So. I made this. I find that if I don’t keep track of where my time is going, I tend to find myself wondering at 11:30pm where the evening went. I used to just keep track on a sheet of notebook paper, but I figured I could have some fun with it. I based it on some vintage punch clock time cards I found on the internet, with my own modifications.

“Motivation follows action” is my own little motto, which I may have picked up somewhere else and appropriated, so I make no claims of ownership. The “You are your own timekeeper” admonition is from the original punch card I based my design on and it’s just too awesome not to use.

Basically, I print them out and note the time I start working and when I am taking breaks. I don’t really have a specific goal of how much time I need to work in a day; it’s a system for mindfulness of how I’m spending my my time, not for accountability. If I write down the time before going off to check e-mail, Twitter, or RSS, I’m much more likely to get back to drawing (or researching, or working on the site) in a timely fashion. If I’m not paying attention, my “15 minute” Internet break just turns into an hour or more before I’m aware of it.

I know there are applications and services which do the same thing, but I’m a pencil and paper kind of person. We all have our eccentricities.

note: the “morning afternoon night” headers are elements carried over from the original. Since I do all my artwork at night, it’s really just a way of splitting time between breaks. But the time of day has a nice feel to it and reinforces the punch card idiom, so I kept it.

The original sketch:

First stamp:

First stamp refined:

Sketch for second stamp, with pencil indicating changes I wanted to make:

Second stamp, which I made by printing the first stamp onto a fresh eraser as a guide. Do you see my error?

Second stamp, finished. There will be another iteration of this, less incompetently executed, I hope.

The actual size of the stamp is about 1″ x 1.5″, the ink is Japanese stamping paste. The fish is a coelacanth, inspired by a set of pen & ink drawings I did a couple of years ago based on the idea of a tutelary genius.

It all started with an essay by Elizabeth Bachner on the nature of genius and the mysticism of art. She points out that “Genius is not, etymologically speaking, a trait, like prettiness or stupidity or discretion. Genii, in the Roman tradition, are spirits that enter a man’s body at his birth and leave at his death.” Bachner is dismayed by what she perceives as an anti-genius bias in today’s society. But it was her mention of the Roman genius that got me thinking. Thinking about the nature of inspiration and the realities of turning that inspiration into finished work and not just hopes for the future.

Part of the role of the tutelary genius was to guard, if not actually determine, a person’s character; thus, in the sixteenth century genius came to be used in direct reference to a person’s inclination or bent of mind, as in Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poetry (1595): “A Poet, no industrie can make, if his owne Genius bee not carried vnto it.” In the next century this led to the sense of ‘a strongly marked aptitude.’ This sense of genius was often used of poets and artists, and in England in the eighteenth century the Romantics began to use genius to mean ‘an extraordinary native intellectual power,’ especially as manifested in an unusual capacity for creative activity of any kind.

—from The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories

There’s a misconception that says that in order to do your best work, you should only work when the spirit seizes you. It’s an old Romantic notion, and not really subscribed to by many who do creative work seriously. If we only worked when we really felt like it, we wouldn’t get anything done (I discovered this through hard experience.) Art involves a lot of hard work and unglamorous dedication. To succeed, you need to make (and keep) good working habits and keep at it even when your artwork feels like, well, work. Keeping habits, being productive, it doesn’t exactly sound like Shakespeare’s muse of fire, does it? But it’s critical.

The problem is, the rejection of the Romantic notion leads some too far in the opposite direction: that you need not a muse of fire, but to “fire your muse:” buckle down and Get Things Done. Get productive and start working and forget that mystical happy talk about muses and inspiration and geniuses. But in that case, why make art at all? God knows, it’s a damned impractical thing to be doing in the first place. Without the inspiration, the genius, the muse, well, what’s the point of making art? You’re much better off being a lawyer. Unless, of course, there is something in you that is demanding that you create and just won’t shut up about it, like the Romans’ tutelary genius. The truth of it is that you need both to thrive. Art is a calling and it’s not foolishness to call it that. But it also requires showing up and working every day: your genius will come, but it usually finds you when you’re working.

note: Originally posted in 2009, this essay got lost when I transferred to WordPress and redesigned the site (thank you, Wayback Machine!) It was brought to mind again when I was creating my eraser stamps. I have little to add except that I actually agree with everything Merlin Mann wrote in the essay linked in the final paragraph, except for the firing muses part. I like the idea of muses. 

Posted: October 23, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment

If you ever chance to spend a little time around a substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA’s state-funded Ennet House, you will encounter many exotic new facts.

That you do not have to like a person to learn from him/her/it.

That loneliness is not a function of solitude.

That logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.

That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that.

That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds.

That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them.

That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

That concentrating intently on anything is very hard work.

That a clean room feels better to be in than a dirty room.

That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid.

That having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear.

—From David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest.

Notes on The Making of an Expert, by K. Anders Ericsson, Michael J. Prietula, and Edward T. Cokely. Harvard Business Review, July/August 2007

All the superb performers [benjamin Bloom] investigated had practiced intensively, had studied with devoted teachers, and had been supported enthusiastically by their families though their developing years.

1. Intensive, deliberate practice
2. Devoted teachers
3. Family support

The amount and quality of practice were key factors in the level of expertise people achieved.

The journey to truly superior performance is neither for the faint of heart nor for the impatient. The development of genuine expertise requires struggle, sacrifice, and honest, often painful self assessment. There are no shortcuts. It will take you at least a decade to achieve expertise, and you will need to invest that time wisely, by engaging in “deliberate” practice—practice that focuses on tasks beyond your current level of competence and comfort. You will need a well-informed coach not only to guide you through deliberate practice, but also to help you learn how to coach yourself. Above all … forget the folklore about genius that makes many people think they cannot take a scientific approach to developing expertise.

Real expertise must pass three tests. First, it must lead to work that is consistently superior to that of the expert’s peers. Second, real expertise produces concrete results…. Finally, true expertise can be replicated and measured in the lab. As the British scientist Lord Kelvin stated, “if you can not measure it, you can not improve it.”

Deliberate Practice

Not all practice makes perfect. You need a particular kind of practice—deliberate practice—to develop expertise. When most people practice, they focus on things they already know how to do. Deliberate practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you *can’t* do well—or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become.

Deliberate practice involves two kinds of learning: improving the skills you already have and extending the reach and range of your skills…. The famous violinist Nathan Milstein wrote: “Practice as much as you feel you can accomplish with concentration. Once when I became concerned because others around me practiced all day long, I asked [my mentor] Professor Auer how many hours I should practice, and he said, ‘it really doesn’t matter how long. If you practice with your fingers, no amount is enough. If you practice with your head, two hours is plenty.”

[V]ery few appear to be able to engage in more than four or five hours of high concentration and deliberate practice at a time.

Ivan Galamian: “If we analyze the development of the well-known artists, we see that in almost every case the success of their entire career was dependent on the quality of their practicing. In practically every case, the practicing was constantly supervised either by their teacher or an assistant to the teacher.”

The development of expertise requires coaches who are capable of giving constructive, even painful, feedback. Real experts are extremely motivated student who seek out such feedback. They’re also skilled at understanding when and if a coach’s advice doesn’t work for them. The elite performers we studied knew what they were doing right and concentrated on what they were doing wrong. They deliberately picked unsentimental coaches who would challenge them and drive them to higher levels of performance. The best coaches also identify aspects of your performance that will need to be improved at your next level of skill.

The key to improving expertise is consistence and fully controlled efforts.

A guide for the emerging comics artist or how to behave on the Internet w/r/t social media.

Don’t take your readership for granted

Small readership defined: If your Twitter and Facebook followers could easily fit inside a college auditorium, that’s a small readership. If this describes your audience, you have time to respond to any personal messages. See also internet famous¹.

It literally takes ten seconds to respond to a complimentary post on Twitter or to “like” a Facebook comment or post that someone has written about you. Seriously. If you get ten compliments a day in your platforms of choice, that’s five minutes out of your day to respond with a simple thank you to all of them. It’s not too much to ask.

Case Study

September 23, 2011: Thorne posts “Morning ‘Verse.” then @ replies to five people who complimented his work in the past day. Total time elapsed: 2 minutes.

Conclusion

If you can’t be bothered to do that, I’ve got no sympathy for you. Neither you nor I is Lady Gaga. We are not people who get more messages than any one person could possibly respond to. At that point, your relationship with your audience must change, but you’re not there yet. If it does take you more than fifteen minutes a day to respond to readers, then you may indeed be at that reevaluation point.

As an artist, dedication to your craft and making great work is your first priority. But I am going to posit that respect for your readership is a close second. If you have an Internet presence and a readership, that respect means that social norms of politeness are not just things you discard when you get behind the keyboard.

And Action

Take fifteen minutes each day to respond to readers. You may not need that much time. You may need more. If you are getting more mentions than you can respond to in that time, I would say take the fifteen minutes anyway and do what you can. If you’re getting that much attention, your readership will probably understand that you can’t get to everyone. Similarly, if you get linked by a major site, you’ll get overwhelmed for a time. Take your time and work through the backlog. If you thank someone three days after a major traffic spike, they should understand.

Art is the intersection between artist, object, and spectator. The audience plays a crucial role in your work. Don’t forget that. Without your readers, you’re just a person in a room with a stack of papers.

notes:
1: The next stage up.

Over at dynamanga.net, Dirk Tiede has been working on a series of master studies as an exercise to sharpen his drawing skills. Being inspired by the idea, I decided I would shamelessly copy it. Master studies. Once again I found myself enthusiastically doing things that I had half-assed or blown off completely in college (when I knew everything and didn’t see the point). This happens to me all the time these days: e.g. copying the works of masters, reading the suggested but not required texts, going back to primary sources, etc.

The Rules

I started with Dirk’s original rules, which are to do two drawings based on an original, each one with a 20 minute time limit. The first drawing is a faithful copy, the second, a “riff” in which you do your own thing with it. I liked the idea of the 20 minute time limit and the idea of kicking it old school and working from the masters. So off I went.

The Art

Here’s the original drawing, Parmigianino’s Holy Family with Angels and Shepherds:

Here’s my faithful copy. Although Parmigianino’s drawing is complex, it’s very gestural, and I felt twenty minutes was enough time even though I’m doing pencils, inks, and wash.

The same cannot be said for the “riff” or the departure drawing. It’s not really enough time for me to bring anything of my own to the table and be able to execute it. It might have worked better if I had just focused on one of the figures, or if I had increased the time limit—maybe to 30 minutes—ten for pencil, ten for ink, ten for wash. Or maybe I’m just making excuses for myself. Anyway, here it is:

I’m going to be doing more of these, but I’ll be tinkering with the format. Perhaps giving myself more time for the second drawing, or perhaps working on the theme of variations: drawing more, but focusing on different things in each. More to come.

Shawn Blanc brings up something that’s been bothering me for the past few years: consuming content.

We say “consuming content” as a way to sum up the act of reading, listening, viewing, and other ways of taking in various forms of media and entertainment. We keep using that phrase. I do not think it means what we think it means.

Consume (verb): eat, drink, or ingest (food or drink); buy; use up.

Content (noun): everything that is included in a collection and that is held or included in something.

I don’t like either of those words when applied to art. They are both lazy and unspecific words that are used as a sort of shorthand for “the stuff people do on computers and iPads” and it generally implies that we’re not exactly sure what that is yet.

Consuming

As Shawn points out, to consume something is to use it up. When we read a book or look at a work of art or read a post on the Web, we are not rendering it unfit for other’s enjoyment, we are not using it up. Talking about consumers w.r.t. art, literature, or journalism is an appropriation from the field of economics. We talk about consuming goods in an economic transaction because when we buy things we use up some or most of their value. Once used, they are worth less from an economic standpoint than they were when new. Even so, the term is useful only in talking about purchasing in the abstract: global consumption of electronic goods, or consumer price indexes. In the specific, however, we watch a television, drive a car, or use a computer, we don’t consume them.

It’s telling that this vague term is only applied to content or sometimes as a verb without an object, as in people are using their iPads for consumption. Although even here the word content is implied. Again, vague and uncertain. Are they reading or watching a movie? Playing a game or browsing the Web? Are they writing? Be specific. If you can’t be more specific than that, maybe you need to think harder about what it is you’re trying to say.

Content

To aggregate specific art forms under the term “content” assumes that art is fungible, that words and images can, like water, be poured from one container to the next without any fundamental alteration of their nature. This is untrue, as anyone who has posted a magazine article to the web or collected blog posts into an anthology will tell you. The same goes for a images: the jpeg on the Web or the CMYK reproduction in a magazine are related but different instances of a physical object (like the drawing or painting they are based on). The same is true if the image is created electronically from the start: an infographic or webcomic created entirely on a computer is very different when viewed on screen as opposed to in print. They are perceived differently by the viewer, created differently by the artist, and are composed of different materials. Is the content the platonic ideal of the image? What about text? An author writes a blog post which she expands into a magazine article, then into a book. Which is the content? Is it the original idea that informs all three? Or are they all separate instances of content? If so, better to refer to the idea, post, article, or book. Because it makes a difference. Each of these iterations of the author’s idea have different characteristics, different presentations, and different expectations from the reader. Some are physical, some electronic. If you treat them all the same, as content, it implies you are not aware of these differences or that you don’t understand them.

I draw and paint on paper using pen, ink, and watercolor. I then scan and publish my work on this web site. People then visit and read this graphic novel, or if you prefer, webcomic. Occasionally, I write a blog post like this one. There is art and there is commentary, but there is no content and there are certainly no consumers.