Art and Endurance: Why You Can't Finish Pieces
Note: This is all just a discussion, so don't take everything I say as fact. Be creative and experiment with what works best for you
Have you ever gone through your sketchbook, or your files, or where ever you keep your drawings, and noticed that it's ALL sketches, simple doodles, or pieces only half finished? Do you have a mountain of WIPs that you ignore? And does the idea of actually finishing something fill your heart with dread?
These are all common phenomenons that artists, and especially beginners, experience, but why is that?
Now, to preface, there are many many reasons why you might be unable to finish your work. It can come down to a lack of free time, underlying mental health conditions, too many distractions, unsure where to go with the piece or how to finish it, etc. and these are all valid reasons for why your work may remain unfinished. However, for this article, we'll be discussing one of the most frequent obstacles artists face: a lack of endurance.
What is endurance?
I consider endurance to be how much drawing you can do before you "run out of steam." It's broken into 3 aspects:
How fast can you draw?
How much can you get done?
How long can you draw for?
What do I mean by these? Let me give you an example. Say you're doing a drawing of a face.
How Fast Can You Draw: It takes you 10 minutes to draw your initial face.
How Much Can You Get Done: But, you notice it looks wonky, so you move the eyes around, redraw the nose a few times, flip the canvas over and over, and an additional 20 minutes later, your face is actually done. The initial drawing took 10 minutes, but you had to spend another 20 minutes fixing it, so it took 30 minutes total.
How Long Can You Draw For: You've drawn a face, but you want to give it a body, too. However, on average, you can only draw for an hour before you start getting tired, so now you've got 30 minutes left of energy to finish your drawing. Once you've hit the hour mark, you've only got the top half of the body done, but you're tired now, so you give up, and your drawing remains unfinished.
It's a bit more complicated than this, but for simplicity's sake, these are the main components of endurance. Now, what determines these factors, and what can we do to improve them?
1. How Fast Can You Draw?
This mostly comes down to how much actual time it takes you to draw something. When you're unfamiliar with a topic (such as faces or hands), you have to spend longer to draw it, since you're having to spend time "guessing" where lines might go, instead of just knowing. It's like trying to find your way somewhere when you've never been there before, but once you've traveled there over and over, you can just go straight to your destination. Because masters know the directions, they can go straight to where they want to be, whereas beginners have to slowly stumble through their lines first. It takes years of familiarization and practice to get comfortable, but with enough time and dedication, you can get there too.
But, how do you become familiar with these topics? Mostly through study, experimentation, and practice. If you do a drawing, and notice it takes you only a few minutes to draw the face and the body, but you're spending hours trying to get the hands right, it's a sign you need to build your mileage up for hands. Do lots of studies from photographs, then test yourself by drawing them from imagination. Over time, more and more aspects of art will become familiar to you, and you'll be able to draw them faster.
2. How Much Can You Get Done?
There's a lot of overlap between point 1 and point 2, but I want to break it into it's own section. How Much Can You Get Done refers to how many mistakes you make, and how long you have to spend fixing those mistakes before the drawing is "done." You may be able to draw a hand in 5 minutes, but if it's constantly in the wrong perspective or isn't sized properly, you have to sink additional time into redrawing it. How Fast Can You Draw is how long it takes you to draw a hand, but How Much Can You Get Done is how long it takes you to get to the finished hand.
Again, to improve at this, you just need to gain more experience through study and practice. Additionally, making improvements to your ability to spot mistakes and identify solutions to those mistakes will cut down time on the "I'm randomly moving things around until it looks good" phase of the drawing (I have an article in the works regarding this topic, which I will link when it's finished.)
3. How Long Can You Draw For?
Art is both a mental, and physical activity, and thus, it can take a strain on the body that you might not expect it would. Physically, you are repetitively moving your hands to create lines and brushstrokes (make sure you're doing regular stretches to compensate for this), but more importantly, it can be mentally exhausting to try creating shapes and forms from nothing. Your brain has to, in a way, calculate what anatomy looks like, how that object would look in perspective, if that expression makes sense, it goes on and on. It's very brain-intensive, which can be draining to do for long periods of time. As a beginner, your brain has to work harder to accomplish these things, but when you get more experienced, these become second nature, and take less of a toll on you.
For example, think about learning a new skill, let's say a language. So, you're trying to learn Spanish, and making simple sentences is very time consuming and requires a lot of brain power. People who have been speaking Spanish since birth can easily speak the language, and hold hours long conversations, while you're brand new, fighting for your life just to ask someone, "¿Qué día es hoy?".
When you don't have to think about something, you can do it for longer. It feels less like you're climbing a mountain, and more so just going for a stroll. I mean, you don't find it exhausting to blink 15,000 times a day, do you?
With not only studying and practice, but CONSISTENT studying and practice, drawing becomes a lot less tiring. Make it a habit, and it will feel as easy and natural as writing your name.
Okay, but, HOW should I be practicing?
Well, aside from the types of practice artists constantly recommend (reference studies, drawing simple forms, life drawing, etc.), I personally noticed the fastest improvements to my endurance and speed by doing two things:
Timed Drawing
Quantity > Quality
With timed drawing, this is most often done through gesture drawing. I used the website quickposes.com, set the timer to 45 seconds per pose, and did 10 drawings every single day for over a year. The purpose of this exercise is to build line confidence, loosen poses, and teach you to draw quicker (among other things). It takes me only a few minutes to do a complete pose now, as opposed to the several hours it used to take. Don't worry if the poses look bad or if they're left unfinished, and they will be at first, but they will get better through practice. You can do timed drawings for other things (hands, portraits, etc.), but I mostly focused on doing poses.
Next, putting Quantity > Quality sounds very counterintuitive at first. When are we ever told it's better to do more shoddy work than to make fewer perfect pieces? Hear me out, okay. Years ago, I saw a post (if I find it again I'll link it) talking about how there was a study done in a pottery class. There were two groups, Group A and Group B. Group A was told to make a pot every single day, no matter how bad it looked, whereas Group B had to spend the entire semester perfecting one single pot. By the end of the study, Group A had made significant improvements over Group B. When you spend time creating something new every day, it forces you to tackle new challenges and make more mistakes. Spending forever on one thing only teaches you how to perfect that one piece, in that one scenario. If you struggle with perfectionism, set a time limit, or challenge yourself to do drawings without an eraser (or draw in pen if you draw traditionally!).
Once you learn to accept that your pieces will, at first, be bad, you can get more done. Whether I'm studying, or I'm drawing from imagination, I accept that the drawing might suck, and that I will live with that. You have got to stop letting perfect get in the way of finished, and if a fear of failure stops you from your practice, you will never get better. Draw, analyze what the mistakes were, and take that into consideration for your next drawing. Stop spending forever tweaking a piece, let imperfection go, and keep moving forward.
Why Does This Matter?
Artists have this tendency to beat themselves up all the time for every little thing. "Your art isn't good enough", "You draw too slow", "Your style sucks", over and over and over again. I wanted to try and explain WHY drawing is so hard and WHY it can be so tiring, so you can understand: It is not your fault. Don't worry if you can't draw fast, or you can't get a lot of things done. This is extremely common for beginners, and you need to give yourself the grace and the patience you need so you can keep practicing. Do not let your self-hatred get in the way of achieving your goals.
Consistency is the master of improvement. You have to be practicing frequently, at least several times a week if you're serious about getting good at drawing. Set a goal for yourself, but make it a reasonable one. If you're expecting yourself to draw for 12 hours a day like a professional and create masterpiece after masterpiece, you're going to just get frustrated.
I recommend trying to draw for a certain amount of time every day, one you know you can consistently accomplish. Let's say an hour. If an hour feels too daunting, start with 30 minutes. You want it to be slightly out of your comfort zone so you can grow, but you don't want to push yourself to burnout. And, of course, if time's up, and you're still having fun, keep going, but don't feel like you're failing if you stop, and it's okay if you stop in the middle of something. (And if you miss a day, just forgive yourself and practice tomorrow so you don't break the habit!)
The idea is you want to practice consistently so you can achieve more in the same amount of time and build a tolerance for drawing, in which you can then increase the amount of time you're drawing for. For example, say you're getting into running. You think running is soooo cool and you admire people who can run marathons, and you want to do that too one day! So, you start running every day for 20 minutes. You notice in the first few weeks, you can only run for half a mile, and a few weeks later now it's a mile, and months later you're now running 3 miles in 20 minutes and running has gotten so much easier now, so your tolerance increases, and so you start running for 30 minutes every day, so on and so forth, the cycle continues. (Note: I am out of shape, and I don't know how fast people run, so ignore if these numbers are inaccurate, the metaphor still runs, I swear!)
Finally, when you've built your tolerance, and your skills, you now have the endurance to finish your pieces, and more and more ambitious projects seem less and less intimidating. It will take time and patience, but if you keep at it, you can achieve your artistic goals. Best of luck!
