The active study

Studies are relaxing. No pressure (beside time if you impose it yourself), no designing, no planning. I love them. You can just shut your brain off and study for hours without thinking.

For a long time, that's exactly what I told myself, and that's exactly what I did: pick a picture and copy it. I suppose we've all done that at some point. Hell, I still do it for the very purpose of relaxing.

Now, I wouldn't say it is useless in terms of learning. I helps you with seeing and drawing what you see (I think James Gurney has many articles on that topic). It makes you practice your craft on a technical point of view (whatever medium you use). And to some extent you are building up your visual library. That is what I call the passive study.

The problem with the passive study is that you are not really doing anything. The mere fact of painting brings you the benefits mentionned above. I began to understand that when I started asking myself after my studies "Did I learn from this?" It was very hard for me because most of the time I would realize that I didn't know what I had learnt. What is the point of doing a study if I can't phrase what I have learnt?

The artist and his model - Charles Bargue

I can't help but refer to my academic training: when I learn a mathematical theorem, I have to understand how it works, why it works this way, and how to use it. There is an active intellectual work that comes with it. I have to think, reflect.

With that in mind, I began to study by first asking myself "What can I learn from this?". It can be art related, like how a certain color reacts with another, or the range of the color palette ; but most of the time it is something NOT art related but that can be used for future work. The obvious example is anatomy, how bones and muscles are placed, how limbs are connected to the rest of the body, etc. Some other ideas can be what makes the standard package of soldiers in the desert, or the texture of the bark of a specific tree, or again how light behaves on a crystal.

At the end of my study, I ask myself again "What have I learnt from this?", and hopefully I have learnt something. It is my way to do an active study.

You don't even have to paint or draw to study actively. For instance, I spent hours (literally) just sitting in front of my screen and looking at Jean Léon Gérome's painting, trying to understand the composition, the color palette, measuring, analysing the values, etc. In that case, I wanted to get a better grasp on composition, and studying by just painting one of Gerome's work wouldn't have taught me nearly as much as what I've learnt just by THINKING.

Notice how the painting has only 2 subjects but how details and composition balance it

I now try to do that everytime I am studying. It is not always successful, I am not perfect and sometimes I study an image passively just because I like it, but it helped me to realize that I could learn more by looking for it.