#204 - Books Feed The Brain
I was reading the book “The Gamification of Learning and Instruction” by Karl M. Kapp. It’s a good book, but I struggled to map what he wrote to drawing practice.
Until!
A quote from the book: “The goal is to create a system in which learners engage in an abstract challenge, defined by rules, interactivity, and feedback that results in a quantifiable outcome ideally eliciting an emotional reaction.”
And I realized that the little drawing routine I present in my memory drawing workbook is a game according to that definition! I realized that was part of why I liked it so much. It’s challenging to draw from memory. The rule is you follow the sequence: observation, draw from memory, correct, draw from memory again. There is a quantifiable outcome in the form of two drawings, the second one hopefully a lot better than the first one, which, when a subject was chosen that was easy enough, elicits an emotional reaction.
It’s not an exercise but rather a little game you can play every day!
Why is that important? Because playing games is something we do for fun. And it makes it that much easier to learn new things if we don’t realize we’re learning and are just having fun.
I’ve created a page with ‘games,’ exercises that can feel like playing.
Books feed the brain. Reading non-fiction is a way better use of your time than being on social media. If you’re not drawing, that is! It’s fun for me to figure out how such a subject relates to what I am doing with Practice Drawing This.
This Week
Something weird happened the past few weeks. I used to get a satisfying dopamine hit from adding to or improving the Practice Drawing This website in some way. I could look back at the end of the day and feel proud of having done something cool.
But that went away recently.
The mistake I made was creating a comprehensive to-do list of things I wanted to do for the site. Up to that point, it was all in my head, but now it was a list. It sounds like a good plan on paper, but in reality, it becomes a monument of failure as it grows and grows and grows. Look at all the things I need to do still!
I’d add a new model, improve something, and, in the process, come up with a ton of new things to do for the site, effectively lengthening the to-do list, not shortening it.
I decided to slow that down and focus more on drawing. That’s the whole point of the thing, after all.
Someone reached out to me to ask if the older torso model, the one with the two boxes, was still available, as they couldn’t find it. I replaced it with the new torso model because the older one was too inaccurate. Notably, there was often no believable spine between the chest and hip.
On the website, I have re-introduced the older model that approximated the torso through boxes by using the new torso model, modifying it so that you see the boxes.
This is one small example of the many items on the long list of things I can add or improve to the Practice Drawing This website.
In the coming period, I will still be publishing a weekly newsletter, but it may lack a ‘This Week’ section as I focus on drawing more.
Yours sincerely,
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