Art is the practice of converting units of life into units of materialized ideas.
Maybe. What?
Art is easy: you start with life, that is, experiences, or ideas, or beliefs, or anything that (generally) triggers an emotion of some kind in you and will (probably) trigger an emotion of some kind in someone else, and make something out of materials that captures or makes it real outside of you.
Okay, possibly sometimes. Let's not get bogged down by insisting on it.
So we're converting units of life into units of material ideas? What's a unit of life?
In physics, energy divided up into units in a number of ways, depending on how it's used. Newtons are units of force (one kilogram times one meter per second), joules are units of work (one meter of a one-newton force in a given direction), as are watts (one joule per second, in an electric circuit).
In art, “units of life” are divided up any number of ways also. The lines are subjective, and are so much blurrier because of this as to be mostly nonexistent. But when it’s turned into art, life is definitely carved up in certain regular ways.
The most basic and important format of life that goes into art, at least in my experience, is time itself.
How good is a given work? How high can we raise the quality, how complete can the execution be? How far can we push the ideas, how clearly can we convey the details, how fully can it be brought into the audience’s mind?
The answer always depends for me on one follow-up question:
How much time do we have?
The more time I can put into a project, the better it will turn out and the better I'll be satisfied for it. But my time is limited, and the more time I spend on any one project, the less I have for others.
Let's say I'm working on a drawing. I have (1) leisure time for creative work and (2) actually set aside some of it for working (two large assumptions, but so it goes).
Generally if it's a piece that I'll wind up being happy with, then before I start working on it I spend some time being intimidated by it in idea form and waiting, in various ways, to actually get to work on it.
Of the three hours I'll burn through getting a decent drawing churned out, I'd say about forty-five minutes to an hour of that time is spend on parts that will actually end up being seen and appreciated by the audience.
The rest is either draft work, which is useful (preliminary sketches and erasures), or on fighting the quirks of the program and unintentional mistakes, which is not.
Practice reduces the second category of time sink the longer I spend doing the work, but it would be nice to be able to just jump straight to the finished product without losing so much time to the process.
What to do?
Here's a few thoughts I've had for trying to be more effective in creative time:
1. Dive in. Do not hesitate, don't spend any more time "planning" then is necessary. Attack the project with energy and without pausing for breath. Get as much done as possible, and clean up if necessary.
2. Pay attention to shortcuts that work and make notes of them, then force yourself to use them until they become habit. Don't get shackled by one particular set of techniques, but don't pass over useful tricks because you're not paying attention.
3. Futz around with tweaking and revisions as little as possible. Practice will help you find clean lines and get the result you want with minimal fuss, as long as you keep at it. For now, accept that the work won't be perfect, and keep moving on.
In the end it's results that matter, but a good process is a kind of meta-result that we're all striving to find for ourselves.
The more time I put into trying to be the best artist I can be, the more I find that a lot of what we'd call style is a balance of what we're inclined to think of as a perfect ideal balanced against what is available to us and convenient.
It's probably very rare for any piece turn out 100% as perfectly as we'd like, without being able to spend a disproportionate amount of time getting it done.
In an ideal world, we'd have weeks or even years to dedicate to even small pet projects in order to get them turned just so and rendered in just exactly the way we'd like.
But even the greatest masters could never do work that would take longer than one lifetime to complete, and generally if they knew what they were doing they required a lot less time than that.
For instance, this post I think could be a lot more direct and specific -- I plan on rewriting it one day to be more on point, maybe with some fun illustrations, and in such a way as to be more helpful and clear to someone reading it with the goal of doing their own work better.
But for now I'm afraid we're out of time.
Generally if it's a piece that I'll wind up being happy with, then before I start working on it I spend some time being intimidated by it in idea form and waiting, in various ways, to actually get to work on it.
Of the three hours I'll burn through getting a decent drawing churned out, I'd say about forty-five minutes to an hour of that time is spend on parts that will actually end up being seen and appreciated by the audience.
The rest is either draft work, which is useful (preliminary sketches and erasures), or on fighting the quirks of the program and unintentional mistakes, which is not.
Practice reduces the second category of time sink the longer I spend doing the work, but it would be nice to be able to just jump straight to the finished product without losing so much time to the process.
What to do?
Here's a few thoughts I've had for trying to be more effective in creative time:
1. Dive in. Do not hesitate, don't spend any more time "planning" then is necessary. Attack the project with energy and without pausing for breath. Get as much done as possible, and clean up if necessary.
2. Pay attention to shortcuts that work and make notes of them, then force yourself to use them until they become habit. Don't get shackled by one particular set of techniques, but don't pass over useful tricks because you're not paying attention.
3. Futz around with tweaking and revisions as little as possible. Practice will help you find clean lines and get the result you want with minimal fuss, as long as you keep at it. For now, accept that the work won't be perfect, and keep moving on.
In the end it's results that matter, but a good process is a kind of meta-result that we're all striving to find for ourselves.
The more time I put into trying to be the best artist I can be, the more I find that a lot of what we'd call style is a balance of what we're inclined to think of as a perfect ideal balanced against what is available to us and convenient.
It's probably very rare for any piece turn out 100% as perfectly as we'd like, without being able to spend a disproportionate amount of time getting it done.
In an ideal world, we'd have weeks or even years to dedicate to even small pet projects in order to get them turned just so and rendered in just exactly the way we'd like.
But even the greatest masters could never do work that would take longer than one lifetime to complete, and generally if they knew what they were doing they required a lot less time than that.
For instance, this post I think could be a lot more direct and specific -- I plan on rewriting it one day to be more on point, maybe with some fun illustrations, and in such a way as to be more helpful and clear to someone reading it with the goal of doing their own work better.
But for now I'm afraid we're out of time.
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