It’s important to have an understanding of why you started drawing in the first place and the purpose. Drawing is something that as long as you continue to do you will always get better at. The more you draw the better you will become sometimes though, a person can draw and draw and feel like they are getting nowhere or actually feel like they are regressing; then suddenly you might draw something you are pride of and then another long stretch of time where there is slow progression. Rinse wash and repeat. Your progress will be slow and gradual, you will not become a great artist in a day or a week or a month or a year. There is no set timeline for the amount of time a person needs to put in to reach professsional level, everyone is different. Your goal should be to draw first. Draw because you like doing it and it will be more enjoyable. The cycle I described in the beginning of this article is from a book I read by George Leonard, Mastery. The author is a martial artist with expertise in aikido and writes in his book about what it took to reach the level he did as a martial artist. The lessons he learned can be applied to everything from starting a new exercise routine to being a student to advancing in your career. Basically it’s a self-help book but I like the ideas brought up in the small paperback book. The reason I searched for this information is because I notice it myself not only in drawing but in a lot of other things I do. George Leonard calls it the plateau; he describes learning as a cycle where you slowly step up in skill as your brain solidifies bits of information. I read that on average it takes a person ten thousand hours to obtain expertise in a new skill, which on average is about ten years if the person remains consistent. The process is long and if you do not enjoy the process and are only there to reach the goal you are not likely to succeed. The plateau is the way the author describes the learning process as you slowly become competent in different aspects of the skill of your choosing.
If you research learning and the learning process you will find that the process has been broken down into four different stages everyone goes through. The first stage you will go through is Unconscious Incompetence where you don’t know how skilled or unskilled you are at a particular skill. The beginning of learning isn’t till you realize that you are at a certain level and would like to reach a higher level. The only way you make it to the next level is to get feedback from others or by comparing your skill level. Once you realize and become aware you reach the second stage of learning which is called Conscious Incompetence. The second stage is where you start to gather information on the skill on how it can be done better and where practice comes into play. Importantly this is where George Leonard describes the type of learners that people tend to take he describes four of them in his book he labels them the Dabbler, the Obsessive, the Hacker, and the one who chooses the path to mastery. I will talk more about this later and how it relates to drawing but for now I want to finish explaining the stages of learning. After training for a while you will reach a point where you understand how to perform a skill better and you will have Conscious Competence. Once you know how you do something correctly only through experience and doing it over and over can you reach the last stage which is when you unconsciously perform the skill correctly and with a high level of skill you no longer have to put all your thought into it.
This happens in cycles, a especially with skills that have many different aspects and many skills can be continued to an indefinite level. Let’s take learning to ride your bike, which is the common example used, if you never rode a bike before you don’t know how badly you suck at it until you try it. You being unaware is the first stage that I talked about the unconscious competence. Once getting on your bike and realize that you can’t balance yourself and ride you get the feedback you need to reach the next stage (Conscious incompetence). The normal response would be to continue to practice over and over till you figure what how to balance yourself just right that you can ride without falling and smashing your face. As you practice you will eventually figure out for yourself how to ride a bike, this is why only you can learn anything really, you can reach the second level of learning and have all this knowledge given to you but unless you practice it and apply it you cannot master it. The third stage is when you know how to ride the bike and when you focus on it you can pull it off. (Conscious competence) That the third stage if you continue to ride your bike you will reach a point where you don’t think about it you just ride. (Unconscious competence) The cycle is complete for that particular skill and that skill itself has a bunch of smaller skills that made up learning to ride a bike, like learning to steer, petal, balance, and doing all together.
Now the learner stages goes for everything, think about the different skills you have now. If you know how to drive and have been doing it for a while do you think about driving the way you did when you first started probably not. You most likely are able to focus on what’s going on around you and not worry about driving because you are unconsciously competent. If you never heard of this before then you just went through the stages to learn this information. It’s a little different but you became aware of i,t learned the meaning of concepts, applied it to a skill you might of learned already and examined the stages at work, and now hopefully when you hear this information again you won’t have to think about what each stage is, you should will be able to point out the stages someone is in. This is a theory created by 1940's psychologist Abraham Maslow. I think this explains the plateau George Leonard is talking about in his book, because we can only focus on small bits of a skill at a time we experience the plateau. We are consistently becoming aware of new skills to master, and the time spent on the plateau is the second stage of learning the training and the practice until we can figure out how to do it better. The reason why drawing is a long term process is because of all the different skills you have to master and normally you don’t spend enough time on each skill you jump around. You focus on being able to copy an image by learning how to measure perspective and how to shade and how the light reflects on the object and the different parts of foreshortening and so on. To be able to do that without a reference to refer to means you have to understand how each works and how to apply it and then do it until you are able to do it unconsciously.
George Leonard’s Dabbler, Obsessive, Hack, and Path the Mastery
These are all different types of learners you could be, I am not one for labels but it is interesting to know and good to know the pitfalls that the first three have. I’ll briefly describe how each approaches drawing. Check his book if you want to learn more.
The Dabbler is someone who likes to start new things he is a jack of all trade’s type person. He likes the process of starting something new, as an artist the dabbler would buy new sketchbooks, buy new pencils, fancy inking tools, maybe software like photoshop whatever. He will practice for a while until he draws something decent that he likes he basically reaches his first plateau but after that he quickly losses interest and convinces himself to pick up something else. The Obsessive is the type person who wants to be an expert already he tries to cram as much knowledge as possible into his brain and becomes obsessed with drawing. He will probably get better quickly because of the amount of time and energy he put in but soon after will quickly get burnt out and quit. The hacker is the person who is the forever doodler he reaches a level that he likes and stays there indefinitely he doesn’t try to learn anything else. They all have there are problems and struggle to stay on a path of consistent learning. George Leonard says the best way to go about getting better is to remain consistent and creating a habit for yourself that way it is natural for you to practice. You should set a definite amount of time each day like an hour whatever you want but you have to do it. Each week pick one thing you are going to focus on and small chunk the massive of information about ways to draw. Learn a new technique and work on it till you are comfortable with it. Another way is to get better is to copy the work of artists you like and study how they draw. I’ll probably post some articles of me copying and studying other artist; also you should buy a small sketchbook that you can carry around I do this so I don’t end up drawing on something I am not supposed to. Now that you understand the process of learning you shouldn’t get upset when you feel no progress because you understand it’s just a plateau and you enjoy drawing anyway so you should be alright and not freak out and quit. Ok that’s it.
-Guy
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