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How to Improve as a Digital Artist?
If you’re watching this video, then you know that growing as an artist is hard work.
It involves more than just improving your own artistic skills, but also learning how to market on different social platforms, plan your projects, develop a community and so on.
The 10,000 Hour Rule
To encourage people to improve, the idea of the 10,000 Hour Rule is raised. Catchy! It says that accomplishment would require a minimum of 10,000 hours of practice. It is raised not only to suggest that hard-work pays off, but to also rebut the old-fashioned classroom setting, where students simply sit and listen to a lecture, rather than putting their skills into practice.
A psychology research done in 1993 even supported this. The study found that the most accomplished violin students practiced for a minimum of 10 years before they turned 20.
The 10,000 Hour rule sounds reasonable on paper, right? You need to put in the hard work- and consistently over years, instead of blaming you own circumstances and luck. And it offers a visible goal too! 10,000 hours. If you hit that mark, you accomplished something, right?
Let’s take a deeper look.
Psychology Concept: Overlearning
If you repeatedly practice something- let’s use drawing for our example, because you’re an artist- then you might be in danger of falling in a spot of overlearning! What? How can you over-learn? Can you really learn too much?
Overlearning is when you practice something- at a certain level of difficulty- over and over, until you just cannot improve. Well, as a beginner artist, of course you can still improve.
But note that it says “a certain level of difficulty”.
Digital Art Comfort Zone
Everyone is at a certain level, doesn’t matter high or low. When you go through some artists’ work on social media, be it Instagram, DeviantArt, Tumblr, or Twitter, you might notice that some artists consistently post their artwork.
And in a gallery interface, you can suddenly see that… their artwork are quite, similar in a way. Maybe their characters are all facing the front. Maybe they all have doraemon hands- or maybe none of the artworks show any hands and below-waists.
Still! They are consistently drawing, sometimes even for years! Perhaps their skills are a bit more proficient than before. But it doesn’t look like what the 10,000 Hour Rule promised.
Overlearning does improve your efficiency of performing the task again and again. Think of serial comic and manga artists, who spend their full-time job drawing the same characters over and over. The same characters would look more natural as time goes by, because the artists mastered drawing these characters.
The Price of Being “Master of One… State”
However, overlearning inhibit your learning journey as a whole. In a recent psychology study in 2017, it shows that strong overlearning stabilizes the learning state, meaning you get stuck at a certain state you practice so much at, and become resistant to moving forward.
So if you overlearn drawing a certain character, you kinda become more proficient at it, but when it comes to drawing new stuff, or learning, studying new things, there’s a great chance you won’t be able to do it, at all.
Conclusion: Be Brave to Move Forward
So what do all these mean? As an artist, of course you want to draw better and better. To bring impact to your audience. To express and deliver your ideas and stories.
But drawing the same thing over and over again- or staying in your comfort zone- might not be so beneficial in the long run.
As a digital artist myself, I know it’s a difficult feeling- to be torn between doing things you love and putting in the hard work to improve.
Sometimes the two are at the opposite polar! But what the psychology research showed, is that- to achieve improvement, even if it means showing your weaker side and exploring unfamiliar areas, it’s better now, than later.
