One thing
I've found this year in Munich is that I've freed up a lot more time for
reading and depending on how devoted a reader you are you will have come across
some of my musing on the subject. The books I've bought so far spread
from art to design, work ethic to fiction and I'm getting through them at a
steady pace. I've already talked about a large chunk of them in All The Knowledge to
which I'm considering this to be a sequel of sort but I imagine keen eyed
readers may have already derived this from the title. In the aforementioned
post I closed touching on a few of the titles I was hoping to acquire over the
Christmas break and now on the back of Easter I'm knee deep in a handful of
them.
The one that so far has had the largest impact is The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg in which he discusses and dissects the various roles habits play in our personal lives, our work and in corporations and communities. Whilst a largely interesting read in it's own right the first chapters of the book are an incredible insight in to how to manage one's habits, both the good and the bad, in, for the most part at least, the work space. I won't delve too much further into an explanation as I've covered that on here at numerous points before, I don't want to bore you this early in by repeating myself yet another time. Using the lessons I've picked up from Duhigg's pages I've been trying to tighten my day to day routine, keeping an eye out for bad habits, analysing why they are and then changing them for the better, an example will help clear up what I mean. One of the first habits I've been changing is the all too familiar itch to go on Facebook or whatever after periods of focus or work and I've been replacing this primarily with taking a drink of water which is a far better habit and as the book explains it's impossible to "delete" negative habits, one can only overwrite them with better ones. Hence water instead of Facebook. The lessons the book offers are based on a very simple concept which is that a habit is constructed of four factors, first the crave, then the trigger, the following process and finally the reward. In the case of the above the initial crave is the desire to be distracted and the trigger for this could be a pause in modelling, switching software or just having focused in for a period of time like I've mentioned. The process would then be to flash up Faceyb and that's then fifteen minutes if not longer before feeling a short period of satisfaction but now I've switched out the internet in favour of taking a drink which fulfils distracting my mind so feeds the crave but is far less impactful on my time. I'm finding the lessons and the processes of Habits to be largely working but as always there's ups and downs with some days working better than others but by and large it is improving my work ethic. A similar book, Eat That Frog, which is a fantastic title I'd like to point out, is in my cross hairs when I finish with Duhigg but I imagine that will most likely be summer before I can get my hands on it unless I dare to put my trust in the great Deutch postal service.
Back to the more familiar territory of art books however before we get too distracted with talk of frogs and the other book I've been mainly reading recently is Grid Systems in Graphic Design which I'm sure sounds mind blowingly interesting which it totally is by the by. Seriously. Riding the wave of my interest in all things composition the grid has been a term that I've heard been thrown around I various GFX vidoes such as Tron, Oblivion, and by the likes of Ash Thorpe and other major players in the UI space and it's a topic I've been wanting to follow up on from well before Christmas but it was only then that I was able to find a solid book on the subject. Funnily enough it's also written in German so I'm getting two lessons for the price of one. I'm not too deep into it as I write this, I know I said I wanted get it done by the end of the month but it's been fairly busy so I've not got around to it but I'm hoping to get through it by the end of May. In so far Grids has covered the basic terminology of various graphic principles which is a nice return to a lot of terminology I left in graphics class when I left secondary school but the point I'm at now is taking the first steps into breaking down the compositional elements that allow for a strong graphical composition.
While the two above are what I've been focusing my time on reading I couldn't help myself having a peak at the first few pages of Figure Drawing by Michael Hampton which is what I'll be diving into after I finish Habits and Grids. Hampton's book is pretty self explanatory and it's quite extensive in covering how to construct the figure from gesture to a more "finalised" level. He goes into some of the basic anatomy of the body and while I've bought it primarily for the benefits it will bring to my life drawing there'll also be some cross over into my 3D character work, at least I hope so. After Figure Drawing I'll be tucking into both How to Draw and How to Render which I'm pretty excited for and that will pretty much lead me into the summer and September for going back to Leicester which I feel works out rather nicely for the start of the new academic year.
Moving on from these I want to start making ground on the business angle of things. It's something I've been thinking about for a while and third year feels like a great time to start looking into and developing the skills that while they may not be applicable directly to my art or working as a part of a larger studio they will be vital if I go done a freelance route or start my own studio which are two avenues I would like to explore perhaps later down the line. Most of the books I'm looking into are skewed mostly towards finance and marketing and while I like to think I'm half decent with the former the latter is definitely a subject that is a little foreign to me. There's also a couple on socialising, networking and influence which from what I've looked into so far appears to be a very interesting subject of study. I think overall though with these what I'm most looking forward to is studying something that's not art which, of course, is not to say I've grown bored of art rather it'll be refreshing to sink some hours into something new and different.
Whilst this post has focused on books before I close up I would like to bring
the conversation round to touch on a couple video tutorials I'm looking into. Gumroad
is a self publishing site that has gained a lot of popularity over the last
year with many artists producing their own home brew tutorials for fairly
modest prices. Up till now I've been picking away at the occasional
freebie as it pops up but there's two or three by the artist David Lesperance, an
environment guy, that have piqued my interest. My hope with these is that
the direct link between industry professionals will help enlighten me on new
techniques and pipelines in Max or Photoshop that currently would require a lot
of sifting online and a lot more luck and I can then fold these into
my own techniques and step up my game to a higher level. For now though
I'm content at getting through Habits
and Grids
before moving onto Figures
next month, something that really excites me as I haven't done any figure work
in far too long before moving on to the How
to series before looking ahead to a new area of study in business.
All in all that leaves me with a lot of reading, or watching, to keep me
going for the foreseeable future, I'll just need to make sure I keep the time
available to do so because I'm pretty sure that third year isn't going to be
the most generous when it comes to spare time.
Man I should really look into getting paid for all the pluging I'm doing...
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