Introduction
Building a habit is tough but I broke it down into 2 or 3 steps:
– beginning
– discipline
– patience
Some would say discipline and patience are very similar especially in drawing but I sought to keep them separate. To me, discipline is about being somewhere at the same time each day. Patience on the other hand is about taking time with the drawing to exercise proper technique to achieve the result. My go to example is hair and fur which require a lot of patience.
1. Choose a subject matter and medium
I chose pencil and initially faces.
Pencil is obvious – we all learn that from very young and should be the easiest thing to pick up. Plus everybody has a pencil and eraser and I have a lot of those.
Faces because these are fundamental to being an illustrator, excellent to learn proportion and values. Also, it is a visual way to both self-analyse and see progression.
I also added a secondary subject: cats.
2. Step 1 - Just draw
Focus: draw something, anything as often as possible in a week.
Key tip: have reference images readily available, stacked up and numbered if possible.
3. Step 2 - Discipline
Focus: Pick the same time to draw with a minimum period of time for that session.
Tip 1: depending on your life, you may find it helpful to have two slots so you can alternate if things happen beyond your control (work, life, family, etc).
Tip 2: make sure you have enough reference images to fill the allocated time to reduce time lost through decision making.
4. Step 3 - Patience
Focus: to draw more complicated drawings.
A part of this will depend on what subject matter and medium was chosen. For faces and cats hair and fur respectively were the elements that I needed patience for.
Tip: don’t try to do complicated drawings initially, build up to it and don’t try it when tired.
5. Addtional tips - critical analysis
If you see the practice gallery, I’m often pointing out where I think the drawing failed. You will have to learn to be self-critical because if you show your drawings to your nearest and dearest, almost invariably they will be nice and say it looks good. At this stage, that will not help you develop.
With the face, this is quite easy as you can roll through a variety of questions: does it look like the reference image, is the angle of head right, are the proportions right, etc.
6. Signs of Success
I kept a note of when I drew, how many drawings in a session and how long the drawing session was. See my blog entry here to see the simple Word table I used.
This allowed me to keep a track and compare month on month. This is one measure of “success”, the data.
However, the more important one is the feeling that drawing has become part of your daily/weekly routine. This can be more ephemeral at first but should develop over time. I didn’t really ever feel this way until month of May when I actually missed a load of days that things felt wrong on a day to day basis when I didn’t draw something.
7. Personal experiences
I’ve actually updated the above since I pulled the site together in Feb/Mar of this year and now reflects a less wordy, more focussed approach because building a habit isn’t actually complicated, but it is the classic “easier said than done” thing.
The one mantra I said to myself is that there is no shortcut to learning. And like doing any sport, your brain and body need to learn how to move and think differently.
I took my time about it – if you see my stats, I improved from month to month from regularly drawing.I naturally started to take longer with each drawing, with the details, find the best part of the day to draw. I became more and more aware of what I was doing, starting to understand why less details means better drawings. The flipside is that how much more there is yet to learn!
Updated May 2022