Calibration

This gentleman provides the same valuable lesson as a classically trained musician that keeps on doing scales time after time: you have to calibrate yourself. Yes, this is about cutting hair. So what?

Watch him after 2:00 if nothing else. He provides exercises to train the hand to feel the lenghth of the hair it is holding. He uses a ruler for the exercise. Of course he won't be using a ruler in his practice! The purpose is to get feedback. You cannot train the hand if you don't have accurate feedback. Immediate, accurate feedback, a guess/check/correct cycle, is essential to make you learn. It punishes and rewards your neurons according to your performance, and drives you in the right direction. Too many art teachers repeat the refrain "practice makes perfect". No it doesn't. It has to be the right kind of practice. If you keep practicing only complicated exercises (like drawing a full portrait each time) where the complexity is so great that you have no clear feedback, where you can't really know where and when you screwed up, where feedback happens at too great intervals, then you'll only make progress painfuly and after too much exertion, and almost in spite of practice (most of the time you'll be practicing and reinforcing precisely your worst mistakes). Yes, it may still work, but that is a credit to the wonderful ability of the human mind to learn even in the worst of circumstances: one has to ask, however, why should one pay good money to do it the hard, dumb way.

Watch this gentleman work and ask yourself what exercises in your routine, if any, correspond to what he is doing.

Next up I'll be making a post on an simple exercise that can help calibrate your brain for triangulation. (even if you don't use triangulation you should ask yourself what are your "scales" for your preferred measuring/drawing method. And like any musician you should practice your scales as often as possible)