#191 - What If You Discover You Have Been Doing Something Wrong For A Long Time - Do You Really Have To Re-Learn To Draw?
Practice Drawing This 3D Model. 
iger Woods is the best golf player ever. One time, he was dissatisfied with his technique and decided to re-learn how to play golf from scratch, to learn a different technique from scratch. He was the greatest golf player of all time, and yet he found himself having to re-learn golf.
Look at this video and observe how Kim Jung Gi held his brush.
And look at this video and see how Katsuya Terada holds his pens.
They are all holding it upwards!
I wasn’t holding my pen that way. I tried it, and it makes a lot of sense. You naturally hold the pen away from you a bit more, and because of that, it’s easier to make marks in any direction. It forces you away from your page slightly more so that you are not too close to your drawing and forces you into a more painterly way of drawing.
I’m not comparing myself to Tiger Woods regarding skill level, but just like he needed to re-learn how to play golf, we may occasionally have to re-learn how to even hold a pen.
Join Me!
I’m trying something new: long YouTube videos with timed sessions with rotated 3D objects. The first was a four-and-a-half-hour video of randomized boxes that change every two minutes.
These are designed for drawing practice. Of course, you can also use the 3D models on the website, but this is a test to see if some people prefer YouTube videos.
YouTube videos have an advantage; you can chat live during the video’s premiere.
Someone came up with the idea of using a voice channel in Discord to chat live while drawing, which was brilliant! So I want to try that for the next session, an eight-hour video of rotated cylinders for drawing reference. It’s an excellent exercise for practicing placing things in rotated boxes.
You can join me live there and chat through text with me and other artists, or even join the Discord Voice Channel.
I can’t be there for eight hours, but I will try to be there as much as possible. But it’s a chance to chat among yourselves while drawing!
If this works, maybe we can meet up and chat like this every Sunday! I’d need to make a video like this every week, but they are recorded Timed Sessions. I record at eight times the speed, which means I can record an eight-hour video in one hour. Processing the video takes two hours, for a total of three hours. It doesn’t take me time, though. The computer is doing all the work.
You can also do the exercises on the website, but this setup will allow us to draw together as we text chat on YouTube or chat in the Discord voice channel.
Things In Boxes
Someone reminded me this week that we practice drawing boxes rotated in many orientations because we want to eventually be able to draw rotated objects by placing such objects in these rotated boxes.
The video up on YouTube this Sunday is about that. It shows boxes with cylinders in them. It’s useful to draw the box first and then the cylinder inside it.
But then it dawned on me that there are many 3D models for objects on Practice Drawing This and that I could make them more useful as tools for drawing practice by drawing the bounding box around them. That way, you can practice drawing the box first and then putting the object inside that box so that you will hopefully be able to do that from your imagination later.
You can find the 3D models with bounding boxes here.
I also made a new model, a folded sheet inside a box.
This Week
Important: If you use the art flashcards , all the data is stored in your browser. That’s nice and safe and private, but it also means you lose the data that records your progress if you accidentally delete all data in the browser or if you switch phones.
I created a way to download the data to your local computer to solve that. You can later restore your data in your browser if you lost the data because you switched phones, for example.
The download backup and restore facility is at the bottom of the Currently Scheduled Cards page.
Timed Drawing
There is a section on the website where you can do Timed Drawing . The system will randomly choose from the 500+ images currently in the flashcards system for you to draw. You can specify how long you want to draw each reference and the category. If you only want to draw hands, heads, or poses, that is possible.
Timed Drawing was a second-class citizen, as I focused all my attention on improving the Art Flashcards. I have updated the Timed Drawing section; it now tracks the same statistics. If you don’t feel like doing the Art Flashcards, switch to the Timed Drawing page and draw whatever image is presented.
Computer Games As Tools To Improve Skills
I made a computer program long ago that helped me train in touch typing. The program would show a sentence, and I was to type the letters away as fast as I could. It tracked time and penalized incorrect letters. It was like a computer game.
It worked!
Computers can be programmed to be great tools for practicing something. I don’t think art education does that nearly enough. Most online art education comes in the form of images, PDFs, videos, and exercises. These are digital variations of tangible lesson materials: books, papers, and live lectures.
Making drawing practice feel like playing a game. That is the idea behind the Art Flashcards on Practice Drawing This.
I’ve been spending a lot of time with my Art Flashcards the past few weeks, and like the blind typing game, it works! I am having a ton of fun filling sketchbook pages. I make 20-30 drawings daily, drawing for one to two hours.
I am learning to let go of the idea that every drawing has to be good. If the drawing fails, it is just a five-minute drawing. I learn from what I did wrong and can do better next time.
I love how productive it makes me. I grab a sketchbook and pens, open the Art Flashcards page on my mobile, and start drawing!
I am terrible at promoting cool things I made. This is one example. The Art Flashcards are really cool, and they are free. How do I let the world know?
To that end, I made a landing page introducing the art flashcards.
And I want to show how cool it is. Amazingly, I had to re-learn this lesson: in writing, writers often say, “Show, don’t tell.” The idea behind that is to let the audience reach the conclusion themselves. If I say, “X is true,” you might shrug and think that’s my opinion. If I show you, you will reach the same conclusion.
How do I show how cool Art Flashcards are? I am thinking of sharing my sketchbook pages like I am doing below, or maybe I can give a free course for a cohort to do the art flashcards for a few weeks with free feedback from me.
More later, but for now, back to the sketchbook!
