Super long post ahead, you've been warned. If you skip it, then Merrry Christmas and happy holidays everyone.
1 hour greyscale Sargent study. Man it's been 3 days. That's like a gazillion years in art time. Aaaargh. These last few days I've been resting becuase the nerves in my arms have not been treating me well. I've basically been staying away from my computer and drawing as to recover and have this pain subside. I've been applying ice on the affected areas to speed up the process, but I'm not sure it does much (I only have one ice pack to use). Things are better than they were a few days ago, but I think I may need a few more days.
I've had this pain once before and much worse. It was intense throbbing within my right shoulder which was really painful. Eventually that went away after lots of ice and just letting my arm go limp.
Now there's something I'd like to share, and this could be total bs or common sense to you, but this is how I analyzed it from my experience of the last week. I tried different things that would potentially benefit me in getting better at drawing faster. I tried staying up late and waking up earlier (together), so I tried staying up to midnight and waking up at 6 AM. That ended by the second or thrid day. That was stupid hard and doing studies in the morning was almost not possible, or really difficult, because I was just too tired. Another thing I tried was to do a bunch of drawings so I could upload frequently, as in a few hours apart from each other. I wanted to be like Johannes or Dave in this case and upload a whole bunch of stuff really fast, but that backfired and I eneded up with the pains I have now.
I've realized there's a difference between just working hard and working responsibly and smart. Working hard, to me, meant that you did study after study, drawing after drawing until you couldn't anymore. I've realized now that is quite unhealthy to do. Working responsibly is sticking to the task that needs to be done, but nothing bad should happen to you after it's done (in this case an injury). You should want to have the task done, but also give yourself adequate rest. Probably around an hour at least after a few hours of work, and you shouldn't be doing anything with your arms and hands during that rest. Working smart, I think, is to be able to complete task in an efficient manner that requires as little effort on your part. Afterall I think most people don't want to work hard for their entire life. They want to work towards an easier life, or make task easier for themselves.
In my drawing today I timed myself so I wouldn't go overboard and hurt myself. I went about this painting slowly and applied as few stroke as I could, yet still get as close of a likeness as possible. In other words I tried to make my brushstrokes count instead of painting haphazardly and hoping something to happen. I use to do a lot of meaningless short strokes thinking that it would help my painting, when I was just not adding anything of value to it. This is what I'm going to try to discipline myself in.
Lastly I'm going to talk about my new years resolutions. I want to get up to page 30 by the end of next year (2015). I have other sketchbooks on other websites, and if I can get up to page 30 on those too then that would be cool as well. I feel that this is a tought goal, but accomplishable. I essentially will have to post everyday, at least twice maybe more within the day (assuming all the posts are by me). If you've read this vomit of words, then thank you, and if you wish to call me out on any of this nonsense then by all means I'm ready for a beat down.