In "Ultralearning: Accelerate Your Career, Master Hard Skills and Outsmart the Competition", Scott Young talks about how "Direct learning" impacts how effectively you learn a new skill. In short, his point is that when you are learning a new skill you should be spending a large portion (he argues most) of your time doing the thing you are trying to learn. It's not just about having fun and avoiding burnout (which are certainly important) but it's also crucial to the process. Avoiding drawing for fun and just grinding through the lessons is not only boring, but it's also counterproductive. It's the classic "slow down to go faster".
For me, I do struggle to step away from the exercises and do my own drawing. This is partly because it's so much easier to just follow the instructions and produce some meaningful output. But sitting down to do my own work means I'm on my own, I have to think about it, think about what to draw, figure out how to apply the lessons I learned so far, and then deal with the results which are not going to be nearly at the level I want. So it's hard to motivate myself to do it.
So yeah, drawing for fun should be mandatory. Perhaps you should make it mandatory to submit a personal drawing or two between lessons, not for critique, because that's adding to your workload, but just as a pre-req before you can start the next lesson. Would also be a great way to see how people on the program progress with their own stuff over the duration of the program. Just a thought.
BTW, there's a lot of things he mentions in that book that I see are present in the drawabox approach. Worth a read.
mirvine555 in the post "Check out this review of Drawabox that was just released by a former student, Rebecca Rand!"
2019-09-14 10:17
In "Ultralearning: Accelerate Your Career, Master Hard Skills and Outsmart the Competition", Scott Young talks about how "Direct learning" impacts how effectively you learn a new skill. In short, his point is that when you are learning a new skill you should be spending a large portion (he argues most) of your time doing the thing you are trying to learn. It's not just about having fun and avoiding burnout (which are certainly important) but it's also crucial to the process. Avoiding drawing for fun and just grinding through the lessons is not only boring, but it's also counterproductive. It's the classic "slow down to go faster".
For me, I do struggle to step away from the exercises and do my own drawing. This is partly because it's so much easier to just follow the instructions and produce some meaningful output. But sitting down to do my own work means I'm on my own, I have to think about it, think about what to draw, figure out how to apply the lessons I learned so far, and then deal with the results which are not going to be nearly at the level I want. So it's hard to motivate myself to do it.
So yeah, drawing for fun should be mandatory. Perhaps you should make it mandatory to submit a personal drawing or two between lessons, not for critique, because that's adding to your workload, but just as a pre-req before you can start the next lesson. Would also be a great way to see how people on the program progress with their own stuff over the duration of the program. Just a thought.
BTW, there's a lot of things he mentions in that book that I see are present in the drawabox approach. Worth a read.