> Drawing takes forever because you're exploring AND refining simultaneously.
> We don't "rehearse" a specific drawing, we solve a novel problem in real-time. There's no cached motor sequence to execute.
When you have been drawing long enough there are a lot of cached motor sequences to execute and modify. A lot of art training is simply filling this cache: spend a few hours every week drawing the human body from different angles, in a year or three you'll be able to make it up from pretty much any angle. Add in another twenty years of doing that and experimenting ways to make your tools do more of the work for you and you can dash off "sketches" that a beginner would consider finished paintings that took days to do.
Music is the same way, especially with improvisation. When you're improvising, you don't make stuff up entirely from scratch - you glue together all the little bits you have in your toolbox to make something new. That's why we endlessly practice scales, arpeggios, learn new songs, copy others' licks, etc.
Why do you think half the keyboard/organ solos in classic rock songs sound like jazzed up versions of Bach and Mozart? That's what they had learned as kids or in music school before going on to make rock and roll.
Right, but there's no point in repeating the exact same sequences unless you are practicing, in production you always do novel stuff, in both programming and drawing. This is unlike other disciplines like music or carpentry.
I have been drawing professionally for about a quarter of a century and it is my experience there are a lot of sequences that recur. A hand is a complex piece of anatomy but you really only need a mental library of a few dozen poses to meet most needs, for instance. You don't repeat it exactly every time, it's easy to change the angle a little, the lighting needs to adapt to the scene, some hands are dainty and some are big meatslabs, but that's all about as easy to adjust on the fly as, say, shifting the rhythm of a rock song you know well into a big band swing groove.
You also learn a discipline we artists call "construction", wherein you can quickly break any object down into a few basic shapes that are incredibly easy to reason about in 3d, and quickly layer details atop that.
Also consider a daily comic strip. How many times do you think Charles Schultz drew Charlie Brown in a single year? How many of those drawings were largely similar to each other? Now that's serious production work. Animation's similar, you probably have a wider range of angles and motion than in a 1970s newspaper comics page but you are still drawing the same character a zillion times and your hand learns stuff and spits it back out without any conscious thought on your part.
Right, I don't deny that parts are repeatable, like creating a function or creating a git repo, or creating a 2 column table schema.
But a whole piece is never the same. This is because the cost of copying is almost zero and the value is in the end-product and not in the performance.
An exception would be if we are talking about an oil on canvas painting and a client asks for a piece that has already been sold.
> We don't "rehearse" a specific drawing, we solve a novel problem in real-time. There's no cached motor sequence to execute.
When you have been drawing long enough there are a lot of cached motor sequences to execute and modify. A lot of art training is simply filling this cache: spend a few hours every week drawing the human body from different angles, in a year or three you'll be able to make it up from pretty much any angle. Add in another twenty years of doing that and experimenting ways to make your tools do more of the work for you and you can dash off "sketches" that a beginner would consider finished paintings that took days to do.