The 10000 Hour Rule - Art Edition - 7626/10,000

[JakeB]

New Stuff - beware, rambling text below

Quickish face study from last night



Finished this


Comparison to last time I tried it, 2000 hours ago.


As some people who see this may know, I started keeping track of the hours I work (on concept art/illustration stuff) a while ago. It started in March last year, while I was still at university, and I'd just been introduced to the "10,000 hour rule". The basic idea is that to be 'proficient' at any skill, you need to put in 10,000 hours of deliberate, focused practice.

So, mostly to motivate myself to work more consistently, I started noting down how many hours I was drawing for.

Fast forward to now, and I've just passed 2000 hours.

The reason for redoing this piece, is that it was the last thing I could find that I'd done from imagination before I started counting my hours. People often post comparisons with old work, months or years apart, and while they can be incredible and motivating, it's hard to gauge how much they were working over the time period. So, I thought I'd do this. Figure it's a reasonable representation of the improvement you can expect with 2000 hours work. Which can be as spread out, or as compressed as you like. These first 2000 hours took me over a year, gonna try and hit ~3000 a year from now on.

If you wanna take a look at any point so far, there's a dropdown menu on my blog where you can select the period of time (how many hours I'd completed)
http://blog.ohbullocks.com/

If you're interested in the whole 10,000 hours thing, check out this interview with Malcolm Gladwell. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHxf68nb_-o (I think that's a decent one, if not, just click around on YouTube, he's done plenty of talks on the subject)

Aaaaaand, if you think the whole thing is poppycock and I'm a moron, and that measuring something like this to the hour is stupid. You could well be right, but I've been doing it for too long to stop now. It's like I started doing something as a joke, but now it's actually a thing. I've gotta see it through.

So yeah, that's it. Enjoy .



Oh, and yes, mostly I did this as an ego boost. Ho hum.