Fixing Your Drawing Practice

When I started drawing, I had a decent idea of the kind of skill I wanted to develop. I wanted to be able to create beautiful line drawings. I have a specific vision of how the skill would be and what kind of drawings I would create. Now, of course, throughout my journey, this vision has changed a little. But the overall vision is mostly the same. And it's far off in the distance.

Let's call this vision the mountaintop. This is where you want your skill to be. You can see it off in the distance, but it's too far away to see a clear path there.

Here is how the path looks for a lot of beginners.

Some things are obvious. You need to start practicing. Furthermore, the distance between you and the mountaintop is going to be filled with ugly drawings. So you need to accept that you're truly a beginner. Next, all you need is some kind of map.

You start grinding technical skills. It doesn't matter where - Drawabox, Proko, Peter Han, Scott Robertson, whatever. And there's lots of low-hanging fruit. You feel yourself improving. Maybe not always as fast as you like. Maybe there's some frustration. But ultimately you're slowly improving.

Sometimes you might start to doubt the map you're following and use a different one. Or you might forge off into your own path, convinced you've found a better road. That mountaintop is always there in the distance.

The more and more you practice, the harder it gets. You start to get good at the fundamentals. You start to become "intermediate". Your skills have definitely improved, but that mountaintop still looks just as far.

Doubt starts to come more often. Sometimes, you break down and start missing sessions. You simply don't see how any path can take you to the mountaintop. You reach out for advice. You talk to other artists, successful artists, or other creatives still starting out their journey. Some of their advice is helpful. Some of it makes sense.

You know, logically, that ugly drawings aren't a negative signal. They're a sign that you're on the frontier of your abilities. You know that it's important to keep practicing. But a part of you has started to wonder if you're missing something. There's a dim awareness that your mindset is wrong. That your emotions are holding you back. You start journaling more, consuming more advice.

Sometimes you talk to other artists, and they confuse you. They seem to have the ability to enjoy drawing almost effortlessly. You don't relate to this.

You recognize problems in your mindset. You don't want to think this way. You want to enjoy the process more. You even do some experiments with more creative exercises. You can see that your emotions are holding you back. But you still don't understand. Why is it so hard for you?

Sometimes the practice breaks down completely. You can't keep up motivation. You can't force yourself to objectively and calmly work through the deliberate practice, even though you know it's required. The distance to the mountaintop grows.

Each time, you refresh by finding a new map, journaling some, psyching yourself up. Reminding yourself about the mountaintop that you need to get to. But it doesn't last long. Soon you're sitting on the side of the road again, head in hands.

At this point, you know that something is wrong. But you don't know what. Maybe you think that you aren't cut out for drawing - that only the "creative" types who can happily play with a pencil are the only ones who make it to that mountaintop.

This is where the Growth Engine comes in:

Let me ask you a question. You're standing on the side of a road. You can see the mountaintop. You have a profusion of maps. There's a long, fascinating, winding, incomprehensible path to the mountaintop - but you'll only see it in its entirety once you're there.

But what is the thing that gets you to the mountaintop? It's the vehicle you're driving. Your car. The Skill Growth Engine.

You have been ignoring your engine. The engine is the part that moves you. The practice of drawing is the practice of building and tuning up your engine.

The engine encompasses the mindset, emotional skills, and execution of your deliberate practice. The road is the short term outcomes, your technical skill growth, the drawings you create.

The problem is, you've been ignoring the engine. You've been thinking the road is everything. The road is what happens every day. It's what you see on the page. The road is your technical skills, and the small improvements that sometimes come. You've been obsessing about the type of cement in the road, the bumps, the branching paths. Constantly suspicious that there's a better path. Constantly stopping your engine, reading maps.

But here's the thing. The road doesn't really matter. The map you use doesn't really matter. As long as you keep driving, and you keep that mountaintop in the distance, you'll eventually get there.

And your engine is dying. It belches black smoke. It clunks and rattles. And every time you stop the car, you slap on some duct tape, and go back to looking at your maps.

Forget about the road. Forget about growing technical skills. Forget about choosing your curriculum - it doesn't matter! It doesn't matter what you practice. You will get better. You just need to draw, and occasionally look up at that mountaintop.

Here is where things get difficult.

Artists who have a working engine intuitively understand the engine. They can even point out that your engine is broken. They can describe attributes of a working engine. But the part that nobody tells you is how to fix and maintain your own engine.

You've built up a bad habit of neglecting your engine. You think the road is what matters. Maybe at this point, you're dragging the engine behind you, map in hand, clueless about why you're moving so slow.

You're not dumb, either. You know your emotions are holding you back. You know your mindset needs to improve. But your engine doesn't come with a user manual.

The thing is, you can't change the way you think overnight. A depressed person can't just snap their fingers and decide to only be happy. It takes time.

The rest of this guide is my hesitant answer to this challenge. It should help you repair and build a strong engine.

The first step is to assess your engine. This is not something you can expect to get right the first time. It requires introspection and awareness, and a new way of thinking about your training. But you can revisit this step whenever you have new insights about what's holding you back.

Like I said earlier, your engine doesn't come with a user manual. We don't know exactly how it works or what a healthy engine looks like for you. We know a few general guidelines:

• You want to gradually detach your motivation from short-term outcomes (successes and failures, good and bad drawings)
• Instead, stay motivated by long-term outcomes, consistency, and enjoyment from training itself
• You need to learn to bypass or redirect habits that derail the practice
• You need to get consistent milage
• You need to be present and engaged with your training, trying new things and doing deliberate practice

Even though there's no user manual, you can still study how other artists work and get ideas. This blog post has an example workflow that I like, for instance.

Let's review the engine we're repairing before we start tinkering:

Skill Growth Engine (n) – The mindset, emotional skills, and execution of your deliberate practice.

With that in mind, we're going to start "fixing" your engine. Instead of reconstructing the whole engine, we are going to just pick the biggest, most obvious things to fix, and start tracking and improving those parts.

Start with this question: What habits, emotions, or reactions most hold you back from having a good session?

For instance, you might say:

• "I always give up when a drawing isn't going well"
• "I get lazy and draw too quickly"
• "I always lose motivation when I look at all of the bad drawings I've done recently"
• "I frequently get distracted by my phone during practice"
• "I don't choose a specific thing to improve or study when I redraw a subject"
• "I get overwhelmed when I try to choose a subject to study"

Choose a small number, maybe 3-5 things you want to change. We'll call these growth variables. These are going to become the new focus of your practice, instead of technical skills. When you sit down every day to draw, you aren't thinking in terms of what fundamentals you can practice or improve, or how good your drawings will look. Those things are secondary. Every day, your goals are going to be related to your growth variables. You are going to evaluate your sessions based on the variables. And if you find it helpful, you should even track the variables in your sketchbook.

For instance, the first time I did this, I decided to track the following variables:

• Pacing (per drawing, whether I drew carefully or rushed)
• Notes (adding at least one constructive observation or suggestion after each drawing)
• "Riff" notes, starting with the words "I could …" (reminding myself to creatively apply what I'm learning and try new things)
• Retries (retrying at least one failed drawing on each page)

And I started writing them down directly in my sketchbook.

With this step, you have taken a huge step towards a working engine. You are basically ready to draw. But first, there is one more tool we are going to add to keep you in touch with your engine:

The "6 Step Prep" is a short reflection that you do before every drawing session. I stole it from a meditation textbook called The Mind Illuminated, but it works great for drawing!

Memorize the following steps in order: motivation, goals, obstacles, diligence, expectations, posture.

Yes, you need to actually memorize this. This is something you're going to do before your main drawing session every day.

Speak out loud, or whisper. At first it might take as long as 10-15 minutes, but soon you will zoom through it. It's ok if you feel silly at first. It will evolve into a minute or two of quietly talking to yourself before you draw.

Each step has a sort of mini reflection. There are two components to the reflection. The first part is to be honest. This helps with awareness. You want to do an honest assessment of where you are.

Then, your goal is to nudge yourself towards the "ideal". This is where you improve your engine.