You’re Never too Old or too Good to Learn
I’ve been on a long quest to get back into creating professional-level art that started about five years ago.
But the real quest began long long before that.
If you’re into doing art then you realize that improvement only comes with time and practice. I’m sure you’ve heard about how important it is to put in 10,000 hours, to master a skill. I’ve put that time in, but I started drawing seriously when I was five years old.
In his 2008 book “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell wrote that “ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.” His examples included, Bill Gates, who was able to start coding as a teen since he attended a progressive Seattle high school , and The Beatles, who played eight-hour gigs in German clubs long before they invaded America. Those opportunities to practice early and often — along with precocious talent — allowed them to respectively invent software and modern rock and roll.
https://www.businessinsider.com/malcolm-gladwell-explains-the-10000-hour-rule-2014-6
The frustrations of my terrible but fun drawings when I was a kid, gave way to some sophistication when I was a teenager, and became more professional when I was in my 20s. So much so that I got some commissions, some illustration jobs for magazines, and I was involved in self-publishing some work first with the Rough Cut group and then with Rain King Studios.
Then… I walked away.
I wrote about this experience and what I learned along the way in this piece that I posted on Quora.
But I’m at a different phase now. Now, I want to get really good at art. Better than I’ve ever been before.
The work that I’ve been producing in the last year has been good enough to keep me in commissioned portraits non-stop. I’m also doing some commercial work again. And I’m looking at what’s next.
So… I did a thing.
After picking up several books on anatomy and talking to close artist friends, and polling my wider network, I’ve returned to studying anatomy, and backgrounds, and folds in clothes, and color work, and everything else you can imagine.
