This is so immensely interesting and useful what the guy documented here... and thanks to Mark Erdmann, it's perfectly illustrated.
What you really see here is not just "his progress" but how he actually did it:
* He went back to the classics (greek statues, classic poses, perspective etc) to really learn the ropes
* he practiced over and over again, often the same subject again and again
* even if his taste seems to lie with those scifi/fantasy-style figures, he nevertheless trained to sketch poses, the human body, faces, muscles and so on
* his strokes become more confident year by year
* he needs less strokes on a sketch to make the viewer see something recognizable
* he judges his work repeatedly
* he lived with being a beginner for quite some time but didn't give up
If some of you might remember Douglas Crockford's JavaScript lessons series - he stressed the "knowing the history" quite a lot - quite similar to many "how to become a great developer" howtos stress to know a language like Lisp. (Basically our version of "learning the classics"...)
The same applies btw for what writers documented about their progress and journey to become good writers: "know the classics" and "do it every day".
For the folks interested in the science side of "becoming an expert", please consider Ericsson's "Expert Performance" (Cambridge University Press) - that's the source/foundation of the notion of "a decade" and the "10000 hours of deliberate practice" comes from. (And a very interesting read...)
What you really see here is not just "his progress" but how he actually did it:
* He went back to the classics (greek statues, classic poses, perspective etc) to really learn the ropes
* he practiced over and over again, often the same subject again and again
* even if his taste seems to lie with those scifi/fantasy-style figures, he nevertheless trained to sketch poses, the human body, faces, muscles and so on
* his strokes become more confident year by year
* he needs less strokes on a sketch to make the viewer see something recognizable
* he judges his work repeatedly
* he lived with being a beginner for quite some time but didn't give up
If some of you might remember Douglas Crockford's JavaScript lessons series - he stressed the "knowing the history" quite a lot - quite similar to many "how to become a great developer" howtos stress to know a language like Lisp. (Basically our version of "learning the classics"...)
The same applies btw for what writers documented about their progress and journey to become good writers: "know the classics" and "do it every day".
For the folks interested in the science side of "becoming an expert", please consider Ericsson's "Expert Performance" (Cambridge University Press) - that's the source/foundation of the notion of "a decade" and the "10000 hours of deliberate practice" comes from. (And a very interesting read...)