Part of my 10 Minute Habit series
10 Minutes a Day
If you want to get better at sketching, all you need is practice, practice, practice. But you don’t have to spend hours and hours labouring over a blank page to reap the benefits.
All it takes is 10 minutes of daily practice to build confident lines and become comfortable with your colour palette.
If you start on January 1st, and practice 10 minutes a day throughout the year, that’s over 60 hours of creative practice you’ll have done.
Imagine what you can achieve in 60 hours?
Narrow Down Your Focus
The great thing about social media is that you have access to so much inspiration and artists. But, that’s also the problem.
It’s so easy to get overwhelmed by this huge volume of creative content online. If you’re limited to the amount of time you can spend creating each day, the best approach is to take ten minutes of the time you spend mindlessly scrolling on your phone, and allocate that to your daily creative practice. Then narrow down your focus and figure out what you want to create or learn. I found that establishing a specific learning goal really helped me to narrow down my focus.
Narrowing Down My Focus to Sketching People
For the past couple of months I’ve been distracted by boats and buildings, and I abandoned my daily people-sketching practice. I was getting overwhelmed, I’d signed up for too many tutorials, and was going trying to learn too much at once, and this was impacting the time I actually spent creating.
So in December I hit the reset button. I started a new daily sketching habit, just focusing on people, and made a deal with myself to always do at least 10 minutes a day to improve my technical and stylistic approach to sketching people.
First I identified the source of my sketching inspiration to help me achieve the goals I set myself:
- Simplify my Lines
- Get better at drawing noses
Then I made it a habit to get that 10 minutes of sketching under my belt before I moved on with my day.
I decided to revisit a sketching challenge I used to participate in on Facebook.
Draw This In Your Style Daily Challenge
Drawing Earthsworld Challenge on Facebook, post a daily portrait photo sourced from Earthsworld on Instagram. These faces are full of character, and I use them to practice my ink lines establish a daily habit to sketch a nose.
My Recent Earthworld’s Rogues Gallery, starting with the most recent:
Each day I sketch from the reference in my style and then post in on Facebook. Then I look at the submissions from the other artists to see whose style or techniques I admire. There are a couple of artists that are really good at drawing noses, and I have been using their sketches to practice drawing noses.
(Image on the far right is sketched using a photo resource from Museum)
One by-product of doing these daily sketches is that I’ve been experimenting with skin tone colours, and realised that I much prefer brighter skin tones than realistic ones. My favourite mix of the moment is Opera Rose/Pink and Hansa Yellow Light to create a warm pinky orange, and then to create warm complimentary shadows, a little bit of raw umber added to the mix.
10 Minute Poses Live Advent Event
Just after I started my Earthsworld Challenge, I found out that Dylan Sara was starting a daily live, 10 Minute Poses sketching event on Youtube for the month of December, where he sketches from a photo using simplified lines. Check out his Youtube channel for the replays of this live session.
I usually attend his Tuesday Sketch Along sessions, where a group of us take it in turns to sketch each other’s portraits. But I love the idea of this daily check in at the beginning of the day to sketch a quick portrait.
This live Youtube event the ideal way to see Dylan’s pen in action, and lets us see how he approaches his simplified sketching technique. This event ticks both boxes — sketching noses and simplifying my lines. I’m a visual learner, and I like to see how artists approach their sketches.
I’ve been using my Sailor Fude pen because I like the look of different line weights, and with the Fude you can incorporate them into your sketch without having to use multiple pens.
Based on the first few days of this 10 minute sketch event, Dylan is using different styles based on the subject. I’ve been following his inspiration, but adding my own touches.
Even though I did intend to mirror his techniques exactly, I find myself veering off into my own direction – I guess that’s called, embracing my style. But I have been experimenting with some of his techniques. For example, I don’t really like hatching, but today he used hatching for shadows, and I had a go at that and I didn’t hate the results! But I was especially pleased with the nose I sketched in the hatched portrait.
How to Get your 10 Minute Habit Started
Step One: Set Your Specific Goals
It’s not going to be very effective to aspire to sketch better, you really need to set goals that you can work towards. .
For example, my aspiration is to get better as sketching people. Whereas my broad goal is to start a daily practice of sketching people to improve the use of minimal ink lines, and a specific goal is master the art of sketching noses.
For each sketch I create, I evaluate what I liked, and what I didn’t. That way I can keep track of my progress, and I can identify when I reach my goal having a sketching style I’m aiming for, and I sketch more great noses than bad!
And when I achieve this nose-specific goal, I can set another.
Step Two: Find Your Inspirations
No matter what subject or style of sketching you aspire to, there are plenty of resources and artists out there that can provide you with the level of inspiration you need to create your daily sketching habit. Search the internet, trawl through Youtube video, or search on Instagram hashtags, etc. Don’t stop until you come across resources that you feel sure will inspire you in your daily practice.
Step Three: Find 10 Minutes In Your Day
Look at all your daily activities and commitments and see where you can “steal” 10 minutes. It’s there, you just need to be honest about finding it.
Set your start date, and commit for a week. Once you get started, it’ll be easier to keep the momentum going. And if you need accountability, announce your intentions online and start posting your progress, or join a like-minded community to keep you accountable.
The key is to find what approach works for you, and commit to it.
I hope your 10 minute sketching habits gets off the ground and soars. I’m finding that even after a week of this new sketching habit, I’ve had multiple ah-ha! moments, and I’m getting better at sketching faces.
