Game in the Brain

These are my notes on art and being an artist. This is what I would have told my younger me when before I wanted to go through art.

Technical Elements vs Art Area Size.

Here is a metric with measuring Art: the number of elements in the piece that requires technique, coordination, and a lot of references or memory. A small quarter page piece of art that has a character with various details like a simple portrait just takes about 30mins (lets assume about give or take 20% in many of these metrics).

Example are simple and small portraits should take about 10-15 minutes in BW if its just a face. This does not count the support work which is digging up a library of faces that would prevent the artist from using the “stock template face” he has hardwired in him memory.

These portraits took about 10-15 minutes to draw but the support task and moving it to this would take about 5-10 mins depending on the tools. It would take me about a couple of man days  to set up a good art work station to produce art regularly but with enough reference material for a limited set of pieces of a particular theme. Researching reference material is the rabbit hole that can suck time and its hard to tell if every additional 5 mins can yield better references when I’m in front of the keyboard. 

• So elements tend to take about 10-15 minutes. Larger pieces of up to a quarter page is about x1.5 time, half page is x2 time, and full page is x4 time. 
• retries is what makes a work drag to up to x10 long. it counts as the same  work and can be very emotionally frustrating. A self measure is the ability to count (and not to shy away from counting) retries and failures. 

Workload and Productivity per Week

Sakimi Chan and various artists like her take about 4-6 hours (can extend to 8 hours) for her works. Lets call one sitting of work to be about a Workload. Sakimichan’s works have about a dozen elements. Sakimi chan’s art has various nude and erotic versions of the same work for certain audiencs. So by technical elements per Workload is at the dozen and more.

Its best to measure productivity of an artist by workload per week. Artists need to be mindful of this if they don’t want to burn out. Some will measure their workload in the months.

 There are problems to this in terms of client scheduling. Its possible for an artist to draw on command but most young artists can do it only a few times before burning out and meet the frustration of being stale because they are drawing from memory instead of references – when I draw from memory my art looks stale and repetitive TO ME. references are the fuel that prevents artists from burning out. (i have some hacks for this).

There is a lot of Pacing in Art that is needed to be trained in school and most professors are not illustrators but designers and aesthetics consultants. I’ll leave a long discussion about illustrators as professors for another time but suffice to say the same technical work ethic and process-flow is similar to programming and writing – but with the quirks of it a visible medium and expectation biases that will diminish the actual perceived value of the work.

By Pacing I mean:

• support tasks that help make art and how these tasks are measured in time and bits of data.
• Workspace and work processes set up. The idea capture systems and personal reference organization.
• calibration, maintenance, startup, and wind down of equipment. 
• the post work catharsis. 

GTD for artists are essential and would have probably made me a career artist if I was exposed to such methods early (at 16)

• So measure it in Technical Elements per Workload and number of workload per week or month (Depends on the artists temperament). 
• Know your workload metrics. 

Aesthetics and Style


Style and Aesthetics is highly subjective, but there are distinct trade offs to certain styles. Some have more technical elements but have a higher drain on the artist and has a bad feedback loop of higher expectations while having a higher market price for his art.  Then there are simpler styles that can appear simpler and has a simple elegance but its harder to justify the value. Then there are the general art trend and market deviant styles.


Whatever the Aesthetic and Style its important to know its personal value to you, either as the commissioning patron or the artist. If you’re a patron (writer who needs art)  or an artist there is a need to not just have this honest appraisal but to know how the market values your tastes, style, and the trade offs.

Traits

• Complications
• Idea Communication Efficiency
• Market Value as well as Audience
• Personal Value (this is a deep personal review)
• Time to execute
• Ease of execute 
• Support Needed to execute
• Recovery rate from such tasks

Art as Work.
Its not what I dreamed about when I chose my major, but I knew no one who could have told me all the risks. I’m not the type to tell you to follow your dream, I live in the Philippines and I know starving artists. I know artists who survived and thrived, while many are like me – former artists. I can’t help be reminded by the business failure rates of 70-90% (over 3 years) when I think of being an artist.

Being an artist is depending on the generosity of your family or the state to let you try until you can start earning and still there are risks of people stealing your art, not being paid, not finding enough work, and the trends and value of the work fluctuate. We remember the rockstar artists but fail to appreciate the risk of failure and a 2-4 year degree going down the drain.

I could walk through the details and complications of being an artist to any teen choosing an art degree. More importantly map out the list of skills and habits they need to be an artist  with a budget. I just see so many fail and I wish i can give them the strategy guide. these days I’d like to map out the petty skills they need to master and the multiple things they need to track when they are composing art.

I still download (using an album downloader and torrents) tons of art for references and look through them ( I recommend an image tagging software to sort by tagging) for continuous ideas. I do it as a left over desire to be able to draw good  but these days I’m lucky to find 1-2 hours in a month to draw. I still like reading and learning various artists work process and imagine how they got there.


Does being a Failed illustrator count as Someone who can Teach?


Key Ideas for further research

• See Art Germ’s, Sakamichan’s workflow and process
• Mangkaka’s life and workprocesses, look at their salaries and risks
• Check salaries of illustrators in Linkedin