"If you're not drawing 24/7, you aren't working hard enough"

[wasgodx]

I am quotting a post I saw on Tumblr and I believe everyone of us should absolutely read. Let's reflect about this.

When I was in college there was this ongoing competitive mindset from the teachers /students that: “If you’re not drawing all night / getting 1 - 2 hours of sleep, you’re going to fall behind.” If you’re an artist you’ve probably met this kind of thinking… I’ve heard it from so many pros / tutorials.

One of my professors said that line all the time. I loved this dude. he worked at Disney on many of my favorite movies, and my young self became absorbed in this mindset. About 3 years into my degree that professor had a stroke, and when he went to the doctor they said he actually previously had something like 10+ strokes without even knowing, brought on by stress, and that he needed to slow down. 

Since then I’ve heard tons of other accounts of sickness and divorce brought on from addiction to work.
A few years later I was listening to an Animation podcast interviewing Glen Keane. He brought up that there were other animators who would live and breathe their work, never going home, barely sleeping, etc. 

What shocked me was that Glen Keane said something like “I ignored this idea, and decided to go home every night to spend time with my family, because I could learn just as much from my life experiences with them.” 
Anyway I just wanted to take a second after hearing a statement like this again recently and let any young artists out there know that:

There’s nothing wrong with investing plenty of time studying and drawing, but also be healthy. 

No one likes to crunch. So let's not do it, ok? 

Besides sleeping, remember to drink tons of water, stretch every 30 minutes and walk a bit. Also, listen to a different genre of music when you want to stop. 

Let's do our best, but our healthy best. Gogogo!

[Farvus]

Research shows that without sleep your brain becomes less efficient at memorizing things. In other words you can do studies all day and barely remember anything you learned. Completely pointless.

[DK]

8 hours is plenty Hristov. 3 hours study+application and then 5-6 hrs doing personal work/work is a sound schedule. Consistency is what's key here and not to overwork yourself to the point of stopping for months.

[Punk-A-Cat]

As someone who is now training themselves to write, draw, brush their godamned TEETH with their off hand due to RSI injury, DON'T OVER DO IT ;-;
like feck, I pushed myself so hard, I broke...

[Hobitt]

Ive recently started switching my mindset to work smart rather than hard i draw about 7-8 hours on most days due to work. Also sleep is crucial the mind needs to be well rested in order to learn properly working with an empty head is a huge waste of time and honestly i regret doing it that way for a bit.

[Toxicpanda]

I have to admit that I used to think that way too- if I just spend some free time on something that isn't drawing I will fall behind and never keep up with others. But after some time I realised that I'm only falling behind with myself. I used to paint +15 hours every day while going on college and traveling in bus for average 4 hours. So yes- I was barely sleeping and I would sleep on classes or bus. After some time I got seriously sick, and I thought it's only for some time but it got worse and worse to the moment I realised I can't get up from bed. Now I've been on heavy medication and therapies for months and my work got delayed so much.
During that time I realised that it's not aboutt how much hours you put in your work- but how much thought and concentration and will to learn something new you're going to put into that.
It's better to do 2 very good studies where you will sit down and think why is this like that and why is that like that - than do 30 studies and lose 30 hours on something you were just painting to be painted and not even understand what you're doing.
I also started reading a lot about color and other things, how old masters were keeping up with deadlines etc, how to make viewer think like he is seeing more while you're painting less.
Overall- take some healty time for yourself- listen to your body and try mixing your habits.
I'm using Habitica for my daily schedule and its good because it makes me do variety of things except for painting.

[Amit Dutta]

Here's a big newsflash/rant, which I hope is actually not a newsflash for anybody, sorry if is a bit off-topic, but my brain just went there.


Art is NOT your entire life.
Art is just one thing a person can choose to do.
Almost everyone who aims to be pro at some point seems to make it this massive huge big deal, more than it needs to be.

We stress over it, spend ridiculous amounts of time trying to level up, angst about how good we might be or how popular our work is.

We eat horribly, sleep too little, become lonely and feel shit about ourselves. We get so hopelessly and overly identified with the artist identity that we all at some point get overly critical / passionate about and join in on crusades about shit that nobody cares about, shouldn't care about, isn't your problem and DOESN'T matter at all.

We obsess over what other artists are doing more than enjoying what we are doing.

We make gods out of people who have simply just doodled for a bit longer than we have. They aren't any more special than you are. Or put another way you are just as special as they are.

We think that artist problems are the worst thing in the world and get so caught up in our angst. There are much much worse things out there, just open your eyes! Live in gratitude for what you do have.

We moan incessently about how undervalued and underappreciated we are (even top paid pros do this!) rather than look at how to truly be of service to others or find a way to make ourselves more valued rather than expecting everything to be the way we want it to be.

We whine and whinge....A LOT. I've never heard so much self pity, self loathing, and whiney shit come out of a group of people than I have from artists (and writers too). Must be some aspect of the insecurity in self expressive creativity that makes us whiny bitches. Creativity and self-expression is meant to be empowering no matter what your skill, or you are just doing it wrong.

I have done all of the above, and seen it in others.
We need to get over ourselves. I know, that might sound a bit harsh but these are just some of the things I have realised myself.

Be passionate, be dedicated, be humble, work damn hard or just kinda hard, but don't forget there is more to life and conscious experience than smooshing marks about for others to look at.

THIS last point is more important than anything else: Time is the most precious resource you have been gifted and will ever receive in your entire life so be truthful with it. Don't simply follow along with what other people spew out as gospel without putting your own critical mind to test their assumptions no matter who they are, because they don't know shit about your life nor how you should live it.

So ummm yeah, totally you should work smart, get sleep, eat well, or do whatever the hell you want. If you want to be the crazed idiot painting 20 hours in the day, I say go for it! I've done that in the past too, and while it isn't sustainable nor that desireable it definitely had its place in my journey. No damn regrets!

[Lodratio]

I agree with Amit on this one. Don't cut down on sleep. Give your brain the time it needs to process and organize information. 
Another problem I see is that a lot of us try to get good at one thing at a time as quickly as possible, while in my experience it's much more efficient to learn several things alongside eachother. If you spend 4 years playing piano, 4 years drawing and 4 years working out you will not get anywhere near as good a result as you will if you divide your energy for 12 years. I think this also has something to do with the fact that our brain needs time to process things. If you try to change one aspect of your mind at too fast a pace your brain just won't be able to keep up, and you'll waste a lot of energy. The drawback to doing things slowly is that you won't get too good at anything immediately, which can be frustrating, since we are used to being given instant gratification in other aspects of our lives.

Now, you might think that there's someone out there who only draws for 12 years, and that that person will be better than you. I'm not even sure if that is the case to be honest. You benefit a lot from learning to be versitile. It changes the way you look at problems and helps you come up with better sollutions more quickly, so leading a ballanced life and not obsessing over any one thing too much may not just be the most healthy, but also the most efficient way of living.

[Jonas Jerde]

You guys make a lot of good point and are right...If you want to be a healthy, balanced individual. But the reality is, the people who become the greatest at anything are often very unbalanced, obsessive, and a little crazy. I don't think there is anything wrong with either path. It's foolish to tell anyone how they should live their own life. If you want to take it easy and go the slower route in your studying that's great. But if you want to go all in and study all day and get as good as you can as fast as you can, I see no problem in that either. Different people have different goals, and the only person that will give you the answers you want is yourself.

[ReneAigner]

 If you want to take it easy and go the slower route in your studying that's great. But if you want to go all in and study all day and get as good as you can as fast as you can, I see no problem in that either. 

The question is whether the "all in, all day, every day" route is in fact faster as a healthy way of studying. Because if it isn't, and the point has been made quite compellingly by a lot of people that it isn't, you're deluding yourself if you go that way thinking you'll benefit from it.

[Jonas Jerde]

It depends on what you mean by all day, clearly there needs to be time for sleep and nutrition. Anybody who says they sleep 1-2 hours per day every day is simply lying or highly exaggerating. But I think it is pretty obvious that if the same person works 12-14 hours a day instead of 5-8, they will progress much faster. The only people I have heard say otherwise seem to be people who are already successful as a result of working extremely hard in the past, or people who are trying to find a valid excuse to work less.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I just don't want a newcomer or somebody seeing this thread and thinking they should take it easy because working as hard as you can might hinder you in the end somehow. Nobody ever said "Yeah, that person could have been successful, but they worked too hard."

[ZombieChinchilla]

Hmmm, I've been thinking about this for the past few months, actually. Over the summer I started listening to Will Terry's youtube videos, they're great to watch as you work, and he mentions having a really good work ethic a few times. In one video (can't remember which one), he mentions med students, and how you always hear about how hard med students are working, how they're always studying and losing sleep over it and how med students are almost guaranteed a job after the whole process if they stick to it. He says that artists should be working just as hard as med students, perhaps even harder because we definitely don't have a job waiting for us in a few years. At the time this advice really inspired me and I started to follow it (kind of). I paired this with some advice Dan Luvisi gave in his Level Up video (SO good, highly recommend it). In it he mentions that he worked like crazy on his first Last Man Standing book, like he would get up every day around 6 and go to bed really late, never socializing or doing anything else, just working working working.

And then just a few days ago I stumbled on the quote in the first post and started to think about that...I don't know. It's hard, maybe impossible for us to say, "x hours is too many/not enough and you should change your schedule," to someone else. I think it's about finding a balance in your own life. Don't dedicate your whole life to art, hell, don't dedicate to one thing, no matter what that thing is. Find a balance. If that's working 20 hours on art and spending the other four eating/sleeping, and you're fine with that? Great! If that stresses you out and you can only draw 6 hours a day and instead socialize or do other hobbies, fine.

I will say, though, that if you want to be really, really big and famous some day, you may have to take the 20 hour route. That doesn't mean it's the only way to be successful. But if you want to be famous and well-known like some of the big names, you may have to follow the eccentrics from history and dedicate your entire life. But for me, I don't need that, so I'm fine taking some time off.

I'll end with some of this comic by Stephen McCraine, You Are Not Your Art:









http://doodlealley.com/2012/09/10/you-are-not-your-art/

[ReneAigner]

 But I think it is pretty obvious that if the same person works 12-14 hours a day instead of 5-8, they will progress much faster. 

I don't think that's obvious at all. There's only so much you can learn in a day and only so much concentration you can muster. 

There is a lot of  groupthink going on in certain circles regarding how all that matters is the time you put in. I think it's delusional to a degree. Of course, getting better takes time and practice. But there are other factors to this as well, e.g. how "talented" a person is (as in how fast/efficiently they learn), how open they are to new ideas, what the quality of their learning resources is like, etc. etc.

Take Noah Bradley who has always said that he worked less than most of his classmates in artschool, and yet I'd say he's done rather well for himself.

[Jonas Jerde]

I am not discounting those other factors, That's why I said "the same person". If Noah Bradley spent twice as much time working on his art he would surely be more technically skilled, no? I'm not saying that means he would be twice as good, but he would be more knowledgeable to a degree.

[Bookend]

It's kinda like how they're discovering that even your body could actually benefit more from short, intense bursts of exercise than from the long marathons that people tend to do.  (Obvious weight-lifting benefits aside-- That's a separate thing, and... Theoretically could be done in short bursts too.)

A lot about how we think our minds and bodies work is changing.

I think an important thing to remember is that when you do work, then work intense, work hard, and do your best.  And key here being do your best.  You don't need to work fast to make good work.  A lot of this awesome work that you see people do takes up to 20 hours, sometimes even longer.  Work as long as you need to, and then give it one more inch. 

Lately, I've been trying to externalize my process, to see what's going on inside my head when I'm working. I've noticed that I try to work quickly because it 'feels' like I'm working like a pro--   Haha.  Kind of silly, I know.  But, more pertinent to this actual thread:  I've noticed that I'm not actually doing my best. 

I don't necessarily finish, I don't necessarily push outside my comfort zone as much as I should-- And I don't necessarily think about what I'm doing, and why.  All of these things are important, and by discovering and breaking this down about my process, I'm able to change things up, and, hopefully, improve.

I think that these things are important to do when you study, and I think that there is a massive difference between 20 hours of mindless copying and 30 minutes of slow, careful study.  The latter actually seems to be more beneficial.

My best advice would be to find your golden ratio.  For me, I can work for about an hour before I need to take a small break.  Maybe 10 minutes.  Maybe a half an hour.  I don't sweat it--  I just take as long as I need, and I allow thoughts of drawing to stay in the back of my mind, cuing myself.  After awhile I'll go, "I want to draw."  And then I'll look internally and gauge whether or not it's something that I can do with full focus, at my best.

My new avatar I did is something I was plugging away at with quite a lot of frustration.  I was getting fed up with those glasses, and just about ready to throw in the towel.  Then I was interrupted by my wifey to do an errand together--  And when I came back, I was refreshed, and I figured it out.  Woo!

So, yeah.  That's my rambling thing.