On Exercises

[holland]

Exercises are practice activities that help you to train a very specific skill. They are generally useful only in certain windows of time, which may cycle back around periodically.

Not every student will need every exercise. They're not tasks you need to check off, just tools that you go to when you need to understand something or improve in a very specific area.

Art exercises can be broadly classified into one of a finite number of exercise archetypes, based on how they influence the brain rather than the subject matter or fundamental they target.

However the actual exercises themselves are functionally infinite.

There is this weird misconception online that there is some objective "canon" with a handful of exercises that every artist does that magically teaches them how to draw, but that's just not how it works.

Most of the exercises you're going to find in textbooks and such will not be enough to target your unique issues. When self-teaching, it's your own responsibilty to create and modify exercises to target your specific needs.

For example, a textboox exercise may have too many unfamiliar steps for your brain to latch onto one and improve it. To solve that problem, you might:

1. Choose to focus on just the first step until it's comfortable. This is fine if the first step is simple, but if it's its own whole field of study and is standing between you and the thing you really want to learn, it might be better to skip ahead.

2. "Freeze" some of the skills and remove them from the equation. For example, when learning fashion illustration, it's common to trace bases called "croquis." This removes the need to learn figure drawing from the equation, which would otherwise be a distraction.

3. Replace the exercise with many smaller ones targeting the subskills until you can achieve it. This is similar to #2, but it leaves open the option for exercises in a wildly different format that may be better suited to a particular subskill. For example, if you want to draw a cluttered room, you might find it helpful to do an exercise where you draw tree trunks on a single horizontal plane first to build your confidence and familiararity with clutter on one plane. Then, you might find it helpful to do an exercise with arches going down the walls, to help you get comfortable putting things in space on a vertical plane. etc.

Exercises can be too simple, too. A good example is the 250 box exercise in drawabox. What makes it hard is mostly the grind and lack of context. A progression of more detailed exercises where you're trying to arrange those boxes in increasingly complex ways in a space would teach much more information whilst being creatively stimulating.

You have to figure out what suits you given your needs and temperament.

In a self-taught environment, it's also your responsibilty to recognize when the exercise simply isn't workng for you, so you can make the decision to pivot and try something else.

An exercise that is appropriate for your level and needs should result in near-immediate improvement. That improvement might be in the quality / speed / quantity of your work, in your sufficient comprehension of a relevant subject, or in your subjective experiences regarding the ease of creation.

Whatever it is, it should be obvious. Don't spend months grinding at something with some wishy-washy sense of "well, maybe it's helping." Seriously. Respect and value your own time by shifting gears when an exercise or resource isn't helping.