Sunday Mailbag: Daily Drawing?

Q:  How do we form a daily drawing habit?

A: Any skill or ability you wish to improve at requires two elements that are of primary importance: study and practice. There are no secrets or shortcuts, it’s really that simple. Unfortunately study and practice require one unavoidable thing from the practitioner…

Time.

It takes time to find and consume learning resources like websites, books, and classes (shameless plugs inserted), and of course to practice that skill/ability. It’s like that for playing a sport, a musical instrument, a game like chess, or an art like painting or drawing.

Everyone is busy. Life makes a lot of demands on us and it’s very hard to find time to commit to something where the rewards of the time spent is hard to see and quantify. Any amount of practice improves your drawing skills. You get better with every drawing you do, but it can be hard to see the improvement in the short term. You often have to compare work from months or even years ago to see the advancement. Without the instant gratification of seeing steady, noticeable progress it’s easy to get derailed on the practice front and harder to keep committing that precious time to drawing.

I think there are two tricks to keeping up with any regular drawing commitment. The first is to set immediate goals for your work. The second is to become part of a community of people with the same goals as you have.

Setting Goals

By this I do not mean saying “I’m going to draw for one hour per day!”. That is an open ended commitment with no real finish line, and will do very little to keep you motivated on days when your time is more limited than other days, or you just feel lazy. By a “goal” I mean something tangible with a real end result. Instead of saying your goal is to draw a caricature a day, challenge yourself to draw the cast of “Game of Thrones”. Make a list of the characters you are going to draw and start checking them off. This is a task with a clear path and a tangible end result.

Most people are goal-orientated. Having something tangible that needs “finishing” naturally keeps people interested in the task and having the satisfaction of reaching that finish line. Your goals can be anything but I’d advise not to be too ambitious. Keep it shorter and more attainable, so you are not daunted by how much time is left in getting to the end. With as big a cast as “Game of Thrones” had I would only list the top ten or so. You don’t even need to do one a day. Spend one hour doing studies and sketches, and then work on the final over a day or two. You decide if it’s just a pencil drawing or if you do something more elaborate. Keep the task shorter and more attainable.

Join a Community

This is where the internet is a major asset for keeping on task for your goals and keeping up your daily (or whatever) commitment to drawing. It is very easy to find groups on various social media that share your interests and with whom you can share what you are doing and get feedback. As social animals, humans are much better at accomplishing things with encouragement and support from a community than they are all alone. You get outside input and kudos for accomplishing even incremental goals like a simple sketch or drawing. That’s a real “reward” that can mean the difference between finding the time to do that drawing and watching yet another episode of “Jack Ryan”. Being part of a community also gives you one other facet to all this that can be a big factor to staying on task: accountability.

I’m not saying being scolded or belittled if you do not accomplish a given task. It’s more about seeing other people posting work and just wanting to not disappoint your fellow artists, or to just keep up with the group. You see others accomplishing tasks and that motivates you to do the same.

I’ve gently mocked and ridiculed “Inktober” the last few years but the fact of the matter is something like that is exactly the kind of goal-orientated community project that can get people motivated to spend that time at the drawing board and accomplish something. You have a list of things to do, a time frame to do it, and a large community of people to share it with and get support/feedback using nothing more than a hashtag.

This month someone started an Inktober type project called “Caricature Resolution 2020”. It’s a list of subjects that participants are supposed to draw, one each day in January. Personally I think that’s too ambitious. One a day is a lot of time commitment and it’s setting most people up for failure. Inktober is sort of the same thing. Too much expected. Yes, I know, you are supposed to just do as much or as little as you can and no one is judging you if you only do half the tasks or whatever. But the sense of accomplishment in total completion is a motivating factor, and with so much to do it’s all too easy to fall behind and just give up. Better to have more reasonable goals. Caricature Resolution 2020 might be better served to also have a second list of 52 subjects and have it be a weekly challenge for those to whom a daily task is too much.

Ultimately it’s simply a choice for the artist trying to develop a regular habit of drawing… you either do it or you do not. However I think the above helps keeping that commitment on track.

Thanks to Richard Deutsch for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!