/loomis/ - Art Gains

I think that having a schedule just takes the fun out of everything, including drawing.

>>3401

But if you want to do art beyond a hobby at the level of a professiona,l it's necessary.

>>3406

I can say from personal experience that 9 hours ain't nothing to sneeze at. You should be proud to keep to the top portion.

Since the bottom portion is new, of course it's going to take some time to adapt to it.

Don't make your schedules so fucking complicated. Have like two or three subject you do each day if you're studying full-time and don't change subjects all the time. Your brain needs time to immerse itself into the subject at hand and if you jump on to another subject just as you start to figure something out, when you get back to it later that thing you were figuring out is gone.

I'll give you some insider advice about scheduling that most classical ateliers use. It tends to go something like this 9-12 cast drawing 13-16 figure painting and then 17- is something extra like anatomy studies. This schedule repeats every day and you move on to different projects when you are done with your cast drawing, Bargue drawing, still life or whatever. You spend like 5 weeks on each project so you have enough time to really learn something from it.

This form of scheduling is simple and it lets you really dive into the subject you're drawing/painting rather than being all over the place. Just because you study 20 different subjects a week doesn't mean you're learning 20 more things than the person that just spends that week working on a still life. That person working on a single still life for that week will probably walk away with more accumulated and in-depth knowledge than the person that only dips their toes into a subject here and there.

Also consider the quality of the time you're studying. I wrote about this at length in the Classical art Q&A thread but if you spend an hour just thinking about the project you're working on. Thinking of ways you can improve your effectiveness, ideas to try, solutions to mess with, what certain principals mean in practice and so on. When you go to your drawing and maybe work 3 hours on it, those 3 hours will probably give you just as much as 6 hours of work without that thinking because you've already solved most of the problems and you can purely focus on just drawing.

I also think that this is a very effective way to learn because you actually take the time to reflect over your studies. You are engaged in problem solving in art rather than a purely intuitive approach, meaning you are actually seeking solutions to problems rather than just grinding. The best artists at the atelier I go to are also the students that almost never work more than 8 hours a day (often just 6). I know all of them and they all take the attitude that there is a set amount of energy you have to learn through drawing/painting in a day and after that point, all you do is grind. They never work when they're tired because they know that they do not learn anything then. So DO NOT beat yourself up over not working 16 hours every day. Focus more on making those 6 hours or so as effective as you can possible make them. The best artists I've ever met always focus more on quality over quantity.

Also, if I can be a little controversial. I think a lot of these schedule memes you see aren't actually people's schedules. I think they're just a form of signalling where people can post them and go "look how organised and hard working I am!". I wouldn't take them too seriously.

>>3467

> I think a lot of these schedule memes you see aren't actually people's schedules.

Would somebody really do that? Just go on the internet and lie?

>>3473

And that's why dropping dead in your mid 30's from overwork is so common in Japan.

>>3480

Well in general my opinion on Watts and that whole school is that it's a cult. Keep an eye open and you just might notice what I'm talking about.

Now sure, you can get a little rusty but it's not like what you've learned somehow disappears. It takes a while to get into the swing of things if you haven't done it in a while but that's the way with everything. Another thing to note is that you're often still using skills that aren't obvious in the work you do. If you're doing a still life painting, you will still be thinking about proportions, gestures edges and so on, even if you're including additional things to consider like color.

Just some personal things about this is like if I haven't done a quick-ish (3 hours) figure drawing for a few weeks and I've been working non-stop on my cast drawing or something, just picking at details all day. My figure drawing tends to come out fairly well because I feel free to just push other aspects of drawing that I haven't had a chance to work on for a while. I've sort of returned with a fresh perspective and now with more knowledge that I've accumulated elsewhere, I can tackle a quick drawing with a new and strong approach.

So for me, the argument that you might benefit from switching subjects can be valid but not because you loose in the areas you aren't working on but rather you stagnate in the thing you've been doing and you need to do other things where you can solve problems in a different light, that you might not otherwise have been able to solve in the current thing you were working on. I tend to feel as if when you sort of get comfortable with a subject and start to feel like "yeah I've got this", you switch because that comfort means there aren't glaring challenges starring you in the face and it is that kind of challenge you need to efficiently learn.

Now it's really difficult to know when to move on and how long to study a certain subject but don't be afraid if just getting into something for several weeks. If you're on a roll and you're learning one thing after another, why stop if it's working? That momentum you have should be used.

There is however value in sticking with something when you're up against a wall. Notice how I mentioned that you can change subjects when you're comfortable with a thing, but when you hit a point where you're like "I have no idea what to do", that is an excellent opportunity to really push yourself one, two or ten steps further than you would have thought you could go. I never would have thought I could spend 10 weeks on a cast drawing but I have done it and it was really valuable for me to do so. Getting to that stage in a drawing 5 weeks in where it looks finished and having to ask yourself "what now?" is a place where you really are starring into the abyss and being able to overcome it is (I believe) what will often separate the good artists form the great artists.

So, If I may suggest a schedule I believe to be very effective, simple and stress free. It goes like this for every day of the week (or maybe except weekends), Project 1 for 3 hours, project 2 for 3 hours and then an extra, alternating project for 2 hours. This extra project can be whatever you want, consider supplementary study time if there's something off topic you're interested in. You can change what projects you're working on every week, every other week or when you feel like you can point to something and say "yeah, I learn that thing". When you switch all the time, it is hard to know if you're actually learning anything at all with can lead you to be inefficient without knowing it.

>>3482

Thank you once again for such thorough and enlightening feedback.

I'm going to put your schedule suggestion into practice and see how it goes.

>>3483

>You pay the actual animator less than the CG animator

>When CG looks so much more terrible

Why do they do this, I do not understand

>>3680

I think at least considering their relationship alone, it's because there's more competition for 2D animators so it drives the wages down. It's pretty ridiculous how little animation staff is paid overall, though. The fact a series director doesn't even make the median u.s. wage is silly enough, but the animators getting paid less than a cashier or something like that is criminal. It makes me feel pretty good about my job. I work at a used video game store and make as much as a CG animator.

>>3680

in japan, traditional animators are usually paid per frame, doing that w/ cg obviously makes no sense. 3d also used to be a really specialized field w/o many people in it, that probably helped.

no name inbetweeners working on bobs burgers & rick and morty probably get paid more than your favorite japanese key animator

studios are starting to move production to malaysia, so wages are only going to get worse