Self Assessment for non-professionals

The majority of the artists in the Penciljam community are not professional artists, by which I mean - their profession does not involve creating art.

While there are a decent number of professionals¹ such as concept artists, illustrators, painters, comic book artists and so on, most of our group may be described as deeply passionate hobbyists or at least aspiring professionals.

I think of it as a gradient.

Some Passionate Hobbyists transition to aspiring professionals and some of these eventually become full time professionals.

I’ve been teaching visual-art for sometime now. I taught as a guest lecturer at the College of Fine Art, where I later served on the board of studies. I designed Penciljam’s popular 100 Day Program, a fast track course for people entering the visual-arts profession, and more recently, I designed the visual art learning system for Byjus.

What I’ve come to realise is that the learning pathway followed by professional artists doesn’t help non-professionals. These pathways tend to have an academic learning bent, are too structured, too intense and require far more time, effort, cost and commitment than a non-professional can afford.

In this sense, motivation should dictate the methodology that is used for learning. A professional is motivated by career goals and a monthly paycheck. What sustains a hobbyist on the other hand is passion, which an overly structured, academic curriculum can easily extinguish. (It happened to me!)

Teaching Visual Arts to non-professionals needs a rhizomatic learning structure.

Some reasons that illustrate why are :

1. Non-professionals are driven by passion. They pick up techniques, art mediums, subjects based on unpredictable factors such as a sudden interest driven by an inspiring painting or the acquisition of some interesting new art material.

2. They learn better when they have a project in mind. These projects need to have short term goals, measured in hours as opposed to professionals who work on projects that last weeks if not months.

3. They are driven to create art in unpredicatble spaces and circumstances. Largely driven by a sudden desire, and motivation that ebbs and flows, unlike professionals who do not have that luxury. Non-professionals may draw at cafes, or on vacations, as opposed to professionals who primarily focus on creating art within workspaces.

So, we need a learning system for non-professionals that is unique to each individual’s needs, desires and circumstances. Basically, we need to keep the fundamental principles (perspective, anatomy, colour theory etc) while changing the delivery method.

This is close to impossible for academically structured syllabi to provide because a factory model only works when you’re training a lot of people in the same thing. This sort of Just-in-Case learning teaches a fully structured curriculum, whether you will eventually need it or not.

Just-in-Time learning on the other hand, is more apt to our scenario, in which a passionate non-professional has the learning resource on hand when they need it.

What non-professionals need are:

1. Highly customised learning pathways unique to each individual’s current skill levels and interests.
2. Learning material that is concise and focuses on principles or techniques that are specific to their need, based on the circumstance.
3. Projects small enough to be finished in a short window of time. Say 4 hours max.
4. Structure the learning as a net or a mesh rather than as a ladder. The idea is that learners will come across certain concepts and principles more than once, in different contexts, in smaller doses.

The rhizomatic structure of learning pathways for non-professionals.

This sort of structure makes it hard to create learning solutions which is why platforms for non-professional / unstructured learning like Skillshare or Domestica makes the customer do the heavy lifting. Curriculum design is left to the customer who may be the least qualified to do it. To pick a course, you need to first know if you even need it. This paradox is kind of central to this whole premise, and is what needs to be tackled prior to developing the pedagogy.

So, the first step may be to create an assessment tool that can help people build a learning pathway. Once a pathway is built, choosing the learning material becomes easier.

Footnotes