Don’t break the chain
Practising every day is very important. If you practice every day it takes less time to warm up each time. You can pick up right where you left off the day before and your brain is almost immediately in the right place to make new connections, instead of spending time remembering what you learned the last time you picked up that pencil a week ago. Besides, if you get some work in every day you end up with so much more mileage. Regular and frequent training is the key. This applies whether you are practising drawing or squash or doing push ups or going for a run.
Problem is, it can be hard to find the time to practice. Does this sound like you? You work during the day and your only chance to practice is in the evening. Often you say to yourself “oh I’ll practise tomorrow, one night off can’t hurt” and switch on the TV instead. You end up saying that every night and suddenly you find that a week or a month has gone by and you haven’t done any practice at all.
Listen, life is all about priorities. If you find yourself watching Game of Thrones instead of drawing, it’s because you prioritised watching TV over drawing. If you promise yourself that you’ll do some trumpet practice but you actually switch on the X-Box and play Farming Simulator for three hours, you can’t complain that you don’t have time to practice, only that being the next Dizzy Gillespie is not the most important thing for you right now.
Everyone is lazy. Everyone follows the path of least resistance. You have to trick yourself into doing stuff, you have to find a way to paint yourself into a corner, find a way to alter the path of least resistance.
Think of it this way. You promise yourself that you will do xyz, but whether you actually do it or not is a balance of incentives and disincentives. If the incentives are greater than the disincentives then by definition you’ll get up and get to it. If you find that you are putting off your practice night after night, it’s because the disincentives are greater than the incentives and it’s up to you to find a way to change the balance.
The light-bulb moment for me was when I read about a technique called “The Chain”, also known as the Seinfeld Technique (yes, that Seinfeld). The idea is that you print a chart or a calendar with a square for each day, get a nice juicy marker pen and put a big cross on any day that you do your practice. Let’s say for drawing the rule is at least 20 minutes practice per day. That’s not much, you can always find at least 20 minutes in each day. The idea is to create an unbroken chain of crosses that’s as long as possible.
You see, if your long-term goal is to be the world’s greatest painter, the incentive to draw today is actually quite low, because you know you can still achieve your aim even if you slack off today and start the rest of your life tomorrow. The disincentives to practising now (e.g. watching re-runs of Columbo) are greater than the vague, future reward. However, once you get a chain of crosses going that’s longer than about a week, your incentive becomes more immediate. Building a chain is not a profound goal but the fact is once you have started, if you are going to keep it going then you have to draw today. You start to think, if I slack off today I’ll have broken this chain and it will take me a week to get this far again.
I can’t tell you the number of times I have done some practice just to avoid breaking the chain.
My personal chain rule by the way is that I have to do 20 minutes, whether that is drawing or painting. I have to put pen or brush to canvas for it to count. Digital painting counts, thinking about painting doesn’t. Neither does reading about painting or writing blog posts about painting. Depending on what kind of practice you are doing and how strict you want to be, if you are going on holiday or get sick you can mark that as a link on the chain – you don’t get to count an extra day but you don’t break the chain either. For example my kids started using the chain to help them practice the fiddle. If they are somewhere they don’t have a fiddle to play on they get to mark a holiday. I play hardball though, I don’t allow myself any reasons for taking days off. As far as I’m concerned there’s never an excuse not to practice drawing. You can always carry a sketchbook and a pen and draw whatever is around you while you’re at the bus stop or whatever.
I thought I was doing well the first time I got to about 30 days in a row. A month of drawing or painting every day! I’d never achieved that amount of practise before using the chain. I broke down a couple of times and had to start again, but I think it’s actually necessary to do that in order to understand how the incentive to keep going really works. After putting together a chain and inadvertently breaking it you learn with force how easy it is to go several days or a week or a month of no practice when you don’t have a chain to keep you in line. It drives home the difference between lots of practice and no practice.
One chain I started broke down on the day before I did the London Marathon. That chain was about 100 days long. Back then I was not confident enough to be drawing people on the train, which is clearly what I should have been doing. Later on I started carrying a sketchbook with me on days where I knew drawing time would be at a premium. I don’t mind drawing in public at all nowadays.
The chain I’m currently working on is at day 1,453, that’s coming up on four years. The closest I came to breaking it was when I actually forgot one day,
went to bed, turned out the light and jumped up five minutes later on the verge of sleep when I remembered I hadn’t done anything. I ran downstairs and drew the sketch of the Peugeot RCZ (pictured right) in my dressing gown whilst half asleep. I think the circumstances actually helped me loosen up a bit and chuck the pencil at the paper.
I’m constantly in a state of mild fear that one day I will forget, although it’s very much part of my daily routine now, like remembering to brush my teeth. Drawing every day has changed my life. Just the amount of drawing and painting I’ve done in comparison to what I was doing before. I’ve got piles and piles of filled up sketchbooks all over the house. I think I’d have to be properly ill or get run over by a bus or something to forget now. Come to think of it, that means I haven’t been properly ill in almost 4 years. I’m like Bruce Willis in Unbreakable.
No-one is going to tell you off if you don’t practice. There’s nothing wrong with watching TV instead of practising, except you don’t get the pay-off of the long-term goals that you’re probably beating yourself up about. The people who succeed in reaching their goals are not ones who have some kind of special ability to begin with, they are just the ones who find the techniques that lead to them doing lots of practice.
If you look at someone and think “they have natural ability”, it’s more likely that they have been doing a whole load of practising that they never told you about. They never break the chain.
