I wish I was one of those people who could just draw a million things daily. Like, how do people do that??
I draw a small sketch and I’m done for the rest of the week and I wanna sleep for 10,000 years. It’s so rare I go on a drawing binge.
HOW DO YOU NERDS DO IT??
You start small. Daily. You doodle daily. Literally ‘doodle daily’.
Not ‘make a masterpiece daily’ or even ‘finish a sketch a day’ daily. Just literally train your brain to want a stylus in your hand for 5-10 minutes a day. Doodle lines, doodle eyes, doodle bullshit poop emojis or watch speedpaints and trace over the screenshots or doodle tongues or teeth or full bodies or whatever. Anything that is literally a painless doodle.
It takes about two weeks for you to start feeling the effects of it, but it works. And the more you keep at it, the faster it is to lunge into it.
I also name every canvas I draw on the current date, that way I am constantly looking at whether or not I really AM drawing every day. After a while, you start ‘affording’ yourself days, because you find yourself wanting to doodle more and more daily, so you wind up doing 5 sketches one day and pretty much affording a week of art block because you did all that in one day.
This was the first New Years resolution I made in 2013 and stuck to because I was sick of the whole ‘drawing one doodle every 2-3 months’ and I wanted to do something with my art. It is still to this day the best thing I ever took the time out of my year to do. I don’t draw daily now, but when I get back into the drawing gig, I can binge on it like crazy for 2 weeks before going on another rest. Trust me. It is SUPER WORTH IT.
This is my current 2015 year, and these are only the raw files of finished pieces I’ve done, or pieces I never plan on working on again. I have a separate folder for WIPs, and the folders I listed above are exclusively for pieces I made a final copy of to post online/give to a client/sell/print/whatever. I tend to keep a month’s worth of WIPs in the WIP folder solely to give me motivation to try and finish as many as I can, and also to keep my momentum up when I feel like I’m not doing enough.
Nothing makes me happier knowing I can actually fill out one of those fucking ‘A picture a month’ memes that goes around every year now. It is so worth it.
