This is very interesting because so many people are saying that! Seems it really is the next step. This particular experiment is dedicated to studying using spaced repetition, but I have other experiments planned fkr the future and so will try to incorporate something project based for that. Thanks for your input, I truly value the opinion of more experienced artists 💖

How many anki decks did you make?

@ArtZee-ch9nk I'm not sure of the exact number, but I make each book into a deck generally. I also did the same thing with some online courses so I actually have a bunch of decks but the ones I show in these videos are the main books/decks I currently study from.

I definitely disagree with this sentiment, especially if you keep with traditional art. There is nothing wrong with pushing to completed pieces, but drawing quicker sketches is immensely valuable. You can learn 20 lessons in 40 minutes where finishing a project over 3-4 hours isn’t going to give you nearly as many opportunities. Visual library and muscle memory is so much of your art. Style comes heavily from your tempo and shapes, which you don’t really overlap with rendering all that much. Obv both at important, what’s most important is doing what brings you the most joy, and gives you the energy and drive to work on what’s hard.

​@@andrewm2475 Having spent a decade in art communities for beginners and intermediates, it is completely true that those who plateau the hardest, those who end up creatively frustrated and lost, are those who turned art into a daily practice of "the grind", where "grind" means drawing naked mannequin men and perspective/form exercises (and then eventually, value exercises, brush control exercises, etc). It is absolutely crucial that what fuels your art is the desire to create art _works_. Works that fulfill the desire to create something meaningful beyond technique. Technique needs to manifest around that need to create _"a something"_. There's this idea that with "sufficient technique" you can create anything and everything, and it may as well be true. This idea, however, leads people -- especially late teens and adults who pick up the craft -- into thinking that they should first gain "sufficient technique" so that they can then, and only then, have the creative freedom to decide what it is that they're actually making. This is a flawed view of being a creative worker. It is far more productive and creatively liberating to build technique for a specialized creative desire that is within you, rather than to develop generalist technique that serves no clear purpose. Creativity is a muscle and training creativity to serve your own ends should be trained from day one. Not from day 366. Yes your lack of technique will hinder your ability to make satisfying works -- and it can take a long time before you start feeling like technique is no obstacle -- but if you start training your creativity only after 'gaining technique', then you will, at best, find yourself frustrated at how much your art is lacking and, at worst, oblivious to the fact that your art is uninteresting because all you can see is that the art is 'technically good' (or even worse ' technically correct'). It may be true that spending 3-4 hours on one work will give you less measurable progress than 1 hour of fundies grinding, but if you stretch that project from 3 hours to 1 week or 1 month, working slowly at it little by little, complementing the process with those very same fundies studies you could do in 1 hour, then you'll train not only your eye and hand, but also your creative side. Then you'll be doing a head-in-a-box exercise not for the sake of a general skill of drawing heads in perspective, but rather in preparation to draw the best goddamn head in perspective for that one specific piece. You'll be doing compositions and designs studies and thumbnails, not for the sake of gaining the ability to compose great art in some distant future, but for the sake of building the best composition right now for the piece you're working on.

No, not a total beginner. I have covered this in my other videos, but I copied a lot of anime when I was younger and was really good at copying. When I tried to draw it from my head or make my own characters, I totally failed. So, I started to copy anatomy. When I tried to draw it without the reference, I totally failed! All I could do was copy. So I started looking at how to learn drawing from the ground up, perspective, and all that stuff. I found what were considered the best books on the subject and also got into neuroscience and learning how to learn. I tried using things like spaced repetition to mentally internalise some of the vast stuff out there related to drawing and just exploded in growth. This was around 3/4 years ago, maybe? I hadn't drawn for about 10 years before that. I decided a few months ago to really push myself to draw every day, and track the progress to help others learn too. Nobody else seems to have really used neuroscience like I have to learn drawing, so I started this channel. Painting I am a total beginner at. I have been learning that at the same time, and only started at Hour 0, so when I review that in the future, you will see how I have progressed from literally no experience. Thanks for watching!

Great response

@@10.000hrs Thanks so much for the detailed reply! I apologize, this video was from my algorithm, I had not seen your previous videos. I hope my comment didn't come off rude, I am genuinely amazed at your skill level, even with the context you've just given. I look forward to seeing your painting progress! Cheers 🙂

​@10.000hrs your time spent learning sounds similar to me, except I always neglected the copying part. Before I really started practing hard, I had a pretty good sense of construction and anatomy in terms of what makes something look believabley 3d, but my proportions and overall measurements were always off. I still find myself having to shrink my characters' heads after I map out the rest of the body

@cdewx5749 That's really interesting. It's amazing how different people experiences shape the outcomes of their art!

Hahaha, love Tradd's stuff. He has a huge callous from the way he holds a pen if I remember correctly.

Yeah! Do it! I'm glad you found it helpful. I think that whatever you are learning, when you switch your mindset to a genuinely curious and investigative one, you make these sort of discoveries. Other, more professional artists already know them, but when you rediscover them for yourself they stick with you, and you find you jump up a skill level.

Thank you! I hope so. Its not for everyone and some people have said they feel art should be more expressive and less technical than I make it, but it's how I learn things, and a lot of people seem to have resonated with it. Thanks for watching 🙏

@@10.000hrs Of course! Different approaches for different people, naturally. As someone more technically minded myself, I can't wait for the next video!

Haha, the road is long indeed. Thanks for watching, and good luck with your training!

Noah, hi, for some reason it's not letting me respond on the other thread. I had said that I don't have an online presence, but I'd be great if we could share our art through discord. Alternatively, if you have any online presence, I'd be happy to check out your art and see your progress!

@@cristiangamesgames oh cool, what's your discord, I'll add you

@@cristiangamesgames sure what's your discord

KJG is the one that inspired me to start a similar project to 10,000hrs. I saw an interview with him where he said he can draw vehicles from memory because he would spend a lot of time drawing the same vehicles over and over. So he believed that he essentially crystalized the forms of these vehicles into his long-term memory. I believe with SR you might be able to achieve similar results.

Thanks! That's kind of you to say. It takes me a while to make videos haha but hopefully I can continue to produce content that you find useful. Thank you for your support 💖

Ah no worries my friend, glad you enjoyed it. I'll keep going and see what happens!

Thank you!

Thank you very much, glad you found it useful 💕

Great! Thank you, I will keep going! I am grateful for your support.

Thanks for your comment! That's really interesting, I love hearing from professionals, especially teachers. It does seem that this is quite a common thing. Quite a few people have mentioned it. I suppose it's just own to individual taste, but some people definitely seem to learn better by producing more finished works and improving based on that. I always felt like I just couldn't produce anything I was happy with and felt demotivated part way through. Doing quicker studies felt a bit easier for me because they were maybe like a lower investment. It's probably purely psychological, but just filling up my sketchbook made me happier. A lot of people are recommending doing more finished pieces though to practice more creative aspects, problem solving etc, so I think I need to bring that into it. Thanks again! I appreciate your support.

Thanks again! Yeah, I'm not quite sure how to handle that yet, but I am hoping that finding new ways to challenge myself should help.

@@10.000hrs I have found that transitioning to longer-form projects/paintings is the logical next step. Are you interested in any subsect of art at the moment? Illustration/comics/concept etc?

Yeah for sure I am interested in illustration and comics. I might try something more project based soon. I have some future experiments lined up that might benefit from such a thing. It does seem to be what many people are recommending as the next step!

Thanks! You too! I hope you find it useful and can adapt it to make it your own. I shall look forward to seeing you at the finish line my friend 🧡

Thanks so much, friend! That's nice of you to say.

Hey! No problem buddy, I am glad you continue to find the videos useful. I hope to continue to produce content that you find useful and inspiring 💖 thanks for your ongoing support

@@10.000hrs ❤️

Thank you!

That's awesome! Glad it helped. I gave up for about 10 years but it eventually pulled me back haha.

Ah thanks that's really nice of you to say. Its all a big experiment really but I think it has helped me, and I want to share it in case it helps others. I appreciate your support and hope I can continue to make content you find value in 💖

You are welcome! Thank you for watching!

Thanks! I love everything about YOU and appreciate you watching 💖

Interesting. I want to get more into anatomy soon, so hopefully I can learn about them. Thanks for your advice!

@@10.000hrs another pro artist here. Don't learn bones, learn forms like you do. But you'll get there anyway. (:

​@@10.000hrs since you're already good enough (or even really good) with basic skills, I'd suggest you start by learning design for concept artists or something like that

@@lucid8302 Thanks, I'll look into it. Do you mean like how to design characters and things like that?

​@@10.000hrs yeah, if that's what you're interested in. I mean, it's easy to get stuck in an endless cycle of "studies", but in the end you probably want to create something new.

the visiterrrrrrr

I am so glad you found it useful 💕 thank you for watching! Yes I agree, I groped around in the dark for years and never really improved beyond copying things.

Thanks for watching!

Well, thank you very much for your kind words. I feel very humbled by them! I am glad that the videos are helpful to people. A few people have asked for things like tutorials, so I will have to put something together at some point but it won't be for a while just because of time constraints. In the meantime, I would say that the most important thing when working from books like Tom Fox's is to: - really understand the lesson and what you want you want to practice this session That is why I make the cards generally contain a single page, or idea that spans a few pages. It limits and isolates my focus to one concept. - draw from life, references, the book, etc BUT after each sketch, try to draw the same thing from a different imagined viewpoint This forces you to ensure that you actually understand how the figure works in 3D, and I believe its this mental reassembling of something you have just studied that helps it stay in your head. If I am working on something like overlap, I will redraw the figure and really pay attention to that. Finally, that last point might actually be hard to do, and if it is, I think it generally means you need a better grasp on perspective, and how the body would work if made of simple boxes and cylinders. Hope that helps at least a little for now! Thanks again for your support 💖

Thank you very much! Haha maybe some day.

It really is amazing, like being given the instruction manual for your brain!

Thanks! I'll keep going and getting stronger!

That's how I started too! Thanks for watching, and I am glad you liked it.

Glad you found it useful! Thanks for watching!

Haha thanks, a few people have mentioned that. I appreciate your support 💗

Ah! Thanks so much! You too! I hope we can both work hard and try our best to learn and improve together. Good luck with your art journey and thank you for your support 💖

Thanks! I'll keep trying to get even better!

Haha, thanks, that's really nice of you to say. It is an acquired taste for sure, and the interface is not the best. I have some other videos in the pipeline that will show alternate methods of study that require no Anki. Maybe they will be more useful. A lot of what I do is just experimenting to see what works for me. Thank you for all your support so far!

I'm glad it's now just me then! I have been told I write left-handed with my right hand as well, whatever that means. I think stuff like how you hold your tools often gets glossed over when following tutorials or learning, so I wanted to include it here.

Thank you very much, I always love getting input from much more experienced artists! I'll have to see if I can find a way to push past the plateau when I hit it.

Haha, I never even realised 😅 it's a hard habit to break

Good for you. I was the same for a long time. The Scott Robertson book is so good for that because it chunks it up into bitesize steps that feed into one another. It makes perspective very easy to learn gradually. Once you have a few hours clocked up practising it, you should notice the difference. Best of luck with it friend!

@@10.000hrs thanks for the recommendation. It's a bit expensive where I live but I'm definitely considering getting it.

I'm not a total beginner, but all I was really good at before was copying. So I would copy anime and then when I tried to draw it from imagination I realised I couldn't do it. So I started copying anatomy from books and the same thing happened with that. I wanted to start learning again from scratch, with the goal of drawing from imagination, and discovered things like neuroscience and meta-learning, and started experimenting with those. In December last year I decided I wanted to commit to experimenting with it daily, and share the way I do things to hopefully help others. I think the thing to look at is the rate of progress in 100 hours, because that should be something anyone can recreate, from a complete beginner to someone who has been drawing for a while. Thanks for watching!

Thanks for watching! It sounds like you experienced exactly what I did. I do believe this sort of more logical and structured approach helps, but it won't be for everyone. Your approach actually sounds better than mine because it's been streamlined, so definitely go with that! A lot of this has been about experimenting and finding what works best for me personally, and I expect that to be the same for anyone else who tries it. By being engaged in our learning, we continually improve and refine it. Good luck with it all! I hope to create more videos in the future that people will find valuable 🙏

For real. That's actually why I made the switch. I used to suffer from really scratchy, indecisive lines with pencil. I still suffer from it a little. I have a bunch of different sketch books to work through so maybe eventually I will find a good combination.

Thank you for your support. I am pleased that you enjoyed the video and will look forward to improving alongside you.

Thank you very much! That's very kind of you to say. I agree with you in that anyone can do this. Of course, there are some people who will be better naturally for whatever reason, but if you can just 'learn how to learn', then anything can be placed within reach! Thanks for watching, I truly appreciate your comment.

Haha thanks. Tom is awesome. He just drew for 10,000 hours and got that good. I reckon I can get there faster by using neuroscience to leverage a more efficient route. I'd like to be able to get to his level.

​@@10.000hrsyou're well on the way. Looking forward to your progress

Thanks! I'm not a total beginner, but all I really did before was copy drawings like anime and manga. I got really good at copying, but couldn't draw anything from my head. This experiment was the result of trying to get good at drawing from imagination.

I actually drill a lot of the exercises mentioned in the book on a regular basis, especially the ones about drawing in XYZ sections. What I tend to do atm is head over to Pinterest and find a cool vinyl toy or object I like and draw it from different imagined angles. I tend to start by drawing it in flat, 2 dimensions from the front, side and above view, then I construct a box of the right proportions and draw the planes, with those 2d images on, like he does in the book. I then join up the volumes with a silhouette. This is also exactly the same as he demonstrates in the book. Then I try to draw the object from imagined viewpoints without the guides! Hard mode. When I draw figures I think of the head, torso and pelvis as boxes and that forces me to place the figure in 3D perspective. Hope that helps!

Thank you! I'm not a total beginner, but all I was ever really okay at before was copying anime characters and stuff.

Thanks! I am glad you enjoyed it. The references come from Proko, where I use the timer tool to practice. I currently draw a referenced figure from there and then I try to draw the same figure, from an imaginary view point. I find this forces me to really consider the figure as three dimensional and how its volumes work in perspective, and it acts as a bridge to hopefully make drawing from imagination a lot easier. Some of the drawings in this video are totally from imagination. I always try to work like this even when learning something like anatomy, because I have found that just copying makes you good at copying, but I could never draw from imagination.

Thank you! I will do my best!

No problem! Ah I was the same my friend. These little discoveries are awesome because they really stay embedded in the mind. Sometimes you just need someone to say something in a certain way to make it click. Glad I could help!

Ooh never heard of that brand, but I will check them out. Thank you for sharing with me!

Hmm I haven't heard of those but they sound cool. I will take a look! Thanks for letting me know!

Thanks! The decks are book scan, so I can't really put them out legally. Also, because I use the cards as digital notes/ journal pages, they are really written for me. Part of this method is really making your own notes for you. That being said, so many people seem curious to try this that I might look into making a deck I can share that covers the same sort of concepts without plagiarising anybody or committing piracy! Thanks for your interest, I appreciate your support.

Yep, it's from How to Draw by Scott Robertson, and it's widely considered the best book for learning to draw from imagination. I practice it on a regular basis.

It's a bit of a tough one really. If I share them, I will be sharing books illegally as they are produced by scanning the books, and I don't want to harm the artists. Secondly, I use the cards as a digital journal, and make notes on each one after a study session. As such the way I use the cards is sort of personal to me. It would be best for anyone who wanted to use Anki how I do to make their own cards, personal to them. Sorry that's kind of a lame answer. I might try and make some sort of more generic deck at some point, but it still would require people to make the cards their own, with their own notes Someone suggested making a deck from the content on Draw-a-box, so that might be worth a go.

Good question! As an experiment this is more focused on the actual training methods and content as opposed to style, but as it develops and I (hopefully) improve further, I should think I will begin looking at style more. I'll be expanding the experiment in the near future to try a few new things, so style might be something to bring in then.

Thank you for your very informative comment. It's so interesting how many more experienced people are emphasising the need to sort of play more and be creative, so that's definitely something I am going to bring in. I still very much feel like I am grappling with fundamentals at the moment, but I will try to branch out and seek new challenges.

That's great! It's something to experiment with for sure. You have to set new cards to 1, so that 1 new card a day will appear. As you will see in the future, if you leave it set to 1, eventually you will just get a backlog, but for a little while you might be okay leaving it set to 1. Just remember you can set it 0 to stop the flow of new cards every day! The anki documentation is pretty good and can probably explain it better than I can in a comment, but it sounds like you have new cards set to 0, so none show. Set it to 1 anytime you want to study a new card. I share the art I practice each day as a daily short video here on KZfaq, and the description of each contains info on the card for that day, which will give a little insight. You are correct, I treat each page as a chunk, that contains information I should know. We want to turn the 'lesson' it teaches into the challenge for that card. To make the challenges, I consider carefully what the author is trying to teach. It's generally a single concept, like overlap, or how the jawbone looks from different angles or something. I base the challenge on that. It's probably best for you to make your own challenges based on what you read from the book, because you might interpret it differently to me! Some books like How to Draw are far easier to make challenges for, because it literally just gives you instructions to follow! Thanks for your support, I hope that helps and if there is anything else I can do for you let me know 💖

@@10.000hrs Thanks for answering, this helped a lot (and I will check out your shorts, I am just not a big fan of them so I didn't look for those, sorry). I started with drawing form & pose and that one is an easy book, too. Because for each page (or two) you can make easy challenges/homework, like for overlap "draw 10 poses and emphasise the overlap and mark it for better understanding (and observing where overlap happens in real life) so... This was really helpful. I hope this way will help me study art better. Because I have the problem I just sit down for a few hours a day but never get back to learning more (or reading a book past the first chapter) than once a week or even a month. So hopefully with Anki and it's scheduling for me I can get the reps in, to use a gym metapher (lol). Thanks for the tip in trying out one new card per day and look where it's going, that is smart. Thanks. I am not used to use anki, because I have to make my own cards and I am relativly bad in learning for myself without anyone guiding me, so the combination in using books I have anyway is SO GOOD. thank you again for sharing and explaining it so well (you did good, I didn't listen enough). Thank you, really.

Wow! This is an amazing list! Thank you so much! I will definitely do some research into those. Can I ask what sort of paper you normally draw on with some of these?

@@10.000hrs np! i mainly use these on cartridge paper and card, most of the pens work on simple printer copy paper as well but i haven't tried the paint pens or the tempera on copy paper.

Glad you found the video useful! Thanks for watching, and I wish you the very best of luck on your journey ✨️ I think having a solid grasp of perspective in particular really sets you down a good path, especially if you want to draw from imagination

@@10.000hrs Yesterday I practiced with some still life, turns out circles are rarely circles!

@chameleonedm All those little things you figure out eventually compound into a strong understanding 🔥

Ah, thanks. I will check them out. The brush pen is hard for me, yes. I quite like the way it looks, though.

Makes sense I suppose!

That's very interesting, thank you for sharing. Perhaps I will experiment with Lucida or a similar tool in the future.

☠️

This is a weird one because really there are 2 types of drawing - from reference, and imagination. Both are actually useful to have practiced, but my main goal is drawing from imagination, so I work more on that. If you only care about drawing from reference, then you can think about line length, angles of lines relative to each other, and points where lines intersect. To practice that, I suggest looking up Bargue Drawing, and it's really just measuring, and then transferring measurements to paper. Drawing from imagination is harder, because the sense of proportion has to be understood before you can draw your subject. For that, I suggest thinking about and studying the proportions in 2 dimensions from the front, top, and side, much I like in the XYZ section of this video. Using the skull as an example, I know it fits inside a rectangle which is typically taller than wide. In 3d terms, just draw a box with those proportions, and make it thinner in depth. You then have a volume correctly propotioned, to draw the head into. It takes a while to internalise the proportions, and I often make mistakes, but it's just about simplification. That is why I draw in 2D first when learning. If I draw a motorcycle, the wheels are always 1.5 wheel widths apart in side view. If I draw a flat plane in 3D with that marked out, it's just a case of filling in the blanks and creating volumes where the marks indicate. Hope that helps! I will try to make a video at some point that explains it perhaps.

Thank you! I spent a long time copying drawings from anatomy books by people like Andrew Loomis but found that when I wanted to draw a figure from imagination or even a photo, I actually had no knowledge of anatomy. I was just copying mindlessly. Nowadays, I use books by people like Tom Fox to learn the anatomy as simple forms, and make sure I can draw them from imagination, and see these forms in the references I use. I tend to draw a figure from reference and then draw the same figure from imagination from a different viewpoint. I use the Proko Timer tool for references. I have found that this has given me the beginning of an ability to draw figures from imagination in a variety of poses, and from different angles.

I don’t think you know how much you’ve helped, I can’t thank you enough for your kind response and your help ! I still can’t believe how much research is put into your videos, still wondering how you got so much curiosity and interest into this domain, have a wonderful day !

@prismedarou-ns2cw no problem friend, I am happy to help and glad you found my videos useful. I'll try my best to keep producing content that helps you and others 💕

You are right. But it's more like HOW I practice. Its deliberate practice. It's how I learned perspective, and how I learn new concepts like colour temperature or specific anatomy. This is a hard question to answer in a comment but essentially yes, you are correct, flash cards are more for learning things like Japanese vocabulary or capital cities. This is known as declarative learning. Art is procedural learning and so it's a case of practice makes perfect. I have been experimenting with using a computer program for declarative learning to learn procedural skills like art. I treat each card as a digital journal page so that I can learn a new concept within the field of art, and as my understanding of a subject grows, I can push it further. The program tells me when I will be getting rusty because it uses an algorithm mapped to my personal knowledge retention rate to ensure the thing I practice every day is the thing I probably need to sharpen up on. This is called Spaced Repetition Learning. It's not a perfect system, and I have only anecdotal scientific evidence that it works for learning art, but many people have commented saying they have found it useful. As I get better at perspective or drawing the foot, I practice that thing less. I have a video on it if you want to learn more, and it's honestly a method which won't be for everyone, but it's how I got to this point. It has focused me and given me specific things to study every day.

@@10.000hrs so essentially. It’s not really about the information on the cards itself. More about a reminder to practice what’s on the card? Sorry, I’ve watched the all your videos, and it seems interesting, it just kinda didn’t make sense to me.

@KronoXP Yes. The program is really just a scheduler. This makes my training more efficient. This tells me what to practice and when. The cards are from books so that should be giving me a logical progression of study to go from say drawing lines to boxes to cars. You do of course get better over time with things like perspective, but deliberate practice at least initially should get you to be able to perform better, faster. Its just that before, I would kind of sit down and doodle for a while or copy mindlessly from an anatomy book, and never ever made progress that way. Thanks for watching so far. If there's anything else I can help with feel free to let me know.

That's a good book! Plateus are a natural part of learning, so they are not really possible to avoid as such. I am still trying to figure out the best way to deal with them myself, but from experience I would say: - revisit and refresh what you are trying to do This is to make sure you are still on the right track for whatever you are trying to achieve, as the goal can take on a new definition as you grow - mix things up It may be that you have to try and approach your practice from a different perspective, trying new ways to achieve your goals - take a break This is surprisingly effective! Stopping your practice for a while (I have gone as long as 2 weeks) gives your subconscious time to process things, and you tend to come back stronger! I am not an expert, but I have found those points have worked for me, and so hopefully there is something for useful for you there. Thank you for your support!

@@10.000hrs, thank you for the advice, but since I'm taking an oil painting course, I'm only allowed to do what they tell me to do, it's not until I get to the last block that every other painting I get to do what I want to do.

@ravenshadowz2343 oh I see! Well, the teachers there should hopefully be able to offer you some guidance as well. If you are quite new to painting you might not plateau for a while anyway. In the beginning phase of learning you always make the most progress. Good luck with your course! I wish you every success!

@@10.000hrs, thank you! :)

I will be creating one in the near future so thanks for the interest. I want to male it really useful and well structured and tie it in with some other plans I have for the channel, but it's in the pipeline!

Yeah! Do it! I can only really do 1 hour a day because of things like work, but I think its really all you need. What matters most is that you can actually focus for that hour (2×30 mins I actually prefer, with a short 5 or 10min break inbetween). Also ensure that you practice things that will help you, like your weak points. What you practice is more important than how you practice.

@@10.000hrs thank you for your advice

Thank you very much! I only study for 1 hour a day, so it's a bit more manageable. Usually in the evenings. I would probably do more if I had time but I do not believe in studying for hours and hours every day. Little and often actually seems to produce better results, at least for me personally.

@@10.000hrs I appreciate your response. I'm hoping to embark on the same trip when I find stable ground. Good luck man!

I will hopefully get around to making a video on that at some point!

I'll have to try that! The reason I jumped to pen was actually because my lines were very unconfident and scratchy. Pen forced me to draw the line as a single bold stroke, and it has helped clean my work up quite a lot.

I could, but honestly I am doing it as an exercise from a book, so you might as well just grab the book! It's called 'How to Draw' by Scott Robertson, and it contains all the steps to get you upto that point, as well as the steps beyond it, such as using that XYZ drawing to make cars and planes. It's probably better than any tutorial I could ever make.

Also, Draw a Box is a free online learning tool that you can use for this. You can even have your work critiqued, either free, or by joining a Patreon.

I'll add it to the list 😉

I can't share the ones I have made that feature book scans because that's piracy, and also because I use the cards as digital journal pages that I update each time I practice a card, it's not really practical. Part of this training is making your own notes. That being said a lot of people want to a deck to try this with, so I hope to produce one that people will be able to use soon. Thanks for your interest!

Thats understandable. I think thsts a great idea

A bunch of books that I scanned and turned into cards for a spaced repetition learning program! When I do figure drawing I use Proko's timer tool for references, or Pinterest for things like still life references. My next long form video, which should be out in a week or two, will cover all the books in detail. Thanks for watching! I am so pleased you enjoyed it!

The next video I post should help with this a bit, as it's about the resources I use, and how to find the most suitable ones. There is a lot out there, and everyone learns differently, so you might want to spend a bit of time experimenting with books or courses to see what works best for you personally. I prefer books myself. Next I would say have a clear destination in mind for what you want to achieve. Can you find 3 artists or pieces of work that really sum up exactly what you want your own work to look like? From there, you can sort of work backwards and figure out what skills you need to take you there, and find resources that will help you get there. For example, if you want to paint portraits, then you don't actually need to spend a lot of time studying things like perspective, but you would spend more time on observational drawing. If you want to draw cars from imagination, then you need a far more detailed understanding of perspective, and might not even need to do much observational drawing, and you wouldn't need any anatomy. I want to be able to draw and paint from my imagination, which is about the hardest thing you can ever achieve in art, so I broke down what I needed into what I call skill pillars, and then found the best resources to help me learn them all. My other videos cover this and I'll post more in the future. I made a clear pathway to follow. From there, its just about being brave, taking action, and starting! I do 1 hour a day, no more. That's sort of a general overview of what I did when I was in your position, but if I can offer any more specific help, please ask! One final thing - I am a perfectionist too, but I have found that when learning to paint and draw, embracing mistakes is essential. The learning process is literally making mistakes repeatedly, and trying to make your next attempt a little better. Sometimes you do okay, sometimes not so much, but over time the progress is made. Art is a good way to learn to let go of perfectionism and just have fun! You don't have to show anyone the mistakes or work you feel is 'bad' so treat your art as an experiment, and don't be afraid to make mistakes! Thanks for watching 💕

​@@10.000hrsI initially wrote a reply but I think I forgot to send it 😭. But to paraphrase, there are definitely times where I am scared of making "bad" drawings but I know I have to accept that and get better at enduring it. I am currently doing drawabox paired with How to Draw by Scott Robertson since I mainly want to learn how to draw for a video game passion project I'll be making in the future. Anyhow, thank you for the advice and I'll make sure to ask if there is anything you can help me with or reply if there are things I forgot to tell you. But yea, just being frozen in fear for the sake of wanting to draw well is definitely my biggest problem when I should be drawing for the fun of it instead of always instensively focusing on the fundamentals. Thanks again!

That's a good point. I think that by using books as a starting point to learn I am casting a very wide net so to speak. Like doing research. Some information will indeed be more relevant than others but it takes a little while to figure out what that is. Once I have an idea of my weaknesses, I can cherry pick cards that I already have made and emphasise those. But yes, you are correct in that it would be more efficient to create a deck or something to specifically hone in on improving weak points. I think that the system is flexible enough to accommodate either approach.

You sure can! I use reference yes, usually from the timer tool on Proko, or Pinterest. If I am working on something like anatomy or figure drawing, I tend to draw the figure from reference, and then draw it from another angle, using my imagination. This forces me to understand how the forms of the figure actually work in 3D. The same thing can be done for cars, robots, whatever you want. So we want to use reference, but also always be moving away from using it.

​@@10.000hrs thanks for the feedback!

You are correct haha. I hope to eventually be able to commit more than 1 hour a day. If I could get 3 hours a day in (morning/noon/night) then I could get there in 11 years!

Thanks! No I haven't checked that artist out yet but I will. I love finding inspiring new work, so thank you for sharing with me!

Hey! Nice to hear from you! Not at all, I am happy to help. To be honest, it kinda depends on whether the face is seen from a funny angle, whether it's drawing from a reference or imagination, and whether it's supposed to be realistic or stylized like anime. In general, I would draw a box sized to the rough proportions of the head in perspective (taller than wide) and divide it's height into thirds. You can then use these lines to roughly place facial features like the eyes and mouth. There are reference guides for this on the internet, like pictures of faces divided up into sections like this. Memorising those proportions and divisions will help a lot. A popular method to construct heads (which is part of drawing a face) is the Loomis method, which might be helpful. These concepts can be used when drawing a friends portrait, or characters from imagination, so I find them to be quite a good base for drawing heads from. Hope that helps. If there is anything more specific than that please let me know and I'll try and elaborate further!

@@10.000hrs thank you very much for the detailed advice.I will try learn the Loomis method for drawing anime from reference. ❤️🙏

I'll add them to the list! Thanks!

Hahaha! Amazing. I believe in you friend 🧡 thanks for watching!

😆 normally people complain that it should be called the Messi analogy

Gotta work them difficult poses 😆

My next check in at 200 hours will cover this, probably be a video I put out around late July, maybe August. In the meantime, the book I use to learn digital painting from is called Colour and Light by 3D Total. It has some good drills for learning concepts like colour temperature, exposure etc.

I use it sometimes, but often forget 😅 I tend to hold a pencil right down by the lead, and so it reminds me to adjust my grip further back. That pencil has also been sharpened down so its kinda short, so the extender is necessary for that reason too. If I start using a new pencil I'll probably not use the extender for a while.

@@10.000hrs Haha fair enough. I was gonna ask your thoughts about the 'expert problem' in learning, I think I read about it in a scott young book. I.e. that experts often make bad teachers. It's like a reverse dunning kruger effect, you're too advanced to understand the mind of a novice. They assume intuition and heuristics that aren't there yet. Also i've listened to alot of great artists give advice to focus intensely on fundamentals yet they themselves did not do that until later in their careers and that training was very brief. What i've found they actually did was project focused learning. Which in reality is alot more fun and engaging, which is probably why they stuck art out long enough to master it. A student might be better off just jumping in to the deep end and fixing problems on the fly instead of grinding out practice disconnected from the actual end goal of 'making good art I'm proud of'. Kind of like how the best way to learn a language is to go to the country and clumsily talk to people, rather than sit in a classroom and learn sentence structure.

@aberwood funnily enough, my next video discusses this! You are right. I think it's a very common issue, especially because as humans, we want the end result, and that's why we start towards learning a subject in the first place. That's why people jump right into drawing anime and then give up because they produce terrible drawings. You are seeing a pro create the simplified expression of a much more thorough understanding of things like anatomy, and cannot reproduce it. The idea of jumping into the deepend is generally called immersion learning, and it's actually probably the best way to learn things like languages, but it's unguided. I think of you can build yourself some sort of structured syllabus to learn from alongside immersing yourself you will make good progress. There is one more issue that can crop up with experts/teachers, which is that they can be so good that they actually cannot verbalise the basic stuff they are doing because it has become a reflex, like controlling a football. This means they will actually miss out crucial learning information that a student actually requires to progress without realising. That means part of being a good student might be to make yourself aware of these problems so you can counter them. It's easy to see a good artist and start following their course or whatever, but what we should seek are the best teachers. They aren't always the same thing.

@@10.000hrs Awesome, look forward to seeing the video!