A short thread on how I approach learning a new skill

Important caveat: how people learn is a deeply personal thing (in much the same way nutrition is) and barring some recent breakthroughs in neuroscience, most “how to hack your brain” advice is usually dubious. What works for me may not work for anyone else

And almost all post-facto “analysis” is fraught with hindsight biases. Learning is almost always never neat and organized. It’s messy and more random than people make it out to be.

And “learning productivity” isn’t some noble end in itself. In most cases, it demonstrates little more than the privilege of being able to invest undisturbed time on something you want to do rather than need to do.

I’ve picked digital illustration as the skill in question because it’s something that I started doing while writing the book because I wanted the book to be illustrated and I wanted illustrations that were both informative and funny in a non-distracting way.

As a starting point, I had decent Photoshop skills from my blogging/early Twitter days, so that obviously helped but while I could doodle reasonably well, I hadn't enough practice or muscle memory to get a visual idea down reasonably accurately.

With most skills, it’s not a binary between being an amateur and being a professional. There is a spectrum in between where the sweet spot is “good enough to tell the story you want to tell”

And normally “good enough” involves the combining of multiple skills to get a greater than the sum of parts effect.

A simple example - when I wanted to draw an illustration explaining why liquid water is denser than ice, rather than obsessing on drawing perfectly three-dimensional representations of the molecule, I opted for something like this

Before I jump into YouTube, my first port of call will usually be an expert - in this case, @krishraghav, to get a rough lay of the land in terms of the learning journey required to improve. What you most learn from an expert is what *not* to waste time on.

I then built up a YouTube playlist of experts just going about their craft (rather than try to condense their knowledge down in easy to consume nuggets). https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9MY7_Evn80arpK3A7Qx5aYetUVzRK5DR

So I’m always usually ignoring the “10 lessons I wish I knew before I started X” kind of clickbait because I rarely find them useful. It’s the kind of content that feels like it might be useful but it's like eating cookies for dinner.

The next step is about building a rough map of the different simpler, modular skills required to do this. In this case, I broke it down into pencil sketching, outline drawing, scanning & cleaning up, colouring, and highlights

And then it’s really just a series of progressively increasingly harder projects and for the most part, I am always looking to learn just enough to do my next project, that’s it.

And I almost always save certain repeated actions as scripts in Photoshop to save me time. Honing a craft is really about outsourcing the boring bits to technology so that you can focus on the more interesting bits

And while Masala Lab only required black and white illustrations, I wanted to be able to do coloured illustrations for the Mint column. Like this Mallu Santa with the Maradona tee.

And it’s not all just work, so I tend to keep some fun side projects in increasing order of difficulty, and difficulty here = level of improvisation over the original.

So here's one I did a while back. Just a plain, from-scratch recreation of an existing illustration

And then this one - again, a straight recreation. I briefly considered turning one of those windows into a TASMAC shop but decided against it.

And then I decided to do a Chennai themed Tintin illustration, so I first roughly sketched the broad details I wanted - the old Ennore thermal power station silhouette, Tintin wearing a shawl and earmuffs etc.

And then I decided to amp it up a bit and do an entire Chennai themed Simpsons sofa scene with a lot more finer detail

So there you go. Essentially, my trick is to have a fun-enough next project that is just slightly more challenging than the previous one and then use all the tool automation I can use to save me time.