical” blog post, just an update on what I’ve been doing. No mushy gushy fun stuff today, just practical nuts and bolts about improving drawing skillz. I’ve been doubling down on this Deliberate Practice thing, spending an hour drawing most nights, this is an update.
I don’t exactly know how Deliberate Practice works, and I’m not going to pretend that I do. I’m not going to write about it with authority when I’m not really an authority on the subject (despite the rules of Blogistan). Eventually, if I keep up my practice, I will have authority on this subject matter, at least with regard to the practice of Fine Art creation.
I’ve said before, and I still believe, drawing is the most important creative skill for an artist. Artistic skill begins with drawing skill, and is capped by drawing skill.
So I want more drawing skillz, please.
While before I just drew, with no plan other than to draw, now I am following a plan. I bought a drawing instruction book, Keys to Drawing
So far, I can’t say whether I recommend the book or not, but having a list of exercises has been helpful. I don’t have to think about what to draw, I just have to do the work.
I’ve had some realizations about Deliberate Practice, I have some tips, observations, etc.
First, having a plan works. Well. The first guideline of Deliberate Practice is that it is specifically designed to improve performance. I bought the drawing book mentioned above to fill this requirement. The book is, after all, specifically designed to improve performance. It may not be the best course for me specifically, but it is, in general, designed to improve skill. If I had a drawing instructor, I might get a better program, but I’m pretty sure that any program is more important than no program.
Second, I have to set a timer. If I plan to draw for one hour, I have to set a timer for one hour and work until the timer goes off. Watching a clock doesn’t work, setting the timer does. The process of setting the timer commits me to what I am doing for the time I commit to doing it. Something about it just works. Timers may be the most valuable productivity tool on the planet.
Third, I’m getting worse. This one was unexpected. As I’ve been working through this book, I feel like I’ve been getting worse and worse at drawing. For example:
The tomatos on the left were drawn months ago, before I was following any course of practice. The pepper on the right was drawn last weekend, as a drawing exercise from Keys to Drawing
The drawing on the left was done a few months ago, before I implemented any structure to my drawing practice. The drawing on the right was done last weekend as part of my structured practice. I think the tomato on the left “looks better” than than the pepper on the right.
The tomato on the left, however, was drawn the way I usually draw, and have drawn for years. I just applied the skills I already had as best I could. When I drew the pepper on the right, I was looking at the pepper differently, because I was instructed to, and attempted to depict different things about the pepper, and in different ways. In other words, I was using different skills, and different ways to draw, that aren’t as well developed as my “usual” way of drawing.
The big realization for me is that by getting a little worse, I probably am actually getting better. The new skills that I learn,and work to implement into my skill set, aren’t as developed as other skills, so when I use them, it seems like I am worse.
Follow My Progress
I created a set in my flickr.com account, check out Sean’s Deliberate Practice Flickr Set, and follow along as I update it. I include a short description of each exercise with each of the drawings I upload.
Are you implementing Deliberate Practice into your routine? What are you doing? How are you doing it?
Deliberate Practice in Art and Drawing(Revisited)
Friday, June 25th, 2010I’ve been thinking about deliberate practice in art a bit lately. I have time to revisit this, the spice mines aren’t taking as much of my time.
A little backstory, starting in late 2009. At the end of last year, I spent a while planning for 2010. I determined what I wanted to accomplish and how I was going to accomplish it. I had a plan in place, and it was good. “No plan survives first contact with the enemy“, however, and the new year saw me loaded up with work at DayJob. A lot of work (so much I only had a little time to send out a dispatch from the spice mines every now and then).
Things have shifted again, I’m still busy, but not so much that I’m working nights and weekends. My Utah trip was at a folcrum point. When I returned, work wasn’t requiring all my time like it had been for the first several months of the year.
I have time to dedicate to my art, but I don’t have a discipline of practice or schedule in place to make the most of it. Hence, time to revisit Deliberate Practice.
Deliberate Practice One Hour A Day
I’m going to mash 3 ideas together –
First, I want to revisit the idea of doing my most important activity for 1 hour every day. Drawing is the fundamental skill of art. If I am not improving as a draftsman, why should I bother?
Second, I want to create a clear program to improve my drawing ability. I just read Switch, by Chip and Dan Heath
Emotion? Check. I’m pretty motivated. Environment? Check. My apartment is filled with art supplies and places to draw. Clear plan in place? Che.. er, hmm. Maybe I’ll just, uh… draw something? Often, my hang up to drawing is, “what am I going to draw?” It is not a hard decision to make, but just having to make the decision makes the process harder. I am shopping for jam, and there are too many choices*.
What I need is a clear plan of study, so that when I sit down to draw for an hour every day, I don’t have to think about what to work on, I just continue with the plan. I just got one of those 33% off coupons for Borders, my plan is to buy a drawing instruction book on my way home from work today. I hope this will provide the type of structure that I am looking for, so I don’t have to deal with paralysis of analysis.
That said, if anyone has a suggestion for an intermediate to advanced drawing book, please don’t hold out on me. Leave a comment with a suggestion.
Third, Deliberate Practice. As a refresher, here are the characteristics of deliberate practice:
- It is designed specifically to improve performance
- It can be repeated, a lot
- Feedback is continuously available
- It is mentally demanding
- Typically, it is not that fun
I think this plan will hit all of these cylinders.
Motivation
I was talking to my dear friend Ivana last night, I told her about my usual routine of working a bit in the morning, going to the DayJob all day, then working again in the evening. She pointed out it is rather a lot to do.
I started thinking about my motivation, because the productivity I am shooting for goes against the common view of what is “balanced”.
I think that what motivates me is imagining myself in 10 years, looking back at what I did over those years. I want to show that I accomplished something, grew my abilities, and did something.
The only way to do that is to work. A lot.
Notes:
The example of too much jam is from an often cited study in which shoppers were first shown a display of 6 flavors of jam in a grocery store. The number of sales were recorded, then the display was modified to show 24 flavors of jam. They sold less jam when there were more options, the conclusion is the more choices we have, the more difficult it is to make any choice at all.
Dispatch: Coloring Ductwork And Understanding Problems
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010I got to work this morning and found this on my desk:
Ductwork Layout in a building, color coded for clarity
Turns out I made this the day before. By the time I was finishing this, around hour 12, I wasn’t taking a bird’s-eye view of what I had done.
I got to work, saw it all laid out in front of me and thought it looked kinda neat. After all, it is kinda neat. My supervisor walked by this morning and said, “Ooooh, pretty”.
It’s ductwork. Pretty ductwork. Green and blue are supply ducts, Red is return and exhaust ducts.
The color coding helps me wrap my head around what is what. I’m retrofitting an existing building, and what I need to design depends on what is already there. It’s a lot to keep track of, color-coding helps me keep track of it. What you see above is one floor on one half of the building. It’s a big job. Sometimes it feels bigger than my mind.
I get sucked into this type of work. I can do it for hours on end.
It is soothing, in its own way. Each new duct I color in adds to my understanding. I assembled this puzzle in my mind throughout the day, adding piece after piece, until I understood how all the pieces fit together. I know what each piece does, and how the new pieces that I have been tasked with adding have to fit into this overall system.
Understanding calms me down. It helps me focus, and once I have understanding, I know how to proceed to complete the task.
Most problems have simple solutions, once you know what the problem is.
The tricky part, the part that may require days of coloring in ductwork, is fully understanding the problem.
Dispatches from the Spice Mines
Monday, April 19th, 2010
Pencil Sketch, dispatched from the Spice Mines
The best laid paths cannot pass through a brick wall in the way.
I had a path set out for myself. I spent the first weekend in January planning 2010. A painting every week! A new woodblock edition every month!
I had an assumption built into those plans, I would not be too busy at the Spice Mines in 2010. I would be just busy enough to keep on working, but not so busy that I would have to commit an extra amount of focus to the job.
Those plans have flown out the window as this year progressed. The Spice Mines have gotten spicier and spicier over the last few months, and now, after already working plenty of nights and weekends, I see myself spending even more time in Chateau Spice.
I’ve been fighting it and fighting it, regular readers have seen my posts about being behind at work or how to focus after a long day of work.
I’ve been fighting it, trying to figure out how to work hard all day, then come home, shift gears, and make beautiful art at night.
Luckily I have good friends, friends who not only help me sort this stuff out, but that prompt me to sort it out for myself as well. My buddy Dave teaches people stuff, how to blog being what he is publicly known for. He teaches other stuff too, like how to get your head right, but that tends to be in our private conversations.
Yesterday Dave called, “what you up to today?” and I had no idea. My plans had fallen so far behind, that once I got a goodness gracious free day to work on art, I didn’t know what to do with it. He told me to come over later in the day, and we’d set stuff straight. He bought me tacos too, and I very much appreciate those as well.
As I did laundry, cleaned my apartment, read some comics, and took a nap, I got to thinking about my situation, cuz I knew Dave and I would be hashing it out later. Big revelation, fighting my situation is the hardest part. I realized a little emotional jujitsu may be in order, and instead of trying to work against my need to double down on the DayJob, I should use that as the fuel.
I’ll probably do that. You’re probably gonna see a lot of art and drawings about being at work and stuff for the next few months. You probably won’t see much promotion or sales stuff here either. I figured out I have time to make art, or I have time to sell art.
Not both.
I’m opting to make art.
Too Busy To Work (or, why TV is so popular)
Thursday, April 8th, 2010When the DayJob piles on the work, it doesn’t just eat up on time, it eats up on energy and motivation.
I’ve been wrestling with the DayJob lately, they have been loading me up with work. It hasn’t started to push into my free time yet (though I see that coming), but it has sapped a lot of my energy and focus.
When I started this crazy art venture, I wasn’t overloaded at work. Every now and then I would have to work late to catch up, but it was infrequent. Now, however, I have a constant, heavy, stressful load of work.
By the time I get home from work at 6pm, after stressing about the 3 jobs I have due in the next 2 weeks to 2 months, as well as the “gotta have it now” emergency work that gets thrown my way, I am mentally drained. I am not in a mental position to focus on writing, editing audio or video, and most of all, art, which requires plenty of focus.
I am not one of those crazy powerhouses of energy that can go and go and go.
Is it just me?
I have a feeling that a lot of jobs are like this, and a lot of people’s lives are like this. Fresh in the morning, drained in the evening. I hear this from my coworkers, later in the afternoon, their brain is fried, they can’t focus on stuff anymore, and not much gets done.
By the time work is over, and the commute home is complete, there isn’t much energy left for mush else. Food. Booze. TV. It’s not that I don’t have time to work for a few hours in the evening, it’s that I don’t have the capacity to work in the evening.
Most evenings, when I get home from work, I want a big plate of food, a few beers or glasses of wine, and to sit and blither out watching TV or some movie. I don’t even like TV (except Lost, that show is tha bomb), but it feels good after a long day at work. It feels like I am relaxing and more so, recovering.
I really believe this is why TV is so popular. It’s not what’s on TV, but what everyone does all day before they watch TV. There isn’t much left upstairs for anything else after slaving away.
So… what to do about it?
After all, I want the fire back. I wake up with it, and it is dim by the end of the day.
Honestly, I’m not sure.
I’ve been cranking up my diet, eating healthier foods, that helps.
I give myself my best time, ie. the morning. I just have to teach myself how to wake up early on a consistent basis.
I think that adding physical exercise to the mix will help. I may start doing some sort of physical activity first thing when I get home. I’ll try this out and see how it goes.
What about you? Do you have any secrets about how to recharge after a long stressful day of slaving in the spice mines? I’d like to hear it. I haven’t solved this one yet.
I will solve this one. It is just going to take some work, practice, problem solving, and trial and error.
I’m a Printmaker, Not an Artist
Friday, March 26th, 2010Artists get show horned together, as if we are all the same.
It doesn’t matter what subject or what medium, society thinks we are pretty much all the same thing.
Painter, sculpture, illustrator, printer, photographer, all the same.
Luckily I don’t remember specifically who I am going to pick on next, it was someone in Blogistan, or on the Twitter Show. This person was pimping out their “art training”, and from what I could see, all artists got the same training.
We’re not the same though. The skillz required to create a great painting are quite different from the skills required to make a great sculpture. Illustration, yet other skillz. Printmaking? Forgeddaboudit.
There are some basic skills that each of these different types of artists must have, but after those skills are worked out, the skills become wildly different.
I got to thinking that an artists medium is sorta like being a specific type of engineer. Nobody would offer the same training to both a Mechanical Engineer and a Structural Engineer.
A little digress, In the Spice Mines (my term of affection for my DayJob), I am an Engineer. A Mechanical Engineer in fact. I work with Electrical Engineers, Structural Engineers, Civil Engineers, and Architects (sigh) on a regular basis.
We all had the same foundation training in math and science, but the details of what we know are very different. I know enough about each of these to get by (480 volt 3 phase! #5 @ 12″ on center!), but the specialization between fields of engineering is rather different.
Electrical Engineers are concerned with voltages, power, and signal; Mechanical engineers concern themselves with pressure loss and heat gain; Structural Engineers think about shear stress and moments; architects concern themselves with getting their latte right.
Nobody would offer the same training to each of these types of engineers.
Why, as artists, are we offered the same training, wrapped as “artist training”?
I think it is because we think of ourselves as artists first, and our medium second. Contrast this with engineers, who think of them self as an Electrical or Mechanical Engineer first, and an engineer in general second.
I’d like to see artists identify with their medium first, and as an artist second.
“Artist” has too much stigma. Too much baggage.
“Artist” doesn’t capture the very different skills required to produce very different art.
I am a printmaker. I am a painter. Sometimes, an illustrator. I am not a sculpture, or a photographer.
Does this make me an artist? I guess, but after the above, that is just a trifle.
Deliberate Practice. Mandatory.
Thursday, March 18th, 2010[Hey! Before you read this post, ask yourself, "do I want to learn something today, or do I just want to look at some cool art?" If you want to learn before you look at the art, read on. If you just want to jump to some kick ass drawings, click here.]
Confession:
All 4 of the Skater Series of Woodblock Prints
I haven’t been completely honest about these Skater prints I’ve been working on. These haven’t just been a quick, punk rock inspired project.
Don’t get me wrong, they are that, but they are actually about a whole lot more too.
Let me back up. The first of these was about about the punk rock and skate boards. I had been working waaaay too much in the Spice Mines (ie. in the office for my DayJob). I got home after a long weekend at the office, and whipped the first one out, because I just wanted to do something, and something quick was good enough.
I put on some punk rock, and whipped out the first skater woodblock print.
The next night, when I wanted to make another one, I realized I had an opportunity to learn and increase my skills as a woodblock printmaker.
Before I go any further, I need to dig into the concept of deliberate practice.
What is Deliberate Practice?
Deliberate practice is different from regular practice in that it is specifically designed to improve performance of a skill.
This all started when Dave sent me and Walter a link to an article about deliberate practice. I read the article, and started thinking about how to apply this to art.
I already practiced from time to time, most commonly in my sketch book, when I draw tomatos, art tools, whisky bottles, or whatever else in front of me. I focus on seeing the thing in front of me, and making my pencil follow what my eye sees. It is practice, specifically designed to improve my drawing skill.
I decided this skater series of woodblock prints would be my chance to apply deliberate practice to woodblock printmaking. I focused on two things in particular: how the wood effects the image, and the design issues of working in black and white. I’ll expand on these in a bit.
Who wrote the book on Deliberate Practice?
It turns out that someone did write a book about this, and fairly recently too (it’s not even out in softcover yet).
Geoff Colvin’s book, Talent is Overrated discusses specifically how deliberate practice improves performance.
Read this book.
Click the link I provided to Amazon, get the audio book from audible, or just go to your local bookstore and sit down with this book for an hour.
The characteristics of deliberate practice are:
- It is designed specifically to improve performance
- It can be repeated, a lot
- Feedback is continuously available
- It is mentally demanding
- Typically, it is not fun (or everyone would do it)
I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty, because the book does a good job. If you have any interest in being better at what you do, you owe it to yourself to check this book out. If nothing else, sit down at Borders or Barnes & Noble with this book for an hour, and read chapters 5, 6, and 7. Those chapters describe what deliberate practice is, how it works, and how to apply deliberate practice to your life.
Deliberate Practice applied to Woodblock Printmaking
I set out on this skater series specifically to apply these concepts of deliberate practice to my craft of woodblock printmaking. The subject matter didn’t matter much, and the whole punk rock thing actually didn’t matter much. In fact, these elements were included as an attempt to make this practice a little more fun (but you already knew that, if you only read the italics).
The actual focus of these prints was my ability to put an image onto a woodblock. I kept these images simple to accomodate this, and repeated essentially the same image over and over. I wasn’t trying to improve my craft of image creation, I was trying to improve my craft of carving wood, and working with only black and white design elements.
In particular, I focused on:
- How fine of detail I can get out of a woodblock. There is a natural limit to how fine of a line I can carve into the wood, and have the wood hold up structurally (at least with the Shina wood and the carving tools I am using)
- The most precise ways to carve a block. This builds upon the previous point, but I spent a lot of time carving the more detail heavy areas, like the hands and the face, to work on my ability to carve finer details. I also paid attention to the shape of blade I used, how different blades carve differently, and how the amount of pressure and the angle I hold the blade at effect the line I carve.
- How to balance black and white on the image. A black and white woodblock print has a high contrast, and I wanted to work on creating a good balance in the image to get just the right amount of ink to make the image look best. I didn’t want it to look too sparse, or too dark.
From the points of view above, I can find half a dozen things that I did well, and half a dozen things I didn’t do well on each print (I may go through this exercise in the future).
Results of this practice
A lot of the prints in the 101 Woodblock Series were carved in linoleum, which responds differently than wood. The blocks that were carved in wood didn’t have too much detail in them. I needed this exercise to prepare for my next round of prints, which will have far more detail than what I have done previously.
As a result of this practice, I feel more confident about my ability to carve woodblocks. I know a lot more about how the wood behaves, and some more information about balance in an image.
As I prepare for my next upcoming woodblock print, I know what to realistically expect from myself, because I hae a better understanding of my skill. I will include some challenges in my next print, but not so much that I will try to do something that the medium cannot do.
I’m Not the Only One
While I’m not too sure that Jen purposefully approached her “100 heads” project as deliberate practice, it certainly seems to fit into a lot of the requirements.
What am I talking about?
After seeing a post about a bunch of students drawing 100 heads, she decided to do her own. It’s mostly her story to tell, so just click through to Jen Hiebert’s drawings and check them out. These things are seriously cool.
I met Jen through Twitter. What? Not on twitter? You are missing out on the internet’s cocktail party. Go follow Jen on Twitter here. (You can follow me too).
She mentioned this project of hers to me on Twitter, and mentioned that she learned a lot from doing this project. I had been thinking about this deliberate practice thing, so this jumped out at me. I imagine that she learned far mar by doing 100 drawings of heads than she would have if she had done 5 or 10.
Go check out this project of hers, because, well, it is cool. I like when people do cool stuff, then share it with the world.
Click here and go to her site already!
Might Be More
This Deliberate Practice vein is rich. I’m gonna be working with these concepts a bit more to figure out how to best apply them to art. I’ll probably write about it.
Be warned.
