Drumroll…

Daily practice of the basics.

And I don’t mean it in a cheeky way either!

I saw an interview with Krenz a couple of days ago, where he said that rather than doing 300 studies in a day, he’d rather do 3 studies for 100 days straight.

For fundamentals like capturing forms accurately, it’s more about building a certain awareness over time. For instance earlier this year there was a period of time when I was doing studies of geometric forms like cubes and cylinders. It worked quite well! After a few weeks I felt significant improvement in my ability to capture shapes and proportions. But then I dropped it for a couple of months to study anatomy. Now when I returned to them, I realized I’ve forgotten what I’d learned before, like how I should start from the bigger shapes, and that I should always measure proportions, etc. And since my observations are off once more for the simple shapes, my anatomy studies also suffer.

So you need to do one or two fundamental studies every single day until the principles of the basic are so thoroughly digested they became part of your subconscious. When you finally stopped doing these and moved onto other more complicated subjects like anatomy, you shouldn’t have to think about these basics ever again, as your consciousness would be occupied by other newer and higher considerations. This transformation of brain can only be achieved over time, with sustained, consistent repetition. Doing the same amount of practise over a short period of time just does not work the same way, biologically.

Writing all this down to remind myself to be patient about the long winded fundamental studies. :3