I have had to step up my game lately. The 10,000 hours project you have been reading about has taught me a huge lesson.

That lesson is this: I can’t do it the way I’ve been doing it.

In the previous posts for 10,000 hours,[a quest to spend as much time as possible focused on art] I was doing all that while working at least 50 to 60 hours a week. I have medical bills to pay, a wife to support, pets to feed, and I want to get the occasional starbucks.

At the same time I love art! I moved to Southern Pines to pursue my art career! It was supposed to work so perfectly! When it turned out less than perfect, I pushed harder. I can do both I thought. I can work more than full time and let art and drawing fill in any little gap of spare time. I had to. We only get one life and we must make the most of it.

But, I missed a key component of my “10,000 hours program” …..

I’m already there. I’m already finished. I’m ready to move on, and it’s not with art.

Don’t get me wrong, I love great art with a passion and I still plan on spending lots of time working on that skill, but that is not what I have already worked 10,000 hours to get started.

To tell you what it is, I need to start from the beginning.

It starts at church, after the sermon. I’m 5 years old and singing “I heard it through the grape vine” through the microphone up on stage.

It starts at church during a sermon. I’m 7 years old and I draw the scene of the crucifixion. Not too bad for a seven year old.

It starts in a mango tree in Bolivia. I am 9 years old and reading. I’m reading for hours and hours. I read anything I can get my hands on. I read Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien, books about dinosaurs, planes, space, the ocean, the jungle. I read “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories. I read anything and everything!

It starts while I’m sitting at the computer. I’m 10 years old and I need to learn MSDOS to be able to play the fun games.

It starts in a smokey guitar shop. I am 15 years old and flat-picking “Sailor’s Hornpipe” on the guitar. I go from learning folk/blue grass to rock and roll to classical guitar in my first year of college.

It starts in the highschool library. I’m 16 and a friend explains HTML programing to me. It seems pretty straight forward.

It starts on the highschool auditorium stage. I’m 17 and I have a great speaking role as Doc in “Westside Story.”

It starts on a 747. I’m 19 and discover a love for travel when I spend a couple weeks on my own backpacking through London, Edinborough and Oxford. I want to go back soon.

It starts at community college. I’m 21 and a professor offers me a position teaching CorelDraw, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator. I didn’t take it, I moved on.

It starts at Barnes and Nobles. I’m 22 and the couches are a poor replacement for a mango tree, but I read. I read all the business books, all the finance and stock market books, all the self help books,  My role models other than my dad became John Maxwell, David Allen, Brian Tracy, Stephen Covey and Napoleon Hill

It starts at NC State University. I’m 24 and a college graduate. They let me piece together my design, programming, communication, art history, and music classes to form a degree called “Arts Applications”. If NCSU had considered my Barnes and Noble education, I wouldn’t have been too far from an MBA.

It starts at work. I’m 26, a couple years out of college and I feel like a square peg. What am I supposed to do now? I plan out my next 5 years and see myself in art school under the best artists. In retrospect I see now that I have a strong desire to plan things out and make things better.

It starts at a wedding. I’m 27 and my beautiful bride is walking the aisle on green grass. I have to take care of two now.

It starts in a doctors office in June. I am 28 and I had just been through two major surgeries in 4 months dealing with testicular cancer and not knowing what is coming next. I have just been told I am completely cancer free! I sit outside on a bench alone and rejoice in the grace that has brought me through these 28 years.

This is me. This is my 10,000 hours. This is my education. I have pursued all my interests with resolute dedication.

I am moving into a new season. Thanks to a couple of good friends here in Southern Pines I have an office, a phone line, a computer and an opportunity to develop a business and develop businesses. I am absolutely thrilled about this because all business is is people serving people. And to serve and help others to serve better and more effectively is an exciting thing!

You might ask what I do. The story I just told will help explain, it’s not what I do, but how I do it.

What I found out was that this is part of my personality. I am an INFJ personality type.  If you follow the link, go half way down the page for an excellent description of some of the things that I have been confused about about myself. You don’t know what a relief it is to find out that atleast 2% – 3% of the population is similar in some ways to me.

Anyways, all that is to say, I am in art hibernation. Apparently, I have been in blog hibernation too, but new things are coming up that I want to write about so I needed to get this article out of the way.

More to come…

I don’t really have anyhting to show for this week other than to say I am 32 hours further in.  I should have a nice Bargue drawing to post for you by next week.

Meanwhile I got to go see Coldplay on Friday in Charlotte! Here is a very nice video of them singing Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”

Until next time…

I finished the main lessons in “The Structure of Man” Series. I have memorized the basics of the skeleton and the muscles and their proportions.

I think there are a few gaps in my knowledge that I want to fill in. But overall. I’m happy with it except for one thing.

As I mentioned last week, The end result of the series had a very comic book look to it. Since that isn’t where I am headed I want to overlay that knowledge with what the Old Masters saw.

I started sketching out a gesture of the body and its proportions as I had learned in the series, but for the muscles/skin of the drawing I overlayed a famous michelangelo drawing. Now thats the direction I want to go! This week, I will be doing more of these master drawings to try to get them into my head. Until then…

When I was 12 I saved up my money for a book first published in 1978, How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way.

I read through it, liked it, was interested in learning what it was trying to teach but in the end I got very little out of it.  I think this applied to a lot of books I read and software and equipment I’ve bought or received as gifts.

Anyway, that was a little digression. The reason I mention How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way is because I have been learning this week about the muscular system.

When I was drawing all these muscles and learning how they pieced together, it reminds me of when I drew these super heroes while I was in middle school. For me thats a good feeling. I wish I had never left that. I’m also excited that I know I can go so much deeper with this knowledge. And, that that knowlede can inform how I draw.

Remembering that book reminds me of another thing I want to learn more about,.. perspective. You may see some of that in the coming months.

Also, if anybody has a good idea about how to photograph white pieces of paper, let me know.

Until next time…

I went to bed Saturday with a sigh. I wasn’t going to make thirty-two hours for the week. I had to flip around my sleep schedule one too many times and I still had nine hours left to go.

I measure my progress from midnight Sunday to midnight Sunday and htis time I just ran out of hours.

On Sunday morning I talked to Sara  about my dilemma. I didn’t want to come up short, but I also don’t want to kill myself the next week to catch up. Her advice was to just tack it onto the end of the 10,00 hours.

So, thankfully, the goal this week is still 32 hours as opposed to 41. We’ll see how it goes, I may be able to do more.

But enough about that. I reached a major milestone this week! I have memorized a working knowledge of the human skeleton and it’s proportions.

Why, would I do this you may ask?

Drawing the portrait and figure can be a bit like writing out sentences.

Imagine copying a sentence when you hadn’t been taught how to write a single letter. You might take some time trying to copy the shape and size of each letter. You could copy the shape and size of each word. Or, if you are really gung-ho, you might try to copy the shape and size of the whole sentence.

Imagine your relief if someone came along and said “Hey, there are 26 letters that you can memorize and once you have that down, the letters make up these words and the words make up the sentence.

It’s can be the same way with the portrait and figure. Except in this case the letters are the proportions and positions of the skeletal system, muscular system, fat deposits, and the skin.

I don’t think an artist needs a medical knowledge of all these areas, but the more you research how these things work together, the easier it is to draw them.

So last week I memorized the first part of my alphabet. This week I’m starting in on the muscular system. So until next time…

It was a nice week for my 32 hours. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to fit it in. But, I took an old laptop along with us and drew along to “The Structure of Man” whenever the opportunity came up.

I don’t want to post every drawing I did, but I will post this one that gives the basic idea of what I am studying now.

These studies are not art in and of themselves. But I see them really helping further down the road when I am drawing and painting portraits and the figure.

Be looking for a post later this week. I am going to put together my thoughts from studying anatomy like this. Until then.

I wanted to share with you a portrait that my friend Mari is working on. Mari is a teacher/student at Mims Studios and has given me several wonderful critiques. I hope to get many more when I make it back to school.

This portrait is an amazing example of balancing what you can see and what you know to create art.

So many ideas about what I’ve learned so far come to mind. But mostly I just find this portrait inspiring.

Check it out.
This is her blog.
This is the portrait.

Also last sunday, Paul Delorenzo came by my house and graciously gave me a consultation about painting and how to set up a still-life studio in my house.

His first word of advice was to block out all the light so that I can have control of what light hits the subject. So most of today I was taping up tin foil on windows in the bedroom.

On the agenda for this week:

• Finish up the last bridgeman sketch
• Continue working on the Bargue foot drawing
• Get started on a training course call “The Structure of Man“

I’m going to try, but I might not make it to 32 hours this week. Ive got a litle vacation to the beach so we are going to play it by ear.

You can stream some of his music from keegandewitt.com

Or you can download one of his songs for free here:

http://keegandewitt.com/wildheart.mp3