Becoming a Regular Sketcher
An 8-week live intensive starting Monday 23 November
The Second Video
Habits Are Built. They Don't Come From Discipline.
Thanks for all the emails and questions after the last video. Here's how we actually go from sketching now and then to a habit that sticks.
Last time I talked about the sketchbook curse: you know sketching is good for you, you enjoy it when you do it, and you still can't keep a consistent habit going.
This video is about how we fix that. After years of mentoring people through it, professionals, older artists, and plenty of eighteen-year-old students with their own set of problems, I've found it comes down to three key areas.
Rhythm. The good news is this has nothing to do with discipline. It's about how habits are actually built, and how sketching fits into your life. Not what other people are doing.
Style. Not drawing style. What kind of sketch artist are you, and what is your sketching actually for?
Passion. Finding the thing you want to draw, and the reason you want to draw it, so the motivation comes from inside instead of from someone else's prompt list.
Key One
Rhythm: Fit It Into the Life You Actually Have
Rhythm is where you build the habit and fit the drawing into your life. And the first thing to understand is that this is not set and forget.
That's the big misconception. You found something that worked, then it stopped working, so everything feels up in the air and you drop it. The truth is that depending on the season of life you're in, when and how you sketch is going to change. That's normal.
The good thing about a habit is that once it's built, it happens whether you like it or not. We are habitual beings. We are what we repeatedly do. The job is just to build the thing.
Drawing has one wrinkle, though. The emotional state you bring to it matters. If you haven't drawn for a while, the first ten minutes feel awkward. You've half forgotten how to hold the pencil, you're thinking about something else, you're not in flow. So take the pressure off. "I'm going to sit down for half an hour. I'm not going to become an amazing artist in the next half hour. I'm going to have fun and see what happens." Ten minutes in, the ideas start flowing. Half an hour later you've succeeded, because you did what you said you'd do.
Here's what this looked like for me. When I was younger and freelancing, I'd walk to a coffee shop every day, sit down, and draw all the sketches for my concept design work right there. Walk home, scan them, colour them up, send them off. The walk and the change of environment told my brain: now it's drawing time, everything else is gone. I got addicted to it and got a huge amount of work done.
That doesn't work for me now. I have a much bigger family and far more responsibility. It would be easy to say "well, that's it, I can't draw anymore." Instead I found a different rhythm: the iPad ready to go, and half an hour or an hour on the couch after everyone's asleep. Some nights I didn't feel like it. But I'd got into the habit, so I sat down anyway, and I had a lot more fun than I expected.
The tactic underneath both of those: build structure around how you start and how you stop. A walk to a cafe. The family bedtime routine. A sketchbook kept in the car or your pocket, so that any spare minute becomes drawing instead of scrolling. Whatever surrounds your drawing is what makes it a habit. It will change with your season of life, and that's fine. Once a habit sticks, it tends to stick around.
Key Two
Style: What Kind of Sketch Artist Are You?
I don't mean the style you draw in. I mean: what is your sketching for?
The sketches you see online come from completely different places. If you carry a little book everywhere and whip it out whenever you have a minute, that shapes the kind of drawing you do. If you're working on a project, your sketching is practical, it has a reason to exist, and that changes how you feel about it. If you're drawing without a plan, just for fun, you're sketching in the truest sense of the word. Some people are just trying to make someone laugh.
This matters because most artistic block and blank-page syndrome comes from not having a clear picture of what you're doing. You don't have a clear expectation of what success means.
If you're sketching characters for a world you're building, it doesn't matter much if a drawing goes wrong; the purpose is making the world work. If you're trying to create a finished illustration, there's a tension there to build it up and get it right. If you're just drawing for fun, the whole point is whether you're enjoying it. These are vastly different ways of thinking, and you can do all of them in the same sketchbook. But when you sit down, it's good to have intent.
So the question is: why do you want to sketch? Imagine a few years from now you have a bookshelf of raggedy old sketchbooks, used and abused and full of stuff. What's in there? What would make you excited? Not the sketches you see on Instagram. Yours.
Once you figure out your style of sketching, everything changes.
Key Three
Passion: Get Connected to Your Why
The last key is a mix of everything, and I know "passion" sounds a bit hokey and self-help. But as artists we need to be excited and energised, and the core reason you're doing this is what gets you over the humps and the friction points.
It isn't grit or determination. Those are different things. It's about understanding why you want to draw a lot. What's the art you wanted to make? What makes you excited?
It's easy to get blocked here because we look outward. Other people's sketchbooks look so fun. But if you want to do this persistently, it has to come from within. Are you creating your own world? Your own project? Is it catharsis, just relaxing and putting pencil to paper? Or is it about levelling up?
The answer changes what rhythm you build and what style of sketching you do. It's hard to sit down after everyone's asleep and grind through anatomy exercises; that needs more structured, intentional time. Maybe you don't want to do exercises at all. Maybe it's finished work. Maybe it's notes and little thumbnails. Finding the reason is what lets you do it.
A lot of us have associated the sketchbook with learning and studies and somewhere along the way lost the fun. Go back to what you actually want those sketchbooks filled with. Because when you're drawing the things you like to draw, not someone else's prompt, it's an endless well of inspiration.
The Common Thread
Everyone's Different. We're All In It Together.
For a long time I organised sketch groups in Adelaide: students, professionals, people trying to break in. Everyone was doing something different. Someone experimenting with markers, someone who'd been using the same pencil for ten years, someone who'd just bought an iPad. Professional concept designers drawing silly little things for fun. People who didn't draw much day to day, just making things because it made them happy.
Ari Gibson was coming along while he was making Hollow Knight. A lot of Hollow Knight got sketched at that table while the rest of us drew silly drawings.
Everyone who's excited about sketching is doing it for their own reasons, with their own rhythm, their own purpose, their own tools. There's no cookie-cutter mould. But we're all doing the same thing underneath, which is expressing who we are as artists.
Next: Inside the 8-Week Intensive
In the third video I walk through the Sketch Artisan Intensive: how each week works, how feedback works, the modules, the time it takes and the price.