This is Bruce fuckin’ Springsteen saying that he was not a natural genius and he would have to work hard. And let me tell you something right here: no one is a natural genius. We have talents to a lesser or greater degree, but it is a waste unless we work hard at the small things.
When Virat Kohli first started batting in the nets, well before he had started shaving, he had to focus on the small things to get better. Sure, he probably got there with great hand-eye coordination, but now he had to cultivate all the good habits that have to be reflexive in a great batsman. He had to work on his footwork, the angle of the elbow while moving into a drive, the movement of the shoulder into the line, the balance of the body, the stillness of the head. And only after hours and days and weeks and months and years of consicious practice could some of those become internalised to the point that an onlooker could say, ‘Genius!’
Genius?
Maybe not for all of us. But excellence, certainly, is achievable by working hard on the small things.
Here’s a 31-day daily drawing practice plan with each exercise limited to 15 minutes. The exercises are based on the concepts from the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
Each day includes one line of context for the exercise:
Day 1 – Pure Contour Drawing (15 mins) – Draw objects without looking at paper to improve hand-eye coordination. Day 2 – Negative Space (15 mins) – Focus on the spaces around objects rather than the objects themselves. Day 3 – Upside-Down (15 mins) – Draw an inverted image to avoid symbolic thinking. Day 4 – Gesture Drawing (15 mins) – Capture the essence of a pose or movement in a very short time. Day 5 – Sight-Sizing (15 mins) – Analyze proportions by using a pencil as a relative measurement tool.
Day 6 – Value Study (15 mins) – Render just the pattern of lights and darks in a scene. Day 7 – Portrait (15 mins) – Apply right-mode techniques to drawing the human face and features. Day 8 – Pure Contour (15 mins) – Draw complex objects like furniture without lifting your pencil. Day 9 – Negative Space (15 mins) – Try drawing the negative spaces between overlapping objects. Day 10 – Upside-Down (15 mins) – Draw an inverted portrait or figure to avoid preconceived symbols.
Day 11 – Gesture (15 mins) – Do a series of very quick gesture drawings capturing motion. Day 12 – Sight-Sizing (15 mins) – Analyze proportions of an interior scene or architectural study. Day 13 – Value Study (15 mins) – Render value patterns of folded drapery or crumpled paper. Day 14 – Still Life (15 mins) – Apply right-mode techniques to drawing an arrangement of objects.
Day 15 – Pure Contour (15 mins) – Draw a household appliance or tool in one continuous line. Day 16 – Negative Space (15 mins) – Explore negative spaces in a natural outdoor environment. Day 17 – Upside-Down (15 mins) – Draw an inverted view of your workspace or living area. Day 18 – Gesture (15 mins) – Capture gestures and poses from watching people in a public place.
Day 19 – Sight-Sizing (15 mins) – Analyze proportions of a room interior or piece of furniture. Day 20 – Value Study (15 mins) – Render patterns of light and shadow on a textured surface. Day 21 – Animal Study (15 mins) – Apply right-mode techniques to drawing animals or pets. Day 22 – Pure Contour (15 mins) – Draw a bicycle, machine, or object with many interlocking parts.
Day 23 – Negative Space (15 mins) – Explore negative spaces between buildings or architectural forms. Day 24 – Upside-Down (15 mins) – Draw an inverted landscape, cityscape or tree study. Day 25 – Gesture (15 mins) – Do gesture drawings of yourself in a mirror to capture different poses. Day 26 – Sight-Sizing (15 mins) – Analyze proportions of a piece of furniture or architectural detail.
Day 27 – Value Study (15 mins) – Render the value pattern on a face or figure study. Day 28 – Perspective (15 mins) – Use sight-sizing to analyze perspective in an interior or street scene. Day 29 – Review (15 mins) – Review your drawings from the past week and reflect on progress. Day 30 – Themed Project (15 mins) – Combine multiple right-mode techniques in a drawing unified by a theme.
Day 31 – Freestyle (15 mins) – Draw any subject matter while consciously applying the right-mode techniques.
It’s my reminder to you to not just passively consume more information that soon will be forgotten. Instead, use what you’re learning to make new things.
Characteristically, where many might see the picturesque aspects of la vie de bohème, Hockney notices the inner discipline of that way of life: an element that must have been essential since these Bohemians were driven and hugely productive people.
DH: Picasso would go to the Deux Magots and the Flore most evenings in the 1930s. His studio was a few minutes away. But he always left at ten to eleven, and he’d be in bed by eleven. He would never drink much alcohol – a bit strange for a Spaniard that. I think he must have had a routine, because he worked every day of his life, just as I do.
It’s easy to think the bohemian life style of decades past was completely unhinged, artists living free from any type of restraint. But as David Hockney and Martin Gayford describe, discipline to the craft had it’s place.
Gayford, Martin, and Hockney, David. Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy. United Kingdom, Thames & Hudson, 2021. pp57,58
The concept is pretty simple. First, you prepare any work you have and set it out in front of you. Also, plug your laptop in, go to the bathroom, that kind of stuff. You set a 1 hour timer on a kitchen timer or phone. For that hour, you work hard with no interruptions. And I mean no interruptions. You turn your phone off and put it in another room. You can have your computer, but you can’t have it open when your work doesn’t require it, and you can’t even open a tab if it isn’t immediately necessary to your work. No stretch breaks, no bathroom breaks, no food, no talking. I know. Brutal. If an hour of total focus seems like too much, you can always do 1/2, 1/3, or even 1/4 of a Doro. The length of the Doro doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you totally focus for the entire time. Why is this so important? Two reasons.
First of all, totally focusing and not allowing yourself any breaks shatters the thought that many people, myself included have when they procrastinate: “I have a lot of work, and I’m going to get it all done, so I’ll just watch one or two videos first.” The psychological attitude most people have is that they are going to have to get a lot of work done, so they just want a quick break first. It’s important to recognize that this often leads into complete stagnation and hours wasted. You have to set a defined time in which you have to work, and can’t take any breaks.
Secondly, working without any interruption makes you way more efficient – you go into this zone where you forget about everything outside of your work. This sounds strange, but often when I finish a Doro I almost feel sad. This is because instead of constantly waiting for it to be over, you actually lock in and stop thinking about the outside world. When it ends, you’re brought back into reality, which is a bit of a shock, because you were so productive.
If you’re looking for a method to regain your concentration Doro’s are way to begin. Think of them like chin-ups for your focus-muscle. Don’t think about it too much, grab the nearest timer and go.
Macabee also gives another excellent tip for what to do if you finish your Doro session early:
If you finish your work, but you still have time left in the Doro, instead of ending the Doro prematurely find a way to use the extra time. Go over the reading again, check your homework answers, edit your paper for an even better final draft, or even do work that isn’t assigned for the near future, or just make something up! It’s good to complete Doros, because that mentally reinforces them as a unit of time, as opposed to just an incentive to get you working. It feels good to finish them, and also you will be able to put them on your calendar!
Former Major League catcher Erik Kratz and author Tim Brown explain.
Good hitters trying to remain good hitters and bad hitters hoping to become good hitters had a common prescription: more hitting. As much as possible. So, thrown baseballs. Tossed baseballs. Flipped baseballs. Baseballs sitting on tees. Baseballs connected to rubber bands. Baseballs shot out of machines. Tiny baseballs. Baseballs painted different colors. No baseballs at all.
They call this batting practice, though it could also be known as confidence practice, as hardly anyone earning a living at it has ever missed a batting practice pitch/toss/flip
Great topic this, how much of batting practice is confidence practice?
I’m not a baseball pro, but I suspect it’s not all about hitting the ball, but how the ball is hit. Is it hit early? Is it hit late?
And the where is it hit? Is it hit to right field? Left field? These specifics can be honed, no?
Consider the sentence structure here too.
Great stuff.
An opening twenty one word sentence with a colon. Then, afterward, a rat-a-tat-tat of three and two word sentences. Erik Kratz/Tim Brown close the paragraph with a thirty one word sentence with two commas. Fourteen verbs total between the two paragraphs.
There’s the build up in the opening paragraph has you hanging, all of these types of batting practice will undoubtedly lead to improvement. But then Erik Kratz/Tim Brown reveals, no, this isn’t all physical improvement, it’s a hopeful, mental, improvement.
He would argue that he simply demands high standards from everybody, from nobody more than himself, his commitment to self-improvement having made him the fifth-most prolific striker in Argentinian history, scoring 200 goals in 260 appearances for San Lorenzo and 21 in 29 for the national side. “I invented the Sanfigo,” he said, “a big cage with a wall the size of a goal that I’d use for practicing, divided into squares of eighty centimeters [30 inches] by eighty centimeters. The most important corners were the lower ones, la ratonera, the mouse’s nest. Practicing everyday was fundamental. Hitting the lower corners is safer than the upper corners, but you need to hone your precision because you’re giving twenty-one feet to the goalkeeper. So I’d need to know how to aim and hit those lower corners, from every position.”
José Sanfilippo is an Argentine striker you also probably never heard of. His training methods were ahead of their time. Long before Eddie Lewis‘s TOCA touch trainer, José Sanfilippo created the Sanfigo to hone his ball striking technique.
I find it really useful to write and draw while talking with someone, composing conversation summaries on pieces of paper or pages of notepads. I often use plenty of color annotation to highlight salient points. At the end of the conversation, I digitally photograph the piece of paper so that I capture the entire flow of the conversation and the thoughts that emerged. The person I’ve conversed with usually gets to keep the original piece of paper, and the digital photograph is uploaded to my computer for keyword tagging and archiving. This way I can call up all the images, sketches, ideas, references, and action items from a brief note that I took during a five-minute meeting at a coffee shop years ago-at a touch, on my laptop. With 10-megapixel cameras costing just over $100, you can easily capture a dozen full pages in a single shot, in just a second.
Cowen, Tyler. The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy. New York: Plume, 2010 (see page 97)
Ed Boyden’s note taking practice seems both exhausting and exhilarating. Tedious and satisfying. He’s not only writing notes, but drawing them as well.
It’s taken him far though. He’s gone from blogger for the Technology Review to the Professor in the Departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Media Arts and Sciences, and Biological Engineering, and an HHMI investigator at MIT.
For someone who understands so much about the brain, is Boyden’s drawing function of his note-taking deliberate? A tool to help him remember and synthesize information?
“By the 1950s I had found I was frightened when giving public talks to large audiences, this in spite of having taught classes in college for many years. On thinking this over very seriously, I came to the conclusion I could not afford to be crippled that way and still become a great scientist; the duty of a scientist is not only to find new things, but to communicate them successfully in at least three forms:
Writing papers and books
Prepared public talks
Impromptu talks
Lacking any one of these would be a serious drag on my career. How to learn to give public talks without being so afraid was my problem. The answer was obviously by practice, and while other things might help, practice was a necessary thing to do.” – Richard W. Hammingfrom the The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
The duty of a scientist is not only to research, but to communicate.
What’s our typical image of a scientist? Someone dressed in a white lab coat, hovering over a microscope. A lab assistant near, clipboard in hand (even in 2022). Hidden in the basement of some concrete government cube.
But think of the inspiring scientists of our time: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bob Bakker, Oliver Sacks, the shark lady Eugenie Clark. They were and are scientists of the public. They shared their ideas on TV, in documentaries, podcasts, and lectures. These scientists were and are able to communicate successfully in at least the first two forms mentioned by Richard W. Hamming. Judging by interviews and their public personas I’m sure they were all capable of form #3 as well.
Mr. Richard W. Hamming’s mindset towards his fear is also worth noting. He could’ve dismissed his trepidation of speaking to large crowds as “something I’m just not wired for”. But he didn’t bury his head in the gravel. He decided practice was the necessary thing to do. Hamming would go on to give one of the preeminent talks on cultivating a scientific career titled – You and Your Research.
To the absolute best of your ability, create an exact replica of your favorite page. Do not trace. Any deviation from the original should be unintentional on you part; ineptitude and sloppiness are charmless when deliberate.
Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, pg 60. Brunetti, Ivan
Brunetti then urges his students to pay close attention to each element of their comics page:
Pay close attention to what you are copying. Think about the artist’s decisions regarding page layout, panel compositions, design, characterization, dialogue, gesture, captions, balloons, word placement, sound effects, line, shape, texture, etc. Hopefully you will gain some appreciation of their working and thinking process… and the difficulty of creating a comics page.
Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, pg 60. Brunetti, Ivan
Brunetti practiced this version of copywork in his own career.
He took on the Nancy strip for a time. The pressure from the syndicate to copy Ernie Bushmiller‘s style precisely, further developed his cartooning technique.
I can tell exactly the time period in my work when I was doing these-the syndicate were such nitpickers about me copying Bushmiller’s style exactly that my approach to cartooning got much more precise as a result. I went from doing strips just to amuse myself, without a grand plan, to focusing on formal aspects of cartooning much more: where to place a word balloon, the composition of every panel, and the flow of panels.
In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists, pg 279. Hignite, Tom
Brunetti enjoyed the project while in the learning phase, but admitted it was an unpleasant way to work:
When you’re copying someone else’s style exactly, you can theorize about it, and actually break it down into a set of rules. So they way I was working by imitating him had almost nothing to do with the way he was working…I also realized that working this way was totally unpleasant, because there are very strict parameters you have to follow, rather than discovering the rules that work. The project was fun while I was discovering all of the rules; I would notice that he would never put certain kind of marks next to one another because they’d look wrong. I became very aware of every penstroke, where he used a ruler, where it was freehand. He had an intuitive sense of what looked good, so for me it was trying to codify this into a set of rules, which made me realize the importance of the consistency of your cartooning vocabulary.
In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists, pg 279. Hignite, Tom
Could Brunetti’s copywork exercise translate into other disciplines as well?
If you’re an aspiring graphic designer you could recreate your favorite logos, stroke by stroke, in illustrator?
Or if you’re a programmer, instead of cutting and pasting, you typed out lines of code, line by line, character by character?
With thought and imagination, copywork exercises can be applied to every discipline.
Floodlights and Goalposts 