This is a follow-up of last week’s post.
Here are some of the places I’ve seen recommendations to intentionally copy other people’s work to better my own practice:
- A book on the modern atelier movement, where the author wrote a significant part of a four-year curriculum was devoted to drawings that are copies of works of the old masters. This helped the artist learn how previous artists had solved problems in their paintings.
- A book on handwriting, which mentioned copy books. Those were books where people would write down famous quotes, their favorite quotes, and other quotes, and carry it with them. It helped them with handwriting practice. It also helped them to always have a handy reference of what had been written before.
- If I look online, I can find several arrangements and analyses of famous classical music pieces, most of them centuries old.
In each case, the recommendation is to get better by copying particularly skillful examples of what came before.
I’ve even read comments that art has to be grounded in what came before, or it runs the risk of having no reference or meaning to the viewer today.
If I’m buying something I want to use, and I want it to make my life easier, ease of use and ease of learning how to use it matter. And for that, the designer probably needs to have spent some time analyzing and copying already existing works.