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4:04 PM, Friday September 4th 2020
  • should there not be a part in the exercise where you check if you actually did it right o.o?

There is, check step 3! Though you won't check all objects. Both options given in the step involve you looking on the Internet or in real life actual true information.

Why the imagination part? Because it forces you to think actively about the subject so that you'll remember better the corrections you make in step 3. It also makes you train some abilities that you won't get only drawing from references, like the ability to retrieve from memory and the ability to see more when you observe.

  • but don´t you need some reference to also study the texture and smaller details of an object, in order to draw it from imagination?

You can choose any set of five subjects. Textures are a perfect valid subject too. And again, you'll correct it at step 3 if you want to.

  • And I often got the information that you should study one subject rather often and long, instead of multiple subjects only briefly.

Absolutely not. And this is not just my opinion, is a well proven scientific fact that mixing stuff up boosts comprehension and makes it easier to stick in your memory rather than doing one at a time. I'm sure you will find the studies easily on the Internet, I read them on the book "make it stick: The Science of Successful Learning". It feels more confusing though, but you're still learning more.

Also, you simply can't study all the objects one at a time, for a long time. As I said on my previous comment, there are just too many objects in the world to do that. With this method, you're drawing 150 subjects per month, 5x365= 1825 subjects per year! And since you are forced to select 3 takeaways every day, it amounts to 1095 keypoints per year! That's 1095 lessons you'll hardly forget.

  • there just seem to be very different opinions going around on how to study to create a good visual library o.O.

YES! Every artist will tell you their method like it's the absolute truth! That's exactly why I devised a method myself, so I could base it on actual scientific studies on how the human brain works rather than on my personal opinion. Still, this method is still in progress, and probably isn't perfect. I'll keep doing it and improving it as I go.

Best of luck!

3:20 PM, Saturday September 5th 2020

Thank you for the quick reply ^^.

First, wow sorry that was embarassing, I checked your post so often because I was sure there has to be one part where you study from reference and I wanted to avoid asking you again for exactly that reason ^^´´, like not seeing the mayonaise in the fridge directly in front of you (part of me knew this would happen).

Yea this makes sense and I thought that the imagination part was a good idea, I was just confused because as it seems I missed your part about checking the reference, multiple times ^^´´.

Ah ok thanks for including this information about textures, this way it seems better for me.

This fact about mixing up stuff while learning, is actually something I already learned about in "general / meta learning", but I did not thought this would apply to drawing (also because I got bombarded with people telling me to study one thing very often). Nice to know that this applys too :).

But thanks anyway for sharing it! Really interesting and as you said, science really is a better source than just opinion, let´s me realize that yea maybe there are good artists who tell how good some method for learning is, but maybe they just think that because they learned no other method and still got good through a lot of time, but needed a lot more time because their method was bad. So with a better method they could have done what they have done, far more effective.

Thank you, you too and thanks for the answers ^^.

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