Ted’s reading this book about learning stuff, and the 10,000 hour thing. The author kinda posits that the first 2K hours are foundational, the rest are mastery. I’m generalizing wildly abt the author’s stance here bc, like, I haven’t read it, BUT:

I think that’s a friggin intriguing place to start. Like. Like. I’m sure that over the course of my life I’ve spent somewhere between 5-600 hours studying Spanish. Definitely not more, maybe not even more than 500. But we’ll give me the 600, because what the hell, why not. And I’d say I’ve probably spent maybe 12-1500 hours ACTIVELY drawing, studying drawing, etc. Doing that specific kind of art.

My Spanish is rudimentary. My art skills are such that I’ve said for decades that I’m good enough to see how good I COULD be with practice/how good I’m not.

But looking at both those things from a “2k hours is foundational” viewpoint…I can 100% see how, although they’re very different THINGS, that premise lines up. My art skills are legit 100% better than my Spanish skills. If you want to add writing, which I’ve obviously spent FAR MORE than 10K hours doing, then it maps even farther: my writing skills are FAR BEYOND 1000% better than my drawing skills.

And this, this is the bit that’s blowing me away, I think:

2000 hours is not NEARLY as overwhelming an amount of time to contemplate as 10K hours. 2K hours is one work year.

Obviously there is zero chance I’m going to spend 8 hours a day 50 weeks a year working on Spanish or art, but 2K hours as a foundation feels achievable. And it seems to me that if you put in 2K hours with a certain degree of regularity, you’ve got a certain level of commitment that might make working toward 10K hours more likely.

& I mean, let’s face it: if I spent another 4-600 hours on art, I’d really be quite good. WHETHER I’d do that is another question, perhaps even one not worth contemplating, but it’s certainly less intimidating than considering 8600 hours to reach any sort of level of competency. Another 1500 hours of Spanish would probably land me in “not embarrassed to try speaking it” territory, if not genuine fluency.

So this is a thing I gotta sit with a bit. Or rather…work with, a bit, I think. I’m really intrigued. Hmm!

I have finished the flat colors for ALL FOUR panels of my little webcomic page.

It’s been very slow going, all learning curve, because, well, I’ve never done it before. If I do more than this, of course, it’ll go faster, because I won’t be spending–for example–4 hours trying to learn to do…whatever it was I spent 4 hours trying to learn last week…or 90 minutes last night and another hour tonight trying, until I went back and tried the thing I’d tried in the first place yesterday and it hadn’t worked and this time it did for some reason. Presumably that won’t happen again (although god alone knows, so it might).

Since at this rate it’s going to take me a month to do one page, I shall downgrade my imaginary page rate to no more than one a week, assuming I keep trying. I…think I might. I need a hobby that isn’t writing, and it’s better for me to be trying to draw than staring miserably at the world burning down via Twitter or FB.

I am stuck with the fact that the thing that’s been making me think for years that I could/should try doing a webcomic was not as good, at its start, as this page is (not that this page is very good, but.), and…I don’t know what to make of that. In a way I wish it was as bad as my inspiration. I mean it’s NOT GOOD. But it’s…I either have too much ambition (well i mean have you met me) or…I don’t know. No ability to start at the very baseline, except I guess this is my very baseline. But I’ve always thought I’m just good enough of an artist to know how good I’m not, and that probably if I practiced a great deal I’d actually be quite good. I think doing this page is making me feel both sides of that VERY STRONGLY. It’s not particularly comfortable. Probably that’s good for me.

Yeah. Anyway. IDK. I should probably go to bed now, rather than ruminate on…anything else. :)

I’ve done bluelines for a 4 panel comic that could be the web comic I’ve been mumbling about for what, a decade now? I sort of think I should do about fifty more before I even try finishing the first one because otherwise I imagine odds are good I’ll only ever do one.

(6 hours later)
I could…probably do an ‘inks’ version of one of these in a day, if I don’t get any more complicated than I have here. Even rudimentary colors & shading would probably take at least another day. I don’t think I could do a page a day web comic like #QuestionableContent.

I do think working on this has been cutting into my “dicking around on twitter” time rather than writing time, so a couple pages a week might be do-able. OTOH I haven’t done any writing for the past week (unrelatedly to drawing, i’m pretty sure), so I might be wrong.

IDK. I reckon whatever I do do, I’ll post to my Patreon as I do it and then maybe to the wider world later, when I’ve got a backlog. If it gets that far.

It’s 10pm and I forgot to have dinner because I got busy mucking with Clip Studio Pro.

Last week I did a little sketch for a cosplay dress, a quantum realm dress, and it made me kinda wanna do more drawing, I guess, so I finally got out the stylus for my Surface Pro and doodled a body shape with the inbuilt art program, something or other, uh, Sketchbook, and then I was clever and put a new layer over it to do the cleaner lines & it like snapped lines smooth & shit & OTOH I’m like ‘well that seems like cheating’ & OTOH I’m look ‘uh cool!’

So then I downloaded Clip Studio Pro that and spent far longer yesterday afternoon mucking about with it than I should have, drawing a not particularly great pic of my old Elfquest character, Spidersilk.

This evening I decided I was going to spend a little time actually reading/watching tutorials on how to use this program. The tutorials I’ve found are all much too advanced, because hell if I know what any of these menus the dudes are all “you can get rid of this, I don’t ever use it”-ing about. I found like…4 small useful things, and the EXTREMELY FREAKY 3D POSEABLE FIGURES THAT YOU CAN MAKE DO WHATEVER YOU WANT AND USE AS FIGURE REFERENCES and after mucking about with it, about 2 hours ago I said “clearly this is enough of this for tonight”

NARRATOR: It was not, in fact, enough of this for tonight.

the coloring is terribly rudimentary, but i’ve literally never really tried coloring something digitally before, so, y’know, it’s…well. it’s terrible, but that’s ok.