Table of Contents
Intro
When I first started learning about art, I realized how technical the journey was going to be. Art is not easy things to draw. I was in a small art school in Encinitas. Although it was a charcoal life drawing, I could already tell there were a ton of principles to follow, if I wanted to get decent at drawing a person.
I took to drawing almost immediately and my improvement was by leaps and bounds for the first year. All of a sudden, I completely stopped improving and if anything, I was regressing. Somehow I was getting worse and I didn’t know why. I became so focused on the measurements, anatomy, and technical side of drawing that it began to burn me out.
Learning the technical side is incredibly valuable, but it never helped me when I hit an art plateau or pitfall. The things that helped me were the mental side of learning; the struggles of learning and mastering a new skill. This is a list of those things that got me to improve my art when I didn’t know what to do.
Making a List
Something that has completely changed my world was using lists to organize my life and time. As a creative, I was constantly putting my mental energy into the craft of drawing or painting, making it easy things to draw. It was hard to think outside the scope of anything that would push my art skills forward. I had heard of making lists from different podcasts, but I never really thought about actually applying it. Learn more about Learning to Draw at an Old Age.
When I decided to try it, l had no idea how much using a list would change not just my drawing habits, but also every other part of my life. For one, the list provided a clear idea of what I wanted to get done. Making a normal list helped a bit, but there were added details that made making a list much more effective. I’ll go over it in a bit. Making a list felt like I was cleaning the metaphorical room that was my brain. Normally, I would have several different tasks to complete and I was only relying on my mind to keep track of them.
- This led me to forgetting specific tasks and goals and also led my mind to being more cluttered and chaotic. I became frustrated trying to remember things I had forgotten to get done. Writing a physical list also calmed down any anxieties I had about memorization. Since I knew I had it written down and in front of me, it freed up my mind so that I could put mental energy into other things. It is very similar to how I do my easy things to draw drawings in separate building stages and also organizing my tasks in separate stages.
Study for Easy Things to Draw
A study by professors Baumeister and Masicampo from Wake Forest University found that tasks we have written down relieve anxiety. You are more likely to accomplish your drawing lesson tasks and goals if you write them out in a physical list. Here is the part of the list-making that skyrocketed the progress / made with the list. In using the list, it was the small details of how l organized the list.The very first step was to write out literally every task I had for my drawing practice.
Example
For example, maybe I would have to draw 10 head drawings, or I might have to study the anatomy of the upper shoulder, or maybe I had to finish a drawing for a family member. would write out every single task and then I would do two things.
- 1) Next to every single task, I would estimate the amount of time it would take me. I would overestimate that time to give me wiggle room. So for example, if I wanted to study the shoulder anatomy, i would write in one hour next to that task. And estimate the time with every task.
- 2) And then after I give every item a time estimation, I would order them by importance. This is something I learned from Brian Tracey.
When I have them ordered from most important to least important, it gives focus on what needs to be done and which task is less important. As I start crossing things off, there is a small sense of accomplishment with it. When I get halfway done, I create an entirely new list to clean the clutter. If I lose my list, which is common, I literally just start a new list. I constantly lose my lists when I start. After restarting over and over, I eventually learned to stop losing them as I got used to the process.
Try this out and let me know how it goes! Its not usually an instant fix, but you’ll find yourself adding to the list constantly, maybe misjudging the importance of certain things and maybe messing up the estimated times at first. Eventually, you’ll find yourself better at organizing your own lists and getting things done faster than ever. Creating and applying lists becomes its own little skill. For more Easy Things to Draw.
Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast
I found that the phrase “slow is smooth and smooth is fast” helped get me over several different drawing plateaus. It’s remarkable how well these words have helped me. The phrase is a military phrase, but I first heard it when I went to art school. The idea is something I’ve heard several times said in different ways, but I had never heard it put this way before. I was always in a rush to finish drawings. This was to the detriment of the drawing itself. Its not always easy things to draw.
It affected my attention span, my ability to finish drawings, and also the amount of mistakes I made on an art piece. The idea is that the fewer mistakes you make during a drawing, the faster it will get finished. Small mistakes have to be tweaked and fixed, while large proportional mistakes could ruin the entire art piece and have you restart the entire process. This rushing through drawings can lead to frustrations. So what was the answer? Slow deliberate movement.
Making it Easy Things to Draw
If you make slow deliberate movements while drawing, really thinking carefully about what you are doing, this will be smooth motion. Smooth motion doesn’t have any friction, so it gets to the finish much faster. In the moment, this seems like drawing at a snail’s pace. It certainly doesn’t feel quicker, but ultimately it is.
Doing this takes a lot of discipline, especially if you are like me. If you like scribbling through drawings and fixing the mistakes left behind, it’s really hard. In my mind, the quicker I draw, the faster it gets done. It almost always had me hit a dead end or a much messier drawing. Be careful to avoid paralysis by analysis. You don’t want to sit there overanalyzing every pen stroke for a full few minutes, I just mean put some thought into your process to avoid blatant mistakes. Make every stroke count.
Rhythm Journey to Easy Things to Draw
You start to slip into a rhythm that you enjoy. You are going to have to play around with the speed of your drawings to find the pace you think works best. Your thought process isn’t so much “push”, as much as it is “present to the moment”. When you do this, you feel more presence of mind on the decisions you are making as opposed to letting your autopilot take over. Pacing it out this way also helps you finish your easy things to draw drawings. It gives you a steady pace that makes it so your mind doesn’t fatigue as easily or quickly.
The way I personally would draw before, I would rush through a drawing and get a mental fatigue having to go back and correct every single thing. Although drawing is a series of correcting mistakes, they were mistakes that were avoidable at first pass.
After taking a smooth pace approach, my ability to go through almost the entire drawing without stopping improved. I wasn’t as frazzled or burnt out by the end of a painting or drawing. Doing this helped me control myself and built up my patience. The method pays off big time. Please try this and let me know if it helps you.
Deep Focus
They say that if you focus on your task for 3 solid hours and nothing else, you get more work done than 8 hours of going back and forth on a task. We live in a world of Netflix streaming, video games, Instagram, and all kinds of distracting electronic devices. It’s never been easier to zone out and break focus for a funny meme or text message, so l understand why this can be so hard for people. It was really hard for me. It’s something I still control.
The skill became totally transformative. It changed entirely how I learned to draw and how long it took me. Dale Carnegie talks about how if you work on and off on a large task, it will take you 500% longer than if you had just focused on the task and done it all the way through. Making easy things to draw in a focused manner.
Breaking concentration constantly requires you get back to the task. Getting back into the flow of steady work again takes several minutes to do and that time can add up to making the task last so much longer than needed.
In the Zone
Some people like calling deep focus being in the zone where you get into a flow state. A flow state is easier to get into when your skill meets a threshold to focus when you are just doing your craft with little hesitation. You are fulfilled in the moment doing what you are doing and time seems to pass slowly. You are completely absorbed in the drawing craft you are doing and shutting out any type of outer distraction. At that moment they are easy things to draw.
Don’t multitask ever, if possible. Multitasking splits focus. You will always do one task more proficiently than two tasks. If you are doing several tasks at once, experiments have shown that those tasks are being done at way less proficiency than you think. It dilutes the ability to get those done well.
So how do you achieve a deep focus state for drawing? At first, it’s pretty tough. The easiest way for me was to get to a different location than I normally am. So if I’m in my room, it’s infinitely harder for me to deeply focus on something, depending on the task. Most people go to coffee shops, but I love going to the library. There are no distractions and has complete silence.
Easy Things to Draw Over Time
I do this to read books and finish important papers. You are going to find that you will get better and better at focusing the more you do this. it’s a skill like any other. Taking breaks is important. Engaging for several hours can be fatiguing, especially if you don’t often do it. So when you feel fatigued, take a complete break and completely disconnect, then go back into it. Eben Pagan used to say, “Don’t live in the grey zone”, which can be an area of slight work and scattered focus. Either jump fully into your work or jump fully out of it to completely relax. I would also silence your phone if you feel that’s a distraction.
The more you do this, you’ll find yourself being more present in your drawing learning. The payoff is so big, let me know if this works for you. This is not an instant thing. Your mind constantly wants to wander off and you have to keep pulling it back until it learns.
I also find this a very useful thing to get over plateaus and you are steadily making your way through drawing and art problems that normally would stop you. It’s the fact that you are taking the time to think out your next move. Take a look at the Drawing Tools Shop section.
Take an Interest in Drawing
So passion can move you forward in anything you are trying to learn. There is the general learning of drawing, but then there are the specific topics you draw. Most artists, including myself, tend to start by drawing what they find most fascinating and personal. Usually that’s the face. Drawing people’s faces is usually what someone gets into art to draw. Famously, many artists have a really hard time with backgrounds. They are less personal and just aren’t as “fun” to draw.
Something that really helped me in my development, was taking an active interest in anything I wanted to learn to draw. I always found plants kind of boring to draw. I never thought much of them, they just felt like background artifacts that I wanted to shortcut in making.
To make the drawing of plants more interesting, I tried to find out more about them. i was searching for some facts or information about them that would ignite my interest to learn to draw them. I ended up finding out that the shapes of several flowers really helped my interest. You can find something interesting about any topic if you read enough on them.
Connect
Doing this helps drive your creative practice on how to draw them so that you are fueled with passion. If you don’t do this, you’ll be feeling stressed and hating your time learning to draw them. If you like drawing something, you are less likely to remember how to paint or draw them in the future. Take an active interest and read about a topic first. Practice with some sort of emotional connection gives context to your art.
Practicing without some sort of connection can seem like a repetitive practice. Active interest can help you notice the details on something and wonder why they are there, similar to if you are drawing a shark, notice that the teeth angle back into the mouth in order for it to pull its food inside its mouth. This is also going to translate into better and more detailed drawings.
You can start practicing really observing an object by taking a walk somewhere and starting to observe small marks on buildings and areas around you. You’ll notice so many small details in everyday items you never thought about before. You can also look up research on plant books or observations.
Meditation on Easy Things to Draw
This is something that not only helped my artwork, but every facet of my life. The mind can wander like an animal that you have to slowly guide back to water. I found that my mind would wander to other things and drawing wouldn’t hold my attention as much. This is normal. Drawing better requires being more present in the moment. Being present in the moment makes the task more enjoyable.
Being present in the moment while drawing also keeps negatives from creeping in. Negative thoughts can sometimes overwhelm you and hinder the drawing process. Thoughts like “I’m never gonna be good at this”, or “Why keep drawing this, the drawing will just turn out bad anyway.” Meditation also helps with what we previously talked about. It gives clarity.
The type of clarity that helped me was envisioning my goals in my mind’s eye so that they were much easier to achieve. If I wanted to draw like a certain artist, I would picture that final result in my head daily. Meditation will help every single other item on this list. It steadies the mind and makes you more present. Your mind will make it easy things to draw.
