In terms of my first formal creative experience was, it depends on how the term “formal” is defined. I have always been creating art since I was very young, before I was even in school. However, in the first grade I had an Art class where I would make a lot of stuff in. It seemed to be a bit more formal than the average first grader’s art class. There was really a focus on learning the creative process and getting to know real useful materials, and not just drawing with crayons. In terms of creative art making, I have probably throughout the course of my life spent close to several thousands of hours. However, I don’t consider myself to be anywhere near expert level. My time is so spread out across such a long period of time. In terms of graphic design, I am in my third year. The classes that I have taken that involve creating graphic design work were: Studio 1, Studio 2, Lab 2, Typography 1 and Visual Studies. If each of those classes is worth 250 hours, my in-class work adds up to 1,250 hours. If I were working on things for a full 13 hours outside of class per week, that adds up to 975 hours in those five classes. When accounting for just classwork so far, I am far from being at 10,000 hours (If I am calculating correctly). However, It doesn’t account for other work that I’ve done and I feel the whole concept of a 10,000 hour mastery is a bit hard to figure out. It also really depends on how those 10,000 hours were spent, too. Not every person who has spent 10,000 hours doing something will have the same exact level of experience. I think that it’s easy to tell if you have become an expert at something by looking at your own experience and understanding what your skills are and how those hours in experience led you to gain those skills over whatever amount of time it took you.
In relation to this class, typography 2– this class is the only creative class I’m taking for the semester. My other graphic design class is Graphic Design History. I feel like I’ll have to catch up on the amount of creative hours I would have missed by not taking two creative classes this semester. I felt the same way about Art History 2 last semester. Since I had to take that class, I was only able to take Studio 2 as my only creative class for that semester. Currently, I feel as if I would be much more confident with my creative graphic design experience right now if I hadn’t taken only one creative class for the past two semesters.