How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

Re:How to get better at painting without painting anything (... by yesenadam on Monday July 05, 2021 @11:41PM (#27744028)

I don't think those pictures are "drill, not scrimmage", in that they are themselves perfectly good works of art. Actually, I like them more than his paintings, a lot more. Strange article, as if he didn't notice the black and white works are art too.[0] He never stopped practising art, making art.

[0] Well, not so strange in this world where ink drawings generally/often/usually/popularly aren't considered Art in the way oil paintings are. Imagine if piano music wasn't considered real music, not like orchestral music!

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Re:How to get better at painting without painting anything (... by nobody_nothing on Tuesday July 06, 2021 @06:11PM (#27755018)

> I don't think those pictures are "drill, not scrimmage", in that they are themselves perfectly good works of art.

I agree that they're nice, but the author's ultimate desire was to make paintings, not ink drawings, and therein lies the distinction between drill and scrimmage (I think). For him, the ink drawings acted as drills in service of the desired ultimate product (the paintings).

For someone trying to get better at ink drawings, on the other hand, those ink drawings would count as scrimmage -- and I imagine the author would argue they should drill the sub-skills that make a great ink drawer (pen work, composition, perspective, shading, etc) separately from the ink drawings themselves.

The artifacts produced by those drills may be beautiful, but they're still "drills" because they represent only a subset of the skills the author was ultimately after.

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