Intro
I used to play and train chess. Even tough sometime in my teens I lost interest in it, the approach to get better at chess stayed with me.
During the corona pandemic, being stuck inside, I started looking for new interesting hobbies that I could do and I started playing around with drawing. I did not go to art school, nor to any in person training. All my learning has been done via books, or the internet, and I have no intention of changing this, because this is strictly a hobby for me. Nonetheless, I would get more joy out of it if I would create nicer things.
There is huge difference in how chess and art are approached, and in this post I will try to draw some parallels on how the structure from chess training can be used to improve at art and specifically at drawing.
How is chess trained?
If chess is one thing, I would say it is fiercely competitive. The rush of mating your opponent, and the implied superior smartness that you might have over him is hard to beat. Every advantage that one might have, is of course used, and the main advantage that you can get is training efficiently, using every minute you spend on chess in the best way, because our cognitive battery is limited.
Chess training is divided in a few parts. This can be split further but for the sake of simplicity I will keep it like this. Below in order of importance:
- Tactics
- Playing and analyzing games
- Endgames
- (Opening) Theory
Tactics are considered the most important topic to train. These are the small combinations used to win pieces, checkmate your opponent, or gain an immediate advantage. You can train tactics with countless tactics exercises and improving your pattern recognition. If you don't have a good grip on tactics, all other knowledge you might have will be kind of useless because you will lose on tactics way before you get to showcase you endgame skills.
The anecdote in chess is that if you would exclusively train tactics, you could probably reach a very high level of chess (2000+).
Here is the kicker. In chess you will endlessly do tactics exercises. At the chess club of my youth, each kid had to do 1500 tactics exercises per week. The really good kids were usually done mid week and asked for another 1500 from the coach. That was when you got them from books. Now with computers and the internet you have an infinite amount of tactics ready for you.
The equivalent in drawing would be your simple lines, circles, ellipses, cubes, cones, manipulated shapes, gestures, 1m sketches, and so on. Unfortunately in the online art community, there is no big emphasis on this. Most drawing books go over them, give you a handful of examples and then rush to the next topic. Drawabox does have you do some exercises (100 or 250 per topic), but nowhere did I see it stressed that this should be a big chunk of your drawing time from now till forever, just to keep the basic skills sharp or improving.
Playing and analyzing games What is the purpose of chess if you don't get to play it? The big advice was to try to play long time controls, this means at least a two hours game, once a week. More if time permits. In that time you would get the chance to really dive deeper into every move you are making. This gives you a feeling for strategy, for the general principles that chess has.
After that, you would also analyze your game. Tear apart basically every move to see where you made a mistake and what the alternatives could have been.
The equivalent for art would be taking time to do long portraits. Really spending time on it. Sketching it out, adding detail, then rendering. My sketches usually take 5 minutes. 20 minutes if I take my time, and this is a problem. I also rarely analyze them after, sketching smaller areas of the mistakes I made again and again until I find an optimal way forward. Having an experienced eye go through it with you would be even better.
There are also countless books on chess games that are analyzed basically move by move. Why did the grand master choose this move and not another. This is harder to find back in art. There are some youtube channel (a great playlist on the basics from The Drawing Database-Northern Kentucky University where the artist talks through the process. There are also some books that go through the process step by step, but it is usually a some examples per book and a rush forward.
Endgame study is learning about the algorithms used in really simple positions, when there are a limited amount of pieces left on the board. While complex and necessary, it can be approached in steps. For a player of rating 1500, these topics from the endgame are important.
I would compare this to the rendering step of drawing. If all the parts coming before rendering are bad, it is of no use to have great rendering skills, because it will be bad anyway. Perfectly rendering a bad sketch, still leaves you with a bad sketch.
(Opening) Theory is mostly the memorization of moves. While considered rather unimportant for the non-master chess player, it does attract a lot of attention from beginners, because it gives the feeling of an immediate gain. I learned the theory for the Sicilian opening, I will have an advantage over my opponent after the first 5 moves. You might have, but that will quickly be squandered away once you are out of theory and you opponent has better tactics and chess principles.
Learning anatomy before having good fundamentals would be something similarly useless.
A typical training schedule
If you would approach a chess coach, or join a chess club, you will probably get a training schedule. This will be based on your level, available time and goals, it would also be focused on your weaknesses and strengths, but more or less it will look like this:
- heavy focus on tactics, 50% of you training time
- playing and analyzing games for 25%
- endgames 12.5%
- theory 12.5%
Your available time will vary per person. An amateur chess player might spend 8 hours a week, with somewhat the same proportions. Let's say 4h on tactics, 2h on playing and analyzing, 1h on endgames and 1h on theory. A committed youngster trying to become a professional chess player might spend 20 hours a week, but the proportions will probably stand.
Conclusion
In the art community training schedules, or maybe a better word in this context would be work schedules, are rarely discussed. Most of the learners just go from one tutorial to the next. Buy a new book, go through with it and then never practicing.
For me this is a hobby, so at a maximum I could dedicate something like 4 hours to it. With the split below, I can probably progress a lot faster than randomly stumbling from course to course. 4 hours a week: - 30m of fundamentals 4 times a week. Lines, ellipses, shapes in perspective etc. Also have a small sketchbook with me and use it for this whenever I have a few minutes, example waiting at the dentist. Total 2h with some bonus if I have a sketchbook on me. - 1h of deep drawing and analyzing my mistakes. Also re-sketch some troubled areas, write down where I need more focus and try to improve in the future on that topic. - 30m of rendering - 30m of theory