I can’t say that I’m the best artist out there, but I’m certainly a better artist than I was when I started this blog. I’ve read a lot of advice about getting better at drawing over the years. Some advice has been very helpful and some advice just hasn’t worked for me. I want to share just a couple of things that have helped me improve, particularly over the last four or five years.

1. Draw a lot. How much is a lot? Malcom Gladwell says its takes about 10,000 hours of doing something to become an expert at it. (I recently did a back-of-the-napkin calculation with my father and we figured he had done over 80,000 hours of surgery!) So the more you do every day, the faster you’ll get good. In 2004, I attended my first San Diego Comic Con, where I nervously showed around my sketchbook to artists I admired. One of these artists was Paul Davies, who recommended that I fill up one sketchbook a month, at minimum. I did just that, several months over, and was amazed at how quickly I progressed over that time. I also recommend that if you have the means, to get a job where you draw. It’s much easier to get in a lot of hours of practice when 8 or more of them are guaranteed everyday.

This is your best friend

2. Slow and Steady. Especially when learning to do cleanup, whether it be with pencil, brush or crow quill, go slowly. It’s just like practicing a musical instrument. You start as slowly as you can without making mistakes, then you speed up. Go as slowly as necessary to have control over what you’re doing on the page. This is particularly important when trying to ink ellipses and other curves freehand. While it’s best to sketch an ellipse in a single quick stroke, I’ve never seen an artist I admire ink an ellipse that way. Most will carefully and deliberately chunk out the ellipse with smaller controlled ink strokes.

Watch how Jake Parker does it:

Inking Missile Mouse from jakeparker on Vimeo.

3. Learn from the best. Another musical analogy. I met a guy once who played the violin in high school. His music teacher gave him this piece of advice: If you want to be first chair, don’t set your sights on first chair, set your sights on the best violinists in the world. Particularly with the ubiquity of information on artists available on the internet, there’s no reason you can’t learn from the best. Find the artists you admire through google or twitter. Start a correspondence with them. Ask them questions. You’ll find many are generous and willing to help. Read what they have to say on their blogs, and watch their video tutorials. The recently launched ArtCast Network is a great place to do this. If you can’t get in touch with an artist you like, then copy their work. Download, or buy high resolution images of their art and practice making exact replicas. When I started learning how to ink, I would download hi-res images of Frank Cho’s art, convert it to blue-line, print it out on Bristol and ink over it trying to copy his line quality. The same can apply to any artist you want to replicate. Look at their art, study it closely and figure out how to replicate it. Just one caution: make sure and give the original artist credit if you show your studies to anyone else.

One of the Frank Cho images I would practice my inking on.

4. Fix it until it’s right. When working on a difficult piece, redraw it until you get it right. Especially if you’re starting out, I recommend using mechanical pencils with a good eraser. They erase easily, and you can re-work and readjust a drawing until you get it right. Set a high standard f0r yourself and work to achieve that with every piece. Look at your drawing in front of a mirror, or flip it around and hold it up to the light. Seeing it in reverse will reveal problems in the drawing. Don’t take this suggestion too far. If you’re really hitting a wall, abandon the drawing, or start over. It’s more important to draw a lot than get stuck on one drawing.

5. Study the Fundamentals. Study the best books and videos on perspective, construction, anatomy, rendering and color theory. I highly recommend the resources found at Gnomon Workshops (Some of the best stuff I found on Gnomon were tutorials by Feng Zhu and Scott Robertson on how to draw a straight line freehand.) Go to live figure drawing classes, weekly, if possible. Go to the zoo every week, or more, if you want to learn to draw animals. Ernest Norling’s Perspective Made Easy will teach you everything you need to know about perspective. Preston Blair’s Cartoon Animation is the best place to get started with construction.  I’m still really searching for is a good book on anatomy. I own several books on anatomy, but none that really satisfies me. If anyone has any recommendations, please contact me.

Buy this book.

6. Repeat until you die. This is probably the most important step. There’s always something new to learn. Thank God! One of the greatest joys of drawing is having those break-through moments that come from constantly challenging yourself. Keep at it. The fun is in the process, not in the prize.

My Dad gets up at 6 AM every morning, and I know for a fact that my Dad hates getting up early in the morning. But he does it almost every day, like clockwork. So why does he do it? More importantly: how does he do it?

Well, I’m gonna have to ask him that sometime. In the meantime, I’ll tell you what works for me. I am terrible getting up early in the morning, but I’m very good at doing other things, like working on my comic every day. So how do I do it?

Much of it can be summed up in an interview with John Norcross on Science Friday on keeping resolutions. I’ll sum up the important points and add some of my own thoughts.

1. Take the One Seat. I stole this idea from Buddhism. The idea is that salvation is as simple as doing one thing — sitting down and meditating. Creating is similar. Find your one thing to do every day. Stop trying to write a screenplay, plan a performance piece and start an NGO at the same time. Choose ONE thing.

You have way to many things to think about. So take the thinking and planning out of the equation, and just find something you can just do. If you’re not interested in doing something artsy, just find something to do every day religiously. For Twyla Tharp, her ritual is going to the gym every day. Notice that her ritual isn’t directly related to her profession – choreography – but it’s the thing that commits her to her labors every day.

A daily ritual becomes an anchor in your life. You can depend on it. It clarifies and focuses your attention, and it gives your day-to-day life meaning.

2. Start Small. Start with a length of time that you know you can commit to. I would recommend 20 to 30 minutes max. I would even set limits. You don’t need to make monumental efforts. You’ll be amazed how much you can accomplish after a year of doing something every day for a couple of minutes.

If you feel very confident about doing more, do more, but don’t do it out of guilt or ego. Do only as much as you are positive you can do every day.

3. Be Persistent. It’s more important to be persistent than consistent. Most people that keep resolutions, have resets along the way. Don’t worry about yesterday. Just do your thing today.

4. Be Willing to Suck. No end goals here. Your job is to just do your thing whether its good or not. Recently, my buddy Kohl shared this nugget of wisdom with me :

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

(original link)

Ira Glass and Jerzy Drozd seem to think the same thing. Just focus on doing the one thing. You’ll get better over time.

5. Be Willing to Be a Little Miserable. Sometimes doing your one thing will be miserable. But here’s the thing: Misery comes and goes, but your work will still be there after the misery is gone. This is why you keep it short and simple. Even if its miserable, at least its only 20 to 30 minutes.

6. Have Fun. This is kind of a two-parter. First, whatever thing you choose to do, make sure it’s something that has an inherent reward in it. That doesn’t mean that it’s easy to do, but that it is fun, peaceful, enlightening, engaging or somehow rewarding for you. There should be some nugget in it that keeps you coming back.

It’s very important that the reward is inherent. While there may be external incentives to doing your thing, you must find something that is rewarding just from doing it.

I think this has a lot to do with why my Dad gets up early in the morning every day, even though he hates it. He loves his job. He’s a doctor and he loves his work far more than I will ever love doing art. And so getting up early in the morning is a small sacrifice.

The second part of this is to have fun when you’re not doing your thing. Once you’ve done it, check it off your one-item check list and enjoy life a bit – without feeling guilty about it. Go to the beach, play with your kid, or read a book. Stuart Brown has some really good things to say about this: Play

So what’s the secret of motivation? It’s not a whoosh of  feeling, or an inherent get r’ done attitude. Motivation is habit. It’s creating those practices that make it as easy and rewarding as possible for you to do your thing every day.

If  you still find large psychological barriers to doing your thing, I highly recommend Neil Fiore’s The Now Habit. It’s one of the few books on procrastination that gets past the drill sergeant answers to the deeper issues that can sometimes paralyze the otherwise well intentioned soul.