Skill Pillars - what you need to get good at art
Summary
TLDRIn this video, the creator outlines a 10,000-hour journey to enhance foundational art skills, or 'skill pillars,' essential for all artists. These include composition, value, color, form and perspective, and technical ability with tools. The focus is on mastering broad, versatile skills for efficient learning, drawing parallels to the Pareto Principle for maximum impact. The creator also emphasizes the interrelation of these skills and the importance of understanding them for artistic development.
Takeaways
- 🎨 **Skill Pillars**: The video discusses the concept of 'skill pillars', which are fundamental skills necessary for drawing and painting.
- 📚 **Simplification**: The creator advocates for simplifying the learning process by focusing on a few key areas to study.
- 🔗 **Grouping**: It's suggested to group related skills together to make learning more efficient and interconnected.
- 🚀 **Efficiency**: The approach emphasizes finding skills that offer the best return on investment in terms of effort and time.
- 🏋️♂️ **Broad Skills**: The video stresses the importance of mastering broad skills that apply to all artists, regardless of their specific field.
- 🌟 **Composition**: The first skill pillar is composition, which includes techniques like the rule of thirds and using light and shadow to guide the eye.
- 🌑 **Value**: Value is the second pillar and is crucial for creating realistic and solid forms in art, as it's how we perceive the world visually.
- 🌈 **Colour**: Colour is the third pillar and involves understanding not just colours themselves but also colour harmonies and their psychological effects.
- 📏 **Form & Perspective**: The fourth pillar focuses on creating believable 3D forms and understanding anatomy, which is essential for depth and realism.
- 🛠️ **Technical Ability with Tools**: The final pillar is about mastering the tools of the trade, whether it's traditional media or digital tools.
- 📈 **Pareto Principle**: The video references the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) to suggest focusing on the core 20% of skills that lead to 80% of proficiency.
Q & A
What is the main focus of the video?
-The main focus of the video is to discuss the fundamental skills, or 'skill pillars', required for drawing and painting, with the aim of enhancing these skills over a 10,000-hour time frame.
What are the three concepts the speaker wants the audience to consider before watching the video?
-The three concepts are Simplification, Grouping, and Efficiency. Simplification refers to studying as few things as possible, Grouping is about combining these few things into related items, and Efficiency is about finding the best return for the least effort.
Why does the speaker emphasize the importance of understanding value in art?
-Understanding value is crucial because it's how we perceive the world and how our brain interprets visual information. It allows artists to create realistic and solid representations in space.
What is the significance of the Pareto Principle in the context of this video?
-The Pareto Principle, or 80/20 rule, is mentioned to emphasize focusing on the core 20% of skills that will lead to 80% of the desired outcomes in drawing and painting, aiming for efficient learning.
What are the five skill pillars identified in the video?
-The five skill pillars are Composition, Value, Colour, Form & Perspective, and Technical Ability with Tools.
How does the speaker suggest approaching the skill of Colour?
-The speaker suggests mastering values first before delving into colour, as understanding value is fundamental to appreciating colour. Colour includes colour harmonies, light, and cultural awareness.
What resources does the speaker recommend for studying Composition?
-The speaker recommends 'Framed Ink' by Marcos Mateu-Mestre and landscape books by Mitchell Albala for studying Composition.
How does the speaker relate the skill of Form & Perspective to other skill pillars?
-The speaker relates Form & Perspective to other skill pillars by stating that it overlaps with value and is always being worked on regardless of which pillar is being drilled.
What does the speaker suggest for mastering Technical Ability with Tools?
-The speaker suggests freely experimenting and finding good combinations of paper and mark-making tools, as well as mastering the use of different art software.
Why is it important to establish a baseline in the speaker's 10,000-hour learning experiment?
-Establishing a baseline is important to measure progress and validate the effectiveness of the learning method over the 10,000-hour period.
What does the speaker mean by 'drilling' in the context of learning these skill pillars?
-‘Drilling’ refers to the focused and deliberate practice of each skill pillar to internalize and master the concepts discussed in the video.
Outlines
🎨 Developing Artistic Skills Efficiently
The speaker begins by expressing gratitude to subscribers and emphasizing the goal of enhancing foundational skills, or 'skill pillars,' for drawing and painting over a 10,000-hour period. The pillars are essential for all artists regardless of their specific field. Simplification, grouping, and efficiency are highlighted as key concepts for learning. The speaker clarifies that while there are skills unique to different art professions, the focus should be on broad, universally applicable skills. The Pareto Principle is introduced, suggesting that mastering a small percentage of core skills can lead to significant improvement. The speaker concludes by emphasizing the importance of starting with fundamental skills before moving on to more specific ones.
📚 The Five Pillars of Artistic Skills
The speaker outlines five key skill pillars: Composition, Value, Colour, Form & Perspective, and Technical Ability with Tools. Each pillar is essential for different aspects of art, such as creating appealing arrangements, understanding light and dark, capturing realistic color, achieving 3D effects, and mastering various art tools. The speaker provides examples of how these skills apply across different art forms and suggests resources for learning each pillar. The importance of focusing on one pillar at a time while still developing all of them is emphasized, akin to training different muscle groups simultaneously.
🛠️ Mastering Tools and Techniques
The final pillar discussed is Technical Ability with Tools, which encompasses the mastery of various art tools and materials. The speaker acknowledges that while some tools may be specific to certain artists, the ability to use any tool effectively is crucial. The speaker suggests that experimentation is the best way to improve with tools, and mentions a few resources for learning about specific tools like gouache. The speaker reiterates the importance of simplicity in understanding and practicing these skills, and hints at sharing a method for attacking these skill pillars in future videos. The session ends with a teaser for the next video, which will discuss setting goals and establishing a baseline for improvement.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Skill Pillars
💡Simplification
💡Grouping
💡Efficiency
💡Pareto Principle
💡Composition
💡Value
💡Colour
💡Form & Perspective
💡Technical Ability with Tools
Highlights
Introduction to the concept of 'skill pillars' essential for drawing and painting.
Emphasis on the importance of simplification in learning art skills.
Explanation of grouping as a method to simplify and efficiently learn art skills.
Discussion on the efficiency of learning, aiming for the best return with the least effort.
Comparison of art skills to athletic abilities, highlighting the transferability of certain skills.
The necessity of understanding color fundamentals regardless of the medium used.
Differentiating between skills needed for traditional art and design.
The concept of focusing on common skills required by all artists.
Introduction of the Pareto Principle in the context of learning art.
The idea of mastering a core 20% of skills for 80% of outcomes in art.
Identification of the five skill pillars: Composition, Value, Color, Form & Perspective, and Technical Ability with Tools.
Description of the Composition pillar, including the rule of thirds and emotional viewpoint.
Explanation of the Value pillar and its importance in creating realistic and solid forms in art.
Discussion on the Color pillar, including color harmonies and psychological effects.
Details on the Form & Perspective pillar, focusing on creating believable 3D representations.
Emphasis on the Technical Ability with Tools pillar, including mastery of various art tools and media.
The importance of interrelated skills and the benefits of training multiple skills simultaneously.
The author's approach to establishing a baseline for skill improvement.
Anticipation of sharing personal work examples and discussing goal setting in future content.
Transcripts
Time for another video And a quick shout and big thank you out to those who have subscribed so far.
It’s great to have you here following along, and nice to see other people who are passionate about
developing themselves efficiently to get better at drawing and painting. If you’re new here,
that’s what I am trying to do, across a 10,000 hour time frame, and today we are going to talk
about the skills we need to enhance within the 10k. I call these skills ‘pillars’.
So what are skill pillars? These are the fundamental skills required to be good at
drawing and painting. Note I say drawing and painting, and not ‘to be an artist’ or to ‘be
a designer, or illustrator’, as much like in sport, there are certain skills in art
that help out some professions much more than others, and we aren’t so concerned with those.
Before you watch this video, I just want to preload your minds with some concepts
that should help you understand my approach to drawing and painting
The first is SIMPLIFICATION, I want as few things to study as possible.
The second is GROUPING, I want to combine these few things we have
to study into as small and compact a group of related items as possible, making it even simpler.
The third is EFFICIENCY, meaning I want to find which things will give us the best return,
for the least effort. That ought to get us to where we want to be as fast as possible.
As mentioned in my previous video,
the high level mastery of throwing a baseball hard and fast only applies to those who play
baseball, but flexibility and hand eye coordination are needed for every sport.
In the same sense, you don’t need to understand the ins and outs of oil
paint if you only ever want to work with watercolours,
but you will need to understand how colour works, regardless of what you paint with.
That’s what I’m talking about here, the BROADEST skills that ALL artists need,
trimmed down to their simplest form.
The complexity of learning to draw and paint is one of those annoying stumbling
blocks that you might experience as a beginner. There is a lot to learn,
and the skills needed actually seem to depend on what specific field of art you want to end up in.
For example, traditional artists like Monet or Richard Schmidt can capture
what is in front of them with an astonishing degree of accuracy,
yet add their own flair to it. This seems like something we need to be able to do but WAIT!
If you want to be a ‘designer’, like Scott Robertson or Syd Mead, then you can maybe
actually ignore being able to accurately capture the thing in front of you, because you will have
to be able to draw things that do not even exist yet! From your head! From your imagination.
This is totally different to what those artists were just doing… So which do we practise?
Whenever you find yourself in a situation like this, you want to find the things that
they ALL HAVE IN COMMON. What do they ALL practice? That’s what you want to focus on.
Now clearly, there are people who are really good at specific things, like those baseball players.
You will need to be very good at just drawing cars to become a car designer, but I’m going
to ignore this fact FOR NOW, like ignoring the baseball players, and focus on the much broader
and useful skills, because the more specific skills depend on the more general, simpler ones.
Those are the ones we want. Long distance runners and sprinters,
BOTH learned to walk very well first!
Grouping.
Remember, we are keeping things simple, we want as few as possible, and we want to group them.
If we were trying to get in shape, and build muscle,
we don’t care about the difference between push ups, shoulder presses and squats. We
can just call that ‘pushing’ in general. A simplified group of related tangible,
practicable movements that we can perform diligently, as we see ourselves get stronger.
The cool thing about grouping our simple skills is that they become interrelated.
That means when we train one, we actually train others, much like muscle groups.
Sure, we pick one to emphasise, but in reality, you’re training multiple skills up at once,
and I believe this is absolutely key to developing at the fastest, most efficient pace possible.
When I came up with this training method, I tried to consider something called the Pareto Principle,
or 80/20 rule. This is a principle coined by Italian polymath Vilfredo Pareto,
who noticed that 80% of peas he grew in his garden came from just 20% of his pea plants,
and this approximate ratio is seen all over the place, both in nature, and in human activity.
For example, roughly 20% of words in a language can be used to say 80% of sentences you use in
everyday conversation. Master the most common 20% of Spanish words and grammar, and you will
be able to say 80% of things you want to say in Spanish. It's been applied to gourmet cooking,
Brazilian jiu jitsu, even ballroom dancing - and the results are pretty nuts.
Tim Ferriss uses the Pareto Principle in learning new skills, where he states that
you want to ‘figure out and get good at the core 20% of stuff that will allow you to do
80% of the activity’. We don't want to train fluffy marginally related painty drawy things.
We want the core, laser focused activities that will lead to fast and direct improvement. If we
learn the 20% of skill that makes us good at drawing and painting, we should be able to
draw and paint 80% of things we want, even from our imaginations, with no reference!
We will get to that key 20% when we return to the pareto principle
another time to see how we can apply it to our skill pillars, but for now,
i've tried to bear that in mind and frame the skill pillars within that context.
The simplest, most efficient grouping - our skill pillars
I’ve settled on the following 5 skill pillars for the purposes of our studies.
Remember, when we work any drill, we will work more than one pillar,
sometimes all of them, but we will usually pick ONE to emphasise.
Let’s start with the simplest:
Composition
It includes stuff like the rule of thirds, how to convey emotion with our viewpoint, how to use
light and shadow shapes to guide the eye across a canvas, and where to place a character in a scene.
Every drawer or painter must know at least a little about composition,
because they will be working within a space, be it a canvas, a screen, or a post-it note,
and so they will have to understand how to position the subject to make it appealing.
Storyboard artists use this pillar to convey a specific emotion. A designer might choose to use
a 30-60 perspective grid instead of an 80-10 one to portray a sports car, because it provides the
best viewpoint to understand the design from. A landscape artist will see the vista before
them as a collection of shapes and values, and arrange those on the canvas in such a way as to
guide the eye through it. So this is something that clearly we all need to be proficient in.
I have a few resources I like that I will be using for drilling this pillar, including Framed Ink by
Marcos Mateu- Mestre. I also like the landscape books by Mitchell Albala, which show how to think
about capturing a scene in front of you, so I will be using these as a curriculum of sorts.
Next up, Value It allows us to make things
seem realistic and solid in space, and enables us to understand what light is and how it works,
which is vital, because that is how we see the world around us.
I will say that again. Listen carefully! Value is essential because it is how we see the world,
and how our brain interprets information visually. Despite us being able to draw
objects with outlines, in reality, no outlines exist, just changes in light and dark, changes
in value. Even colours are all represented as values, which becomes apparent if you desaturate
a photo to view it in black and white. By understanding value, a painter can
describe form, which we will cover in a bit, and make an object seem real. Understanding
this gives us a great deal of control in how our viewers understand our subjects.
A portrait artist can push some parts of the subject back into space,
and emphasise others by pushing or pulling the values. A skilled pencil artist can use graphite
to make light and dark shapes, in 2d, that pop forms out at us in 3d. They can trick our
brains into thinking this image is jumping out of the page!
My favourite book on the subject of values, is How To Render by Scott Robertson,
so I will be working from that to drill this, and to try and internalise what it teaches,
but the Mitchell Albala landscape books also have some really good stuff.
Let’s take this up a notch:
Colour
Getting a little harder now. This includes the infinite amount of
colours we could deploy in a painting, but also things like colour harmonies,
more on light, as well as things like human psychology and cultural awareness.
This is the thing that most beginners screw up on, myself included,
and it’s because we have to understand value before we can really appreciate
what colour actually is. This is something I really want to work on during the 10k,
but before I jump into it, I want to spend a lot of time just getting good at values first.
Colours can be as simple as branding choices,
and as complex as manipulating human emotion and psychology. Cinematographers
and colour key artists, for example, use it to make us feel a certain way.
It’s also very subjective. If we get 3 landscape painters to all paint the same scene, their colour
choices will be varied, and this is because different people see colours very differently,
and what they choose to emphasise when using colour in their work.
The colour harmonies and schemes you may have seen before, are systems that we can use as
shortcuts to make our work appealing and pleasing to the human brain, and represent
an easier to manage method of learning how to manipulate colour, so we will be drilling those.
The best resource I have found for learning this is Colour and Light by James Gurney,
but I also have a book with the same name published by 3D Total which is very good.
Okay… the big one,
Form & Perspective
This actually overlaps with value technically once we start painting,
but we are thinking simply, and so really we are talking about whether we can make
something look believable and 3D, using lines. That’s it.
Technically, it also includes the study of anatomy, and developing a visual library.
We might also want to include things like rhythm, gesture, etc. But remember,
those are more specific. Think simply - make it believable, make it 3D.
This pillar is the ability for a sketch artist to make a scene feel
deep and three dimensional with no value, and no colour. When Kim Jung Gi draws a
cool picture with a ballpoint pen, this pillar is like 90% of how he does it.
Remember our grouping? How everything is interrelated? Well no matter if you
are working your composition, value, or colour,
you’re ALWAYS working form. It’s super important. But that’s okay,
because every drill we do, we will be working this pillar, so we WILL get very very good at it.
The best book I have found on form is How To Draw by Scott Robertson, so I will be working
from that, and I have a few others like Framed Perspective by Mateu- Mestre, and there are
some classics by people like Francis Ching, but honestly, most books on this subject just say
the same information in slightly different ways. I have some other books on learning
things like anatomy that will fall under this pillar, but don’t worry about those for now.
Still with me so far? We have one more pillar, and this one is slightly separate from the others,
but once again, WE WILL ALWAYS BE WORKING IT no matter what we choose to drill.
Technical Ability with Tools
The final pillar is another very broad pillar, and contradicting slightly what I said before,
some of what is inside this pillar might NOT be relevant to you. It includes all
the possible ways we could make art - all the tools. If you are an oil painter, then I want
you to think of this pillar as all of your oil paint, brushes, canvas,
or maybe art boards. You might want to try your hand at oil, water colour, digital painting,
and also be good at marker rendering like syd mead, then this pillar represents those tools.
But the fact is, whatever tools you use, you will need to get good at drawing with that brush pen,
or painting with that gouache set, and every time you change the surface,
or the brand of paint, or the brush, or even the environment you paint in, you will have new
variables to contend with and to learn from. This mastery of this, we will treat as
separate to mastery of any of the other pillars. Getting good with your tools.
I don’t have many books on this, although there are some rated very highly like the Oil Painters
Bible by Marilyn Scott. I feel the best way to get better is to just freely experiment,
but I have read Rediscovering Gouache by Blau, and would recommend it,
and the Scott Robertson books emphasise the need to find good combos of paper and mark making tool,
and make some suggestions that we will try out. You could also include competent use
of any softwares in here, like knowing how to make Photoshop or Procreate do the things you
want it to do, the shortcuts, how to make brushes, how to use adjustment layers, etc.
And that’s about it. Remember the most important thing is that you think as simply as possible.
Forget anatomy and perspective, just call it ‘form’. Forget about the zorn palette
and triadic colour schemes, just think ‘colour’, at least for now.
To recap… We have just thought about,
in very simple terms, what painting and drawing actually are, regardless of if
you are a comic book artist or a car designer. In order for us to progress as fast as possible,
within 10,000 hours, we need to master those 5 pillars in combination.
We will do that through 2 things - understanding, and drilling.
I'll share my method for attacking this soon, but before that,
in order for this experiment to work and be valid, we need to establish a baseline…
So join me next time, where I’ll share some previous work examples,
and discuss a little more about goal setting.
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