Honing Your Craft

            Lots of people pursue a degree for the sole purpose of obtaining a job in a specific industry. The courses students take to earn that degree have plenty to do with the practice. Yet, I have the feeling that a piece of paper mounted on a wall isn’t enough to be good at a life-changing career. It’s like putting on a black belt and saying you are a master at martial arts. The item itself gives you no power. Only the lessons you learn from earning it are worth anything.

            How does this relate to your degree? Recently I learned that in order to truly learn something, you have to practice it. Let’s use the gaming degree as an example. Some of you want to be artists, some maybe want to get better at programming. In order to become good, you don’t just read the textbooks or the notes you write down; you improve by actually doing the work. 

            Want to be a concept artist, but your drawing is sub-par? Study other artists all you want, but that will hardly help you. You need to look into what concept art is, then try to replicate that kind of work. Search for examples of character or environment concept art. It can be for anything from games to movies to TV shows. Now, draw exactly what you see. Yes, you are imitating someone else’s work, but this is for practice. Once you fully grasp what it feels like to do concept work, you can start making your own.

            Now to make this a habit. Do something like this once per day for at least an hour. Over time it will become easier to do. It might become so easy that you hardly have to erase anything and can draw confidently without hesitation. They say that it takes over ten thousand hours of practice to become an expert at something. Well, at a rate of one hour per day, it will take you over thirty years to reach that level. Don’t worry about being an expert. Just be concerned with improving yourself in the present so that it’s easier in the future.

            Same goes for programmers. I personally don’t know how one would practice scripting, but a similar method to what I mentioned above will work. Heck, if you really like what you’re doing, spend more than an hour on your daily work. If you find that you don’t like the work you do, maybe this isn’t what you really want. As for me, I dislike programming and I can only stand to do two dimensional drawings. My concept work isn’t very good, but I would like to get better at it if only to be able to make one piece of work that serves as an example for an artstyle. What I really enjoy doing is writing stuff like this and writing out game design documents. Granted, I have only jotted down ideas and haven’t made a real game design document, but once I find an idea I can work with, I will build it into something presentable, thus why I try to write documents for one hour a day.

            All in all, no matter what your craft, practice makes perfect. Just because your skill level today is bad doesn’t mean it has to stay that way tomorrow. I’ll be writing more articles like this in the hopes that in the future that I too can become an expert.