I talked a bit before about my goals for this year, and how my goal of writing 1000 words a day was going so far.
Well, one of my other goals was to draw two sketchbook pages a day.
Why Two Pages?
Because I intended one to be for a warm-up for the day, and the other would be an entry into a later eBook. This goal was a way to make me practice my craft and build content.
What Did I Learn?
In short… a lot.
In total… it was hard to get into a rhythm of production at first. I had to make this a habit like I did with writing 1000 words, so I often drew in my sketchbook after breakfast and before I got to work… most of the time.
Building up content to put into later eBooks? I did that for the first two or three months until I realized how hard it was to do this on a monthly basis. Once the sketches were made I would have to scan them into the computer, format them into a book, add notes, and get it ready for sale on Gumroad. That whole process took about as long as drawing the pages themselves.
To fix that, I made this goal of producing eBooks into a bimonthly thing. After a while, I realized it was a good idea to make sketches of my comics series to put into an eBook later, like what I did with this sketchbook of Seeing Him. (The sketchbook for Johnson & Sir will appear online sometime next month).
For the most part, I made my goal of drawing two sketchbook pages everyday… and my art has turned out even better for it.
I’m a firm believer in what Hank Green mentioned once in an episode of Vlogbrothers: in this video he had drawn so many anglerfishes in one month that he developed a style all his own. He said, “Turns out, if you do something ten thousand times, you get pretty good at it.”
It’s something I noticed in my brief time drawing caricatures in public, as well, because I had instructors tell me, “Your first drawings will suck. By the time you draw ten thousand faces, you’ll actually get good. So draw as many faces as possible every day, and get the bad faces out as quickly as possible.”
Since I’ve been drawing two sketchbook pages a day (and some days, I draw even more than that) I’ve noticed that my backgrounds have improved, I can draw better dinosaurs than I did before, I draw faster, and even my lettering has gotten better. (By lettering, I mean my freehand-drawing of letters, not the process of placing speech balloons in comics… though I did get better at that, too.)
Drawing everyday will make you a better artist. Will every drawing work? No. Will it be worth drawing? Yes. Absolutely.
Jake from Adventure Time said it best: “Dude, sucking at something is the first step to being really good at something.”
I would encourage you to draw everyday. You don’t have to draw two sketchbook pages like I did – in fact, next year I plan to cut down from two pages everyday to just one. However you do it, draw every day. You WILL get better.
I know I did.
Thank you for reading.
You. Are. Awesome.