Hone your skills for free with my 'workshop in a book' method

   Follow your curiosity, invest in self improvement. I hear these terms being thrown around frequently. Be you, but better, don't do what everyone else expects you to, indulge yourself in what you want to do, follow up on things that interest you. Imagine a better version of yourself and get to work achieving it. Hire a coach, find a mentor, subscribe to a service, pay for another program, get a degree, buy, buy, buy! These sentiments can be both inspiring and dangerous. They can pull us up by the proverbial bootstraps or create self indulgent monsters. To dive headlong into self improvement begs the question, are we enough, will we ever be good enough as we are? There is the fine line between honing our skills and becoming dissatisfied with who we are and what we have.

  This quarantine has seemed to heighten my awareness of this particular strain of dialogue. Shakespeare wrote King Lear while quarantined, someone or other invented calculus. What have you done? And of course for most of us the answer is, we have stayed home, we have fed our families, we have devoted time to figuring out how to better regulate and run our households. We have consumed less, and done it at a more leisurely pace. Not magnificent, but certainly not a life wasted. And yet it is nice to take time to improve one's skills. To hone one's craft. And for those who have that time it is a good opportunity to do so.

 There are so many wonderful courses, mini courses, and online workshops being offered at the moment. Some of them for as little as 25 euros. Yet not everyone can commit either financially or time-wise to taking one. Some are essential workers, others are fully occupied with the demands of a family and e-learning, and some have limited income due to reduced hours at their jobs. For me it is the large family senario. I wanted light distraction and a bit of guided practice without a large time or financial commitment. Oh, and of course, fun. This had been rolling around in my mind for the last few weeks and today I made a decision. I would challenge my self to a 'self inflicted' practice session from my own library.

   How many of us own art books (if you are not an artist substitute your hobby) and use them as reference books? I take a lot of time and care choosing which books to add to my art library. I find those written by artists I respect and admire, people who have achieved a level of excellence I desire to emulate. I generally flip through these books drinking in the photos and then place them in my shelf to be pulled out time and again to be used as reference books for various projects and techniques. I seldom read them from cover to cover. Perhaps I should but often the photos appear to speak for themselves.



   What if I were to treat one of these art books as a workbook rather than a work of reference, following the steps and reading the text. Taking time and copying the work into an actual sketchbook. How much could be learned? That is in essence what I have decided to do. I have chosen for this purpose a newly acquired book on drawing trees. The renderings are excellent- neither too exact nor too abstracted. I started to read the introduction this morning and have managed to complete the first couple of exercises.

   Immediately I found myself having to squelch the feeling of already knowing how to do it and force myself to actually read the instructions rather than only look at the pictures. Sure enough, I have already learned techniques as yet unknown to me. After one only day. A true lesson in humility. In fact one of the lessons learned is a simple circular method for shading large areas quickly. It is amazingly fast and the amount of time saved employing it has more than made up for the few brief moments I spent reading the instructions. There is a lesson there for my children somewhere.

    Are any of you in the same situation I have been? Busy, wanting to do a bit to hone my skills but unable to devote a significant amount of time or money to it? I challenge you to try my 'Workshop in a book' method. I would love to see if you like it and how it works out for you. Let's stop letting all that wisdom in our bookshelves go to waste.

Disclaimer: This is not to in anyway undermine the value of workshops and trainings held either virtually or in person but rather to provide an alternative for those who either can not or do not wish to participate in them at this time.

Drawing Trees book:  https://amzn.to/2YteRcf

I used Staedtler Noris school pencils in my sketches

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 If you liked this post you might also like:
-Field sketching kit must haves
-Taking and using reference photos
-Sketching kit for the US
- Choosing the right paper

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