The Sketchbook Curse
An 8-week live intensive starting Monday 23 November
The Sketchbook Curse
We Know It's Good For Us. We Still Don't Do It.
Hey there! Thanks for signing up to hear more about Sketch Artisan. Let me tell you about something I think almost every artist deals with.
I've been a professional artist for 25 years and I've spent 15 of them teaching people how to get better at drawing, how to build a career, how to become a professional. And one thing I've noticed is that a lot of us struggle to keep a sketchbook habit.
Students struggle with it. Professional artists struggle with it. People with busy lives who just like to draw struggle with it.
On the one hand we know it's really good for us. On the other hand we don't do it. It's like we're cursed. We know we should be drawing in our sketchbooks, and somehow we're removed from it.
And here's the thing. I actually like drawing. I like sketching. You probably do too. You know the more you draw, the better you get.
The sketchbook is where all the ideas and feelings and emotions you have as an artist come into reality. It's where you turn the ideas into real, tangible things. It's where great projects start, where great illustrations start. It's where a big part of your development happens, doing studies, drawing more, building that muscle of putting pencil to paper. For a lot of us it's where the professional work happens too. It can be a major pillar of how you get paid.
And it's fun. It's cathartic. Drawing in your sketchbook is enriching on a pretty fundamental level if you're an artist.
So why isn't everyone just doing the obvious thing and drawing in their sketchbook every day?
If you're struggling to get your sketchbook game under control, to feel good about it, to build a bookshelf full of sketchbooks you can look back on over the years... you're not alone. Pretty much every artist struggles with the sketchbook curse.
In the video above I go through what I've found over years of mentoring people through this. It comes down to three things.
The First Thing
The Habit Has to Fit Your Life
You need to build a habit and an artistic ritual that fits you.
The trap is that we look externally. You look at all the amazing artists around you and how they sketch, and you see people who have figured it out. They've been drawing every day for years, it looks natural, they just pick up the book and go.
What you don't see is anyone falling off the wagon. You don't see the struggle. So you copy a routine that belongs to someone else's life, and it doesn't hold.
There's no point looking at someone who travels the world drawing every day if that's not your life. The question is: what is your life like? How much time do you have?
I know students who are eighteen or twenty with all the time in the world, and the challenge is getting off the couch and drawing instead of playing video games. I know people with family responsibilities where art isn't even their main thing, and the question is where on earth it fits into the day. And I know plenty of professional artists who spend all day creating art in production, come home wanting to make their own things, and have nothing left.
Different lives, same problem: where does this fit?
The first few times you sit down it feels awful. You're awkward, you haven't warmed up, you don't know what to draw. A lot of people give up right there.
But there are good, tactical ways to think about fitting this into your life. What times of day work for you. What success actually means for you, how you define a good sketching session. What tools suit you. The habit has to be built explicitly for you and how sketching fits into your life, not someone else's habit borrowed off a timelapse.
The Second Thing
Knowing What to Draw
The second thing so many of us struggle with is simply not knowing what to draw. Opening the blank page and drawing a blank.
Instead of being excited and struggling to pick from the firehose of ideas rattling around in your imagination, you sit there and you've got nothing.
I'll be honest, I don't have this problem that much. I'm always thinking of cool stuff to draw. And still, plenty of times, I open the page and I've got no idea what to do. I'm not that into it. It takes a while to get into the rhythm where you're used to opening a blank page and filling it.
Here's what I've noticed mentoring people through this. Not knowing what to draw is usually just not understanding the craft of ideation.
If you're a professional concept designer, you can't say "I don't know what to draw today." It's your job. And when you do this for a living you find out there's craft here. There are techniques and tactics for the moment you open the page and you're not sure what to draw, and they work.
A lot of us go looking for prompts and challenges instead. That's fun, and it works for some artists. But if you want a bookshelf full of sketchbooks that are full cover to cover, what do you want in there? For most of us, we want our own ideas. Our concepts. Something that represents our thoughts and emotions.
That has to come from somewhere internal. It's a skill, and it's not your fault if you don't have it yet. It's a matter of thinking about it through the day, or having a few simple tools, like what I call the Like List, a list of the things you actually love to draw that you can combine in creative ways, plus the brainstorming tricks that generate ideas out of nothing.
It won't stop you ever drawing a blank. But you learn the tools to get past it, and you make sure the ideas are yours. Not someone else's prompts. Not someone else's concept.
The Third Thing
Staying Motivated Over the Long Term
You can probably muster a couple of weeks of genuine excitement. New Year's resolution energy. Buy some new gear, join a drawing challenge, have a lot of fun.
At some point that energy runs out. And the question is how to make it stick over the long term.
A lot of us give up the first time we fail. You join a challenge, something happens in your life, you don't draw for a week, and you think, well, maybe I'm not one of those sketchbook artists. Maybe this isn't for me.
It's really easy to fall into that trap. But a couple of things are true.
If you do it once, you can do it again. Learning to pick the sketchbook back up after a gap is one of the most powerful things you can learn, because once you've done it, you can do it forever. There's no such thing as failing at being a sketchbook artist. Something happened, and you start again.
The longer you do it, the more confidence you build. You look back at the books you've filled and you know you can do it because you've done it before. I've had plenty of times sitting at a blank page thinking, I don't know. Then I look at work I've done in the past and think, I don't even know how I did that. But I know I did.
There was a period where I had almost no time. Family, responsibility, not much left over. What I found was that if I just spent half an hour a day chipping away at a sketch page on the iPad or in the sketchbook, even when I didn't feel like it, something interesting happened. I looked back at that year and I had tons of art. Where did all this come from? It came from the in-between time. From nowhere. Because I'd built the habit and kept doing it.
That's where the real value is. Not just "I drew more this week." Over the long term you have a bookcase full of sketchbooks. A collection you can share. A record of how far you've come. And when I flip through books from ten or fifteen years ago, I remember exactly what I was doing when I drew them, and there are ideas in there I can still use now.
And it keeps your hand warm. If you're drawing a little bit regularly, then when you sit down to make your real art it isn't this massive friction. It just feels natural.
Why I Call It a Curse
We Know How Much It Matters. The Challenges Are Still Real.
On the one hand we know how important this is, how much it can enrich our lives and make us more creative. On the other hand there are fundamental challenges that stop it happening.
A habit that fits your life. Knowing what to draw. Staying motivated for the long haul. Those are the three things.
In the next video I'll go into how we actually make all of that happen.
Next: How to Build a Consistent Sketching Habit
In the second video I go into how a habit is actually built: finding your rhythm, working out what kind of sketch artist you are, and reconnecting with why you draw.