Some notes on improvement

It was about a year ago that I decided that I should do speedpainting. There's a whole lot of reasoning that made me came to this conclusion. The main reason being that my drawings took too long to render and I was overall dissatisfied with the progress I made (or rather: didn't make).

 

As some of you might know from earlier journals, I suffer from a chronic injury that severely limits my drawing time. I can draw for a few hours on a good day, but not all days are good, and there are days I cannot pick up a pencil at all. As you can imagine this makes rendering a drawing a very frustrating process, because it would take me days, sometimes even weeks, to finish a simple drawing. So yeah... most of those (impressive) older works in my gallery... they took weeks.
It wasn't until I watched some more of those concept artists that I learned about the concept of speedpaintings. A lot of them were so amazing I couldn't believe they were done so quickly, but it made me think "what if I could pull that off?". That would actually make me somewhat productive. 

In all honesty... I suffered a lot of health issues during that time (and I still do). Some days were good, a lot were awful. But regardless of that, I pulled myself out of bed and did one painting. On the good days I would do an hour, on the bad days maybe 20 minutes or so. But regardless of my health, I had something done that day. It was at least something to feel accomplished over.


I wrote a journal about improvement earlier, in which I already stated that improvement is one heck of slow bastard (and that being the reason I kept my sketches). Improvement goes by mostly unnoticed, and I guess it kinda did until I looked back at those December 2014 speedpaints this year and decided to redo one of them, just for fun.



The change in itself is visible, but to me there was mostly the notice how much easier it got over one year. I can recall using a lot of references for that first one. I rarely drew environments back then, and it was one heck of a challenge to figure out how all of it worked within the time limits. I can't say I reached the final level that I wanted to, but it got remarkably easier to just slap down the colors to create the right mood and fill in on the details. And to draw something that kinda resembled a human in just a few minutes.

I don't know if I got massively better, but I sure get more work done in less time. And that's an accomplishment in itself already.


I get a lot of messages, and a lot of people tell me I'm lucky to have talent. They tell me they cannot do the same, either because they lack either time or "talent" (whatever that may be).
Here's your answer. I'm nowhere near being lucky. I'm crippled by bad health and chronic pain, and I cannot (and probably will never be able to) submit myself to those harsh drawing-12-hours-a-day training schedules that you hear the pro's talking about. This is what I accomplished over a year, by not giving up and drawing a little bit every single day.

Now tell me, what's your excuse?