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Drawing Every Day
We believe that the most effective way to enjoy the process as well as the results of your drawing, is to draw.
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This year, our New Year's resolution was to draw every single day, even if it's just for a tiny amount of time. That's why we are ran the Joanuary Challenge.
Little did we know how many people would be turning to creativity this year and how much we would all need to keep ourselves preoccupied and enjoy solitary pursuits. Right now, we value drawing exercises and how much they help to keep us sane more than ever before.
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The theme this year is quantity. We suggest that as an experiment, we all try focusing on the amount of drawings we can churn out, rather than their quality.
Not only is quantity more of an achievable goal but it automatically results in the gaining of practise.
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So if you're willing to give it a go, here's what we're doing:
First, pick a subject to draw. It can be anything you like but remember to keep it simple. On the first day of the drawing challenge, draw one of your chosen subject. On the second day, draw two of them. By the final day, you'll be drawing thirty one items and they'll look great! Before you start drawing, we advise that you tell yourself that no-one needs to see the results and you definitely don't have to share it on social media if you don't want to. This challenge is about learning a process and the idea of other people's judgements can be really disrupting to your brain's ability to focus on technique. That being said, if when you've finished, you are happy to show the world, please share with the hashtag #joanuarychallenge2020. We'll be displaying some of our efforts on our Instagram account, so we'd love it if you would join us!
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If you could do with a bit more encouragement, we enjoyed this excerpt from the book Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland:
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"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would
be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on.
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Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."