✏️ Skill and Craft
✏️ Skill and Craft
Building a sketching habit: good is good enough
📖 The Quote
‘Relying on craft and routine is a lot less sexy than being an artistic genius. But it is an excellent strategy for not going insane’ - Christoph Niemann
✏️ The Sketch
Pick an object or a scene - I am sketching a space I know well: my living room.
This sketch assignment it’s very simple: sketch the same subject once a day for five days. Use the same media but experiment with the point of view. The intention here is to repeat the same process, over and over, to iterate the output and build a sketching routine.
Assess the results and compare the daily outcomes at the end of the assignment. Have you improved your craft? Have you been able to observe past the obvious? Have you focused your attention on something in particular? Has this process of sketching the same thing every day sparked your creativity in other endeavors?
Imagine now doing that for a whole year1…!
(You can continue the exercise for as many days as you want, but you get the point)
💡 Some Ideas
Christoph Niemann (in my opinion, one of the best visual artists out there) puts it in the right words: great work cannot be planned - it depends on luck. Very good work, however, can be consistently achieved through skill and craft - even in the absence of talent and inspiration.
Perfectionism is a common trait amongst designers.
We tend to believe we can intellectualize the design process in our minds and come up with great work if we find the right source of inspiration - or if we just sit thinking about it for several hours. We never settle for an option when we know we are smart enough to come up with a better one (and our duty as designers is to envision the best possible answer…). I have been guilty of this in the past. In particular, in Architecture School, where I could dedicate all my time to a single project. But working in the real world presents other challenges: time management, clients’ expectations, and opportunity costs..., to name a few.
One of the big lessons I learned in my professional experience as a designer is that good (work) is good enough. And good work can be better achieved through iteration and practice of ideas, more than relying on talent and inspiration.
We tend to believe that we must produce our great work out of inspiration or as a result of an uncontrolled, messy creative process2. And I couldn´t disagree more. Chasing for inspiration to happen, or waiting for the best project ever to unfold is a waste of our time as designers. Really great work is out of our control, as Niemann puts it - it relies on luck.
It is better to finish something and then move on. Because what really makes our work better over time3 (and what increases the luck of great work) is the commitment to practice our craft and iterate ideas.
And that is a much healthier process (we do have control over).
Happy sketching! 💫✏️
Ana
In 2019, for a whole year, I took photographs of King’s Cross Station during my morning commute from a double-decker bus. This requires a dedicated post, but long story short, it was at the end (not at the beginning) of photographing the same subject, over and over for more than 300 days, that my photographs became better, more creative, more intentional. It was after building that routine and practicing the craft, that I was able to see beyond and get my best work produced.
There’s this dangerous popular thinking that the design process should be ‘messy’ and ‘random’ or else not creative. I promise to write more on this topic.
Think of it as a compounding graph.