Shadowing Practice: Starting art "late" is actually a HUGE advantage | YTartschool - Learn English Speaking with Video

Here's the type of comments I get almost every single week.

And it goes something like this.

Hey, Mark, I'm 19 years old and I'm just now starting to learn art.

Is it too late for me?

19?

Too late?

I get this from people in their 20s, their 30s, 40s, 50s.

Even sometimes from people when they're 16.

You know, like at 16, wondering if you've missed the boat because you haven't started, you know, when you're five years old.

And well, I always give the same kind of quick reply.

Like, it's never too late to start drawing.

But I wanted to make a whole video about this because I think the long version is way more interesting.

And I think it will surprise most of you.

Not only is it not too late, but it's actually a massive advantage to start later in life.

And I will prove it.

Let's get this class started!

Alright, as we dig into this, I'll let this time-lapse of a recent painting

that I did play in the background in case you're not interested by the topic, you know, but you still want to be entertained visually.

So yeah, first, where does this idea come from?

You know, the belief that you have to start early, you have to start as a kid, or you're basically toast.

I think it comes from two different places.

The first one maybe is like physical sports.

You know, like growing up, we've all seen athletes that are just training from childhood, and then eventually, you know, they reach their peak and they're unbeatable.

You know, like if you want to go to the Olympics, if you're starting at 25 years old,

in that case you've probably really missed the boat because your body has a peak window of maximum flexibility,

strength, coordination, like all that physical stuff.

And I think most people just like copy-paste that same logic to any other skills, onto art without really thinking about it.

Honestly, this is something I've caught myself saying in the past where, you know, if you want to learn how to to draw better start really young.

That's a massive advantage.

Everybody knows that, right?

Well, no. That only applies to things where your body needs to stay young or have like a peak window of performance,

but art really does not rely on anything like that.

Now maybe another potential source for that way of thinking might come from hearing about like child prodigies.

You know, like kids that are born artists, the one that could draw like photorealistic portraits by the time he was 10, as if touched by some divine talent.

And sure, maybe those kids do exist, but what you don't really see is the parent

or the tutor that's been sitting with

that kid for hundreds of hours providing guidance that that kid probably would have never been able to find by themselves.

But still we've all heard this somewhere, that kids learn faster than adults.

But is there science behind this.

Well, actually there is, and it's science proving the contrary.

So hear me out.

A 2024 study from the University of Copenhagen actually tested this.

So they took 132 people across four age groups,

kids, young teens, older teens and adults in their 20s and had them all learn the same new motor skill.

And the result was where the adults and the older teens improved significantly more than the kids during the actual training.

The researchers just couldn't find any physiological basis for the idea that there's a golden age of learning before puberty.

They straight up called it a myth.

Now there was one interesting catch.

When they tested everyone the following day, the kids did retain a little bit more of what they learned overnight.

It's like their sleep was consolidating their learning a little bit better.

But the thing is, it only matters if you're learning something and planning to basically walk away from it.

Because if you actually apply what you just learned right away, which is exactly what you should be doing as an artist, well the adult advantage holds.

So as adult if we can learn it faster and then you know immediately after that put it into practice, retention really shouldn't be much of an issue.

To remember stuff you need context for it, so instead you should start a real piece, hit a wall, maybe a bunch of walls,

learn exactly what you need to get over those walls and then apply it immediately, you just found the answer.

So, you know, solve your problem and then move on until you hit the next wall.

This is what we call JIT learning or just in time learning, which was the topic of last week's video.

But as adults, we are perfectly built to approach learning this way.

Like I started working in the game industry at 17

and people will hear that and assume that I was drawing non-stop ever since I could hold a crayon.

But the reality is that I only really started to get serious about art, like maybe two to three years prior to that,

because before that, all I was doing is playing video Like I was addicted to World of Warcraft.

So when I did get serious at around like 15 years old I was already an older teenager at

that point with access to like online communities Some art books

that I could understand

and I had enough cognitive development You know to actually be able to structure my practice

So my young start wasn't actually that young and the skills

that got me hired were skills that I developed with the kind of focused self-directed practice that I'm describing in this video.

Because the stuff that I drew as an actual kid, trust me, it wasn't getting anybody hired anywhere.

Now something I built specifically with this in mind was Art School, my complete art education program, the sponsor of this video.

It's designed specifically for the type of learner that I'm describing in this class.

You know, self-directed adults or young adults who want that clear structure.

Someone that can take their hand and guide them through every step, right from home and at your own pace.

Over 31,000 students are in the program now, and a huge portion of them started later than they thought they would have and are progressing faster than they expected.

The program is on sale for a little while longer through the end of February to celebrate passing that 31,000 student milestone.

To learn all about it with the link in the video description, it's my proudest accomplishment.

I think you'll like it.

Alright now let's keep going because we're not done.

Now when you think about it, art isn't just hand-eye coordination, it's a deeply cognitive skill, right?

Like it's problem solving for the most part and our brain get better at doing that as we get older.

Not worse, unlike the body of an athlete.

So I have four examples to kind of drive this home and the first example will be perspective.

The thing that makes your environments look like they actually recede into space instead of looking like a flat mess, well that's geometry basically.

You know vanishing points, horizon lines, foreshortening, you're doing like actual spatial math

And most cool systems don't even cover the geometry fundamentals you would need for this until you're like 16

or 15, let's say.

A 10 year old can learn to copy what perspective looks like, but understanding why it works so you can construct it from imagination,

well, that requires mathematical reasoning that most kids won't develop until much later.

And then proportions are a similar story.

The head fits into the body approximately like 6 to 7 times.

As adults we don't even think about it, it's like yeah obviously that's ratios and fractions, but try explaining fractional ratios to a nine year old and watch them like pass out in front of you.

As adults we take this stuff for granted because we use ratios constantly in daily life without really thinking about it,

like you know, cooking, splitting bills, budgeting, estimating distances maybe.

You've been training proportional thinking for years just by being alive, so when someone tells you the forearm is roughly the same length as the foot,

you can sort of immediately visualize that and apply it.

You have this lifetime of spatial references that a kid simply doesn't.

And then we have also study skills

and this one is probably the most important reason why adults are better suited to learn art.

Most of the best art books and courses use college-level vocabulary and you know, kind of assume that you know how to learn independently.

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They assume you can read a chapter, extract the key principles and practice them on your own.

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They assume you can sit down for two hours and focus on something difficult without someone standing over you.

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These are study skills that you built through years of school, work maybe, life in general.

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So a kid learning art will for sure need someone to structure everything for them, otherwise their only practice tool will be to blindly copy others.

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Kind of what I was doing when I was I was younger and I'm suspecting the same went for you as well.

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But as adults now, you understand how to structure your own learning.

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And that's not a small advantage, that's a pretty enormous one.

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And here's the last one, maybe life experience.

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This is kind of easy to, you know, overlook, but art isn't just a technical skill.

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At some point, you have to decide what to draw, like why you're drawing it, what mood to create, what story to tell.

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And well, that ability to make interesting creative choices comes directly from having lived a life.

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You know, you've experienced losses, maybe joy, hopefully boredom,

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fear, love, you know, and all of that is creative fuel, right?

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Like a 10-year-old can design a character copied from a bunch of stuff that he's seen recently in cartoons maybe, but that's never going to be really that interesting, is it?

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Maybe it'll be done at a decent, let's say, level of technical skills if a lot of references were used,

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but likely objectively quite boring.

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A 30 year old, on the other hand, can draw a character whose design can make you feel something, right?

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Like, you know, like a unique design inspired by a lot more life experience.

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And there's a reason most of the greatest artists in history did their best works in their 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond.

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So if you're sitting there thinking that you're way too late, whether you're 19, 39 or like 59, I want you to really hear this.

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You're not at a disadvantage. At all.

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You're actually bringing decades of cognitive development, life experience, study skills, mathematical reasoning,

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emotional depth, and of course discipline to the table.

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Well, maybe not all of you, but you know, more than a kid you would think.

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Because yeah, a 10 year old has none of those things.

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So I think you can stop mourning the, you know, all the years that you didn't spend practicing art.

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And instead, just start using those tools that you've actually developed along the way.

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Because every year you've lived gave you something that granted you some sort of an advantage.

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When it comes to learning art, it's all made things easier, not harder.

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Now kids do have more time in front of them, that is an advantage.

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Like they have a lot more free time in their day.

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But if you can also make time, you know, to practice art, you'll always be in a much better position to improve faster.

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So start now.

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And if you want the blueprint to level up your drawing skills as fast as possible.

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Which entirely depends on you understanding JIT learning, or what we call just-in-time learning.

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Well, you'll want to check out this other class that I recently made, Explaining It All.

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It'll be up on screen here in just a second, so click on that and I will see you over there.

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It might blow your mind.

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I'm sorry.

Wat is de Shadowing-techniek?

Shadowing is een wetenschappelijk onderbouwde taalleermethode die oorspronkelijk is ontwikkeld voor professionele tolkentraining en gepopulariseerd door polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. De methode is eenvoudig maar krachtig: je luistert naar native Engelse audio en herhaalt het onmiddellijk hardop — als een schaduw die de spreker volgt met slechts 1–2 seconden vertraging. In tegenstelling tot passief luisteren of grammaticadrills, dwingt shadowing je hersenen en mondspieren om echte spraakpatronen tegelijkertijd te verwerken en te reproduceren. Onderzoek toont aan dat het de uitspraaknauwkeurigheid, intonatie, ritme, verbonden spraak, luisterbegrip en spreekvaardigheid aanzienlijk verbetert — waardoor het een van de meest effectieve methoden is voor IELTS Speaking-voorbereiding en echte Engelse communicatie.

Shadowing Practice: Starting art "late" is actually a HUGE advantage | YTartschool - Learn English Speaking with Video

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