EduartBoudewijn

Hello everyone, it’s been quite a while since the last one of these that I wrote, but earlier today I felt struck by this topic and I figured I might as well write down my thoughts on this topic.

Now it’s been often said (and proven) that doing multiple things at the same time can lead to sloppy work or even dangerous situations. When we’re talking about physical tasks this is pretty easy, since we have only one body and a limited number of limbs. Imagine trying to do pushups while at the same time riding a bike. It’s just physically not possible to do two larger things like that with only one body. Now the same thing goes for your mind. For example try to solve a word puzzle while someone is trying to tell you a story. Either the story won’t land or your puzzle will not get solved properly. It’s the same when you’re trying to do multiple things at the same time, like trying to work while also trying to watch television or youtube; either you do very little work or you miss a lot of what you’re actually watching. It’s like one of those optical illusions that can be two things depending on how you look at it; you can focus on either one at a time, but not both at the same time. And it turns out that when switching between two tasks your brain takes a bit of time to reset and readjust to the new task. It’s like getting off of your bike to do a pushup after every ten meters. You’ll technically get both done, but you won’t get very far on your bike and you won’t get all that much pushups done as you could’ve done. This is why many productivity-focused people advise against performing multiple tasks at the same time.

So far so good, you might think; just focus on your task and don’t do other things at the same time. It’s what I’ve been trying to stick to more as well. But lately I’ve been realizing that there’s a deeper layer to this philosophy than just not answering emails while trying to draw. It also applies to the smaller tasks within the larger task of ‘drawing’. For example, you won’t find many artists that draw out the final image in one go. The same way many writers don’t write a fully finished story in one go. First you draw a construction sketch; maybe even thumbnails before that to get a sense of what you want in this drawing. THen you use the base construction to build your anatomy on top of. And after you’ve drawn out the anatomy correctly you’ll go and add the clothes on top of that. So you’re breaking down the larger task of drawing into specific smaller tasks, so you can focus on that one aspect before moving on to the next. That way you can fully focus on that task and get the best result for each of it.

Now more recently I’ve been trying to pay attention to getting even deeper into this and getting into smaller subtasks. So rather than having a task of ‘drawing clothes’, I mentally make a task for each individual article of clothing. First draw the shirt for example and once that’s done draw the pants. So far so basic, but this gets quite important when drawing characters with more elaborate outfits, especially layered outfits, where multiple articles of clothing overlap one another. By drawing the bottom layers first and building on top of that in my experience it gets much easier to draw complicated outfits convincingly.

Now the same can be said for other aspects, such as linearting or shading. When I’ve been doing linearting lately, I focus on getting the lines in the correct places before going back over and adding the line weights to accentuate the form of the drawing. Before I usually tried to do both at the same time, but that usually left me frustrated and my lineart looking flat. Perhaps after I have gained enough experience I will be able to focus on both at the same time, but for the moment I can definitely tell you that separating the tasks has made my work a lot easier. And for shading I’ve been trying the same thing; focusing on the lighting in small parts at a time in the drawing, rather than trying to get everything down at the same time is a big relief. It also helps a lot when you try to depict multiple light sources and allows for easier usage of different kinds of light on top of one another. I feel like I can go even farther with this method in terms of shading and I will be experimenting with this part of my workflow for the coming weeks/months; hopefully to positive results.

Now focussing on one particular thing at a time is something that’s not easy at first; I’m still often struggling with it. It requires a decent amount of patience and discipline to stick to. But over time it gets easier and I feel like the longer I’m holding on to this philosophy, the more ways I see to split my workflow apart. Also I feel like this approach leads to richer drawings over time and in my experience it removes a lot of frustration that used to plague me while drawing.

On a final note I’d like to touch upon the subject of art studies. Say you are trying to get better at something. In my experience when I decide upon studying something I still go way too broad in my intentions. For example I decide to ‘study anatomy’ and end up practising all of the human body. It would probably be more productive to decide on a smaller study area, like arms, legs etc. And after that I could go even smaller, focusing on hands or feet specifically. Another level down I could focus on a particular finger in relation to the hand or ankles. It depends on how crazy you want to get with this approach. I think that focussing down on a small thing and sticking with it for a full study session can teach you a lot of detail information that you wouldn’t get from focussing on the body as a whole. The same can be said for focussing on the shading on a particular material or object, rather than doing a full value study or focussing on drawing one single object in perspective, rather than trying to depict a whole scene.

Now the disclaimer must be mentioned that focusing on the whole can be very helpful at times as well. Once you have a good knowledge of small pieces on their own you’ll need to know how to put them together convincingly as well; which can be the subject of a different study session. The point also isn’t to go to incredibly small scale immediately; I’m doing this over a longer timescale myself. Just keep the point in mind and ask yourself “Could I improve my performance by just scaling down a little bit?” Small gains like that definitely add up over time.

At least this is a philosophy that I’ve been focusing a bit more on lately and I felt that perhaps some people would find it helpful or at least interesting. I would love to hear what you guys think of this mindset and perhaps your own experiences on the subject. Thank you very much for reading this!