Here’s my relationship with learning: I love learning but I hate being taught.

I’m a kinesthetic learner which means that I don’t learn from reading, watching tutorials, or listening to instructions. I learn by getting my hands dirty: doing and making mistakes over and over again.

That’s why in an effort to get better at drawing, I decided to draw every Pokemon. It’s been effective because I’m doing this every day.

I like the analogy of learning as a dimmer switch. It’s not a light switch you could flick on and off. It’s not one moment you have no knowledge of it and the next moment you’re an expert. It’s a dimmer switch and it’s very gradual.

Every time you practice. Every time you experience it. You increase the brightness a little bit more. This analogy was explained to me from a Great Courses audiobook (Amazon) about vocabulary and that tends to be how we learn vocabulary. We don’t hear a word once, immediately add it to our own mental dictionary, and be able to use it in a day-to-day scenario, especially if the word is very foreign to us. So I really like that analogy.

Every time I draw, I try to make it one percent better, or I try to learn a new technique, or I try to get really specific and very detailed, or I try to be one percent faster. I don’t always succeed. Sometimes, I mess up and I just have to get through with it. That is a learning experience. When you mess up, that’s actually when you learn. When you try to make it one percent better you don’t always.

I like the process of making mistakes. I like the process of challenging myself and the fact that I’m doing this every day makes it feel like there’s no risk because tomorrow I’ll get to sit down and try again. I’m always more of a process over progress type of person. I believe progress will happen if you have a process down.

I’m learning new software. I’m learning new techniques. I’m learning to apply different aspects and combine them together. I started doing some animation. I learned Illustrator just a few months ago. I never thought I’d be able to understand the pen tool. Now, I feel like I got it down pretty good, so that feels like quite an accomplishment.

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