Comment by turtleyacht
7 hours ago
How often is a drawing really trashed and restarted?
There's the saying, "Plan to throw one away," but seems like it varies in practice (for software).
There are even books about patching paintings, like Master Disaster: Five Ways to Rescue Desparate Watercolors.
In architecture, it's understood the people, vehicles, and landscape are not as exact as the building or structure, and books encourage reusing magazine clippings, overhead projectors, and copy machines to generally "be quick" on execution.
Would like to see thoughts on comparing current process with the "Draw 50" series, where most of the skeleton is on paper by the first step, but the last is really the super-detailed, totally refined, owl.
From my very limited experience with art, it's more often the case that a work in progress creation is abandoned and then taken a stab at anew later than trashed and restarted. Or it is iterated on to a degree that it is not meaningfully different from a full restart.
I have a bit more experience with software and the only reason for why we don't plan throw one away is because it costs more money and the market pressure on software quality is too low to make stakeholders care. In my personal hobby coding, I often practice this (or do what I described above with art which is closer to abandoning until inspiration strikes again at which point a blank slate is more inviting). The closest thing professionally I get is a "spike" where I explore something via code with the output not being the code itself, but the knowledge attained which then becomes an input to new code writing.
While I'm always ready to throw away code when I realize that there is a better way to do things I found it quite difficult to write code with the intent to throw it away. However I often do write code with intent of modifying it once I have a better idea of what is needed. It might be because I'm comparatively better at refactoring than at starting from scratch.
So i can only speak from my own experience of the last 5 years of trying (and often failing!) to accurately copy or otherwise create various drawings.
Very rarely do I start completely from scratch, but usually adjust the drawing so much that maybe I should have. I wonder if I tracked the adjustments if I would find every line was redrawn in some cases.
Thing is, it is hard to see what part is 'off' until most of the other parts are right. Especially with highly symmetric drawings, where symmetries appear gradually as the whole thing comes together.
Hmm...a lot? For a complex work, you'll sometimes do some number of sketches and studies and drawing and underpaintings...Lots of things get tried/discarded/modified before you land on a final painting.
When programming stuff as a hobby, I do always plan to throw one away.
The first one is where I learn my lessons and write enough spaghetti until I fully understand the problem.
Then I delete the first one, and start over with the lessons learnt.
When I was a kid, I obsessed over getting a picture right the first time. But as I got older, I learned to do subject studies to refine tricky details before committing them to a larger piece.
If you ever get the chance to see the personal effects of a famous artist, most have piles and piles of sketches and studies they've done while prepping for a larger piece.