#130 - Do Not Just Look Up Art Tutorials Online, Also DO Them If You Want To Become A Better Artist
Bookmarking tutorials is just a form of procrastination.Warm-Up Drawing Exercises
Quickly become better at drawing—without burning out—by using my workbook.
while back, I read something interesting: gathering information is one of the things that can be addictive. Their theory was that it used to be advantageous to us when we were cavemen and information was scarce. We can get addicted to sugars and fats for the same reason. Today, sugar and fat are abundant, which is a problem. We consume too much of it. The same holds for information; we have abundant information and gather too much of it.
Rembrandt just had access to a few prints his master owned. He learned by copying these. Look at all the information we have at our disposal now! Any image ever made is one click away, as are all the books ever written. Teachers put out vast amounts of information.
And tutorials.
When I started the “Practice Drawing This” Instagram account, I quickly discovered that I was followed by people who wanted to become better at drawing. So I made tutorial carousels, and they were crazy popular. People looked at them for extended times, shared them with friends, liked them, and bookmarked them for future study.
People hoard tutorials. They are addicted to it. They scroll through their feeds, looking for more. They are addicted to collecting information.
If you exhibit this behavior, don’t feel guilty. Your ancestors learned to do this to survive. You are here now because they did that.
This information hoarding was healthy behavior when we were cavemen, but now, it is better if we stop hoarding, choose one source of information, sit with it, and study it for longer.
I stopped making tutorials back then because I felt guilty. I kept people hooked on their feed, where they should be opening their sketchbooks and drawing instead.
I have been contemplating how to make drawing exercises addictive and am still working on that.
If drawing had been a survival skill for the three million years or so when we were nomads, we’d all be addicted to drawing incessantly now.
I have created a new free drawing workbook!
It is different from other courses in that it doesn’t focus so much on a subject—like anatomy or perspective—but rather on the process of practicing drawing. The exercises are quick, short, fun, and intense, and the feedback I am getting is that they are satisfying. It comes with a Discord community. I hope to be able to make it addictive.
It comes with a free PDF, and predictably, the first thing people did was download and hoard it. You have to DO the exercises!
If you’re interested, you can find the free drawing workbook here.
But please don’t just download the PDF! Don’t be a caveman. Do the drawing exercises! I hope to see you on the Discord server, where we can draw together and share our sketchbook pages. These are the exercises I do myself daily.