On Procrastination.
Procrastinaton. This is the bane of artists and creative people everywhere. Why do we engage in it? People with deadlines to meet will find a hundred things to do before they get moving and start working. Why?
It’s not because you’re lazy. Your problem is fear.
Fear of doing bad work. Fear of getting frustrated and knowing it is inevitable with almost every design problem. For me the key is to decide before I start working that it’s going to suck but that’s ok. I’m going to do bad work and that’s ok. I’m going to waste a lot of time flailing around without a clear direction and it’s all ok.
And once you start, you need to find a way to keep going until the day’s work is over. There are strategies to accomplish this. My favorite is to concentrate on the kind of work that matches my energy level at the time and when my energy level changes, my work changes.
For instance, if I’m feeling low energy I may work on a part of the drawing that takes less concentration, like filling in large areas with color or working on the clouds rather than the fine architectural details in a scene.
As long as I’m making marks on the page or screen, I’m getting closer to my goal. I’ve coined a name for this strategy and it’s this:
Keep the Pencil Moving
This motto is about a lot more than drawing pictures for me. It has become one of my core philosophies in life.
Keeping the pencil moving means taking action, any action when we feel paralyzed by a daunting task in front of us. This is a very old idea. It’s my version of “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” encapsulated in the thing I do more frequently than anything else in my life.
It’s difficult to create good drawings but it isn’t hard to begin moving a pencil on the page. As soon as we start that simple act, something profound happens. For good or ill, those lines start to combine, forming manifestations of our intentions.
These manifestations then speak to us and say things like “This shape you made is interesting” or “You need to make this element more dominant”. Sometimes they tell us “This is a cliche you’ve used a hundred times” or “You need to fix this awkward tangent”.
Now you’re no longer just moving the pencil. You’re having a conversation with it.
I had a drawing teacher who used to talk about the importance of having a “rapport with your tools”—We must use our tools in a way that gets the most out of them, whether it’s knowing just how much paint to load on a brush or getting the pressure sensitivity dialed in on your stylus.
But this rapport can also be the conversation we have with the pencil as it shows us the way forward past our fear.
Keep the Pencil Moving,
Chris
P.S. If you have any thoughts you’d like to share regarding the content of these emails, feedback is much appreciated, so let me know!