Personally I feel that if I've spent more than 3h on an artistic work, it's wasted time.. at that point, it tends to become a game of trying to eliminate an error whose nature you do not comprehend.
(FWIW I'm clearly not an introvert, unlike (I posit) most artists -- I care more about doing than understanding.)
Both these statements are very interesting, Ai. I'd like it if you explained more about how it chasing an error you don't comprehend doesn't lead to some sort of comprehension of *something* (perhaps not how to solve the error itself directly) that's worthwhile. 3 hours per art piece - depending on how fast one is as an artist - might be too low to achieve forward movement and to get better from piece to piece in my opinion.
re: comprehension:
I often find the principle behind 'you learn to ski in the summer' works for me:
It seems to work much better to work for a time on something, then intentionally spend time away from it, drawing other stuff. The downside? disconnection from the original work -- maybe not in spirit, but it may well look like crap later, not worth the time to fix. The upside -- there seems to be a kind of synergistic effect: as long as you're drawing, you can be integrating the knowledge you are acquiring, subconsciously.. until you reach a saturation point for a given area, which gets in the way of noticing anything much consciously any more, like your consciousness gets tired of that for a while...
If you understand what I mean when I talk about the difference between epistemological (understanding)
rationality and instrumental (achieving) rationality, I'm basically just saying, working on instrumental rationality is both simpler and more rewarding in terms of boosting both: I have learned to trust my subconscious processes to notice things I don't have the processing power to notice consciously. Then I just need to identify the differences in my behaviour in order to boost to my conscious understanding.
(
the four stages of competence might be relevant here)
So as to understanding -- I believe that the gains you can make in conscious understanding are much less than the conscious understanding you can gain through first doing in great variety. eg. 100 5-minute drawings of cats are much more valuable in terms of knowledge acquired per unit of time, than 500 minutes spent on one or two drawings of cats.. basically because most of your computational power is subconscious. (I'm aware incidentally that most people reading this will attribute more of their understanding and actions to conscious motivations and thoughts than can remotely be justified... this is a well documented cognitive bug.)
The 3h thing: in retrospect, I would say it depends on a) experience level -- how many mistakes you've already done, and b) cognitive skill -- your ability to notice elements that are discordant with reality.
Currently I feel that I will never really have 'enough' artistic vocabulary, if you know what I mean by that..
so I'm focusing on getting the feel of various kinds of things; don't really want to hang around too long on one subject . I need more experience.
Conversely my cognitive skills are quite good. (I found things like
LessWrong's explanation of normal and quantum physics had a great impact on my ability to see things more like what they are. various other stuff helped me to train and trust more in my subconscious ability to notice things, rather than constantly trying to notice errors consciously). I still would like to comment that as the duration of time increases, the chances of remaining in 'the zone' drops. Hence the effectiveness of eg. repetition+speed drills -- forcing you to devote all your attention to the one thing, at which point you notice more things consciously but a huge quantity more subconsciously.
This also applies, IMO, if what you are practicing is 'finishing' -- you need to choose things that you can finish quickly, so you don't get stuck.
(actual paid work is different, of course. but paid work doesn't focus on learning, which is what I'm talking about here -- efficient learning processes. actual period of time spent on a single piece has to be short enough that you can sustain that 'HUP HUP HUP HUP! CHAAARGE!' mindset)
* by 'you' in this post I mean anybody. While these are mainly my observations of myself, my understanding is that they reflect general human cognitive behaviours.
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hope some of that makes sense