09-02-2016, 06:06 AM
One year makes a difference!
(All rights for this claim belong to FZD School, lul)
- aka. my first year of practice in REVIEW
This years Industry Workshop in London is over. I didn’t attend that one but I was in London the year before. I remember sitting in my chair, surrounded by dozens of people sharing the same passion watching the genius Mike Hill holding a keynote about storytelling through design. At that very moment, I decided to give this „drawing for a living“ thing a shot. Fast forward one year I’m right about starting my industrial design studies at the university. I think this should be a good time to look back on the progress I have made so far.
Lets get started.
About Volume
As of today, my total months drawing are roughly 13.
The first 9 months I practiced in the evenings after my full-time job. My weekly volume was roughly about 10 hours on average.
After those 9 months I quit my job to go full-time, resulting in 4 months of 5-8 hours of practice every day excluding weekends.
When looking back at the stuff I did, there are a lot of things which I feel really good about. In general I definitely feel that I can go somewhere with this, although at the same time, I’m realizing AGAIN: this stuff needs a lot, a lot and A L O T of work.
Examples
That being said I found some of the earliest attempts at drawing. Its quite fascinating to see how much of a difference consistent practice makes. I collected some examples showing the first weeks compared to my latest stuff.
As you may have noticed besides a few master studies (which I loved btw) I rarely dabbled into painting and value. I think my linework, or rather my fundamentals aren’t there yet. If I had to plan the next 6 months of practice, I’d guess that I’ll mainly focus on project based design exercises. And then slowly transitioning into slight value application.
About the future
Sooooo, I tried writing a few short stories on a weekly basis. And there is something I learned: You can have the most beautiful crafted sentences, with the most accurate descriptions, but without a solid idea about the story and what you want to happen, those words are basically meaningless. Its just technical beauty.
That technical beauty without real content and without thought as its core is one of the biggest leaks of my drawing so far. That being said the next months will be focused on learning about subjects on a content-related level. And thats concept design in a nutshell. People are giving you money for the ideas - in other words - for the content, not the drawing. The drawing is just the medium to deliver the content. For the last year I delivered only drawings with the purpose of being drawings (which is good to get the fundamental skills up and running).
But the next year I should aim to deliver ideas.
And that concludes my little review. I’ll be on a quick „holiday“ for a few weeks and then continue the struggle. And THANKS to all who commented on my stuff and who are pointing me in directions, really really appreciate!!
See you all!
Ressources
A collection of my primary ressources to learn stuff, listed in terms of influence with the first being the most influential:
- Foundation Group by John Park, Matthew Zikry and Daniel Park
- How to Draw by Scott Robertson, as well as his youtube
- FZD Galleries
- Gumroad: Joe Peterson, John Park
- Proko Premium