Just sit down and draw it.

“But Brookes,” you might say- to which I say I am not accepting questions at this time.

“But for real though, Brookes,” you say in reply in this fun hypothetical dialogue- to which I say sure, but not really.

A little caveat that might help you backspace that angry comment you already started typing out, I’m not going to stand here and make the argument that drawing isn’t hard. Or that it isn’t especially hard right now. This video is about all the ways we make drawing harder. This video is about the inhibitions that tend to build up in us like a grease trap and make it harder to get started as a result.

It’s also about how powerful it can be to clean that grease trap out.

Watch the latest video here!:

Yes, there are plenty of reasons to pre-plan, gather reference, warm-up— legitimate reasons to hold off on starting your artwork. But there are myriad more reasons that we convince ourselves to procrastinate (some that even have the gall to masquerade around like they’re legitimate reasons, too!)

As you’ll see from watching the video, I throw some time-lapse on screen, none of it particularly notable, the only real running thread between them is that they were all done for fun, not at all to be productive. One was a test of the new brushes in Max Ulichney’s Retro Max Pack, one was exploring the cast of Baby Boy Tommy the Copyright’s surrounding parody characters, for whatever reason, and the last was simply just a prompt to include bikes in an illustration.

Here’s a reason that comes up a lot: sometimes there’s art that we NEED to make. If you have work as an artist, there’s a workload or series that you’re following or a project you’ve committed to. Sometimes we need to make progress in a particular series (ahem like a certain ‘Tober challenge we’ve committed to) or that we’re already a few days behind in. This makes it so every time we’re free to draw, we feel the obligation to work on the thing we need to.

Sometimes that’s true, but often, there’s three things happening as a result:

We’ve made the thing we like doing into so much of an obligation that we might not enjoy it as much.
We don’t give ourselves enough time to get warmed up or loosened up because we need to 100% commit to working on final work,
It forces us to not spend any time doodling, exploring, doing studies, and just plain ol’ having fun with our drawing.

This is the kind of thing you can do for a little while, but it is a FAST way to fill up the grease trap. It becomes such a painful and laborious thing to even get started working. We need to have a creative junk drawer, time out of the metaphorical spotlight.

So one suggestion is this: schedule a period of 45 minutes or an hour with either no plan for what you’re actually going to draw, or something so completely outside of your normal work that it’s ok that you aren’t doing it the right way or being productive.

Another super fun self-imposed blockade is worrying that you aren’t doing enough things at once to learn. Often times it’s like, “What illustration could I make right now that would practice my anatomy, my lighting, my fur texturing, my perspective, all equally at the same time?!”

But two things that happen as a result of this:

You’ve setup something so daunting it continues to cause you to procrastinate.
You can’t genuinely push and improve on all of those aspects at once.

A difficult universal struggle us artists experience is that learning and improving is such a long road, sometimes it would be nice to just try and double up or take a shortcut (I’ve been guilty of glancing for many a detour myself).

But here’s another suggestion I find actually helpful: divvy out the goals that you’re trying to accomplish so that you’re only aiming for one or two at a time. If that means splitting your lighting study and your anatomy study into two different things, then do it! If that means splitting a thing you’re trying to improve in and something fun that you want to do in two, awesome. Do that too. Anything that lets you work in more manageable chunks will help you see your progress incrementally, and will let your brain focus on one thing at a time. And that’s just really healthy!

Of course, another thing that is important to remember (and is super hard to) is that we’re not in any kind of rush. We do not have to catch up to our favorite artists on social media immediately, and we don’t need to match someone else’s output arbitrarily. That’s the kind of comparison and contrast that leads to discouragement and burnout. And right now, we are in the middle of a situation that is heavily affecting a lot of creative people’s ability to output.

So last suggestion: Don’t compare yourself to someone else. Heck, don’t even compare yourself to your own output last year. Because 2019 and 2020 are two totally unrelated years. I’m talkin’ half cousins thrice removed, unrelated.

I just have to say, I get a lot of questions about “How do I learn this specific thing in art?”, folks that are frustrated with not progressing, “I need help with fundamentals!”— Things like that.

The Learn Character Design course is 18 hours of learning from the ground up: how to draw, design characters, and make people care about them. I advise it because I created it to work, to help you create your best characters yet.

So if you’re arm-wrestling with the same questions, check out the course for every artist right here, friend: