Vectober baby! I spent the last month trying to hit a target of putting out one drawing a day (and coming closer to 1 every 2 days.) It was a great way to kickstart my drawing brain after a little post-vacation rut. While I was working (because it's fall and I'm in a more reflective mood) I've also been thinking a lot about my drawing habits.  

 

Ideally I would draw a little bit every day. But in reality I draw in month long sprints, seperated by nearly as much time where I am trying to get back into it. I seem to need to recommit myself to it about every two months. Without meaning to, the hours in studio fill up with email, coffee runs and plenty of just staring into space. And when I am working on an assignment, it's easy to justify cutting out the extra hour of drawing I do for myself. Then, as soon as I do, I forget how much I get out of it, making it that much harder to get started again. On top of that, it seems like the longer I am away from a sketchbook, the more impossible my expectations get for what I'll do when I get started again. Even though my drawing brain is dormant, my idea brain is going into overdrive. By the time I break out a pencil, not only am I totally rusty on the fundamentals of drawing, I am expecting myself to dive right into an ambitious cohesive project. 

 

The upside of going through this cycle so regularly is that I've started to figure out a strategy for bypassing my hangups and just getting back to work. What works best for me when I'm trying to get started again is to throw out any ideas I have about what the drawings will look like, or what story they will tell. What I try to focus on instead is hitting a minimum time limit of drawing every day, and putting my effort into color and design, rather than concept. Whatever ideas actually end up in the drawings happen while I'm drawing, or in the hours between drawing sessions when I'm already warmed up. At some point, I'd like to figure out a way to do something with those "big ideas" I come up with on breaks.  For now I just write them down, and hope that my attention span will catch up with them eventually. 

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