Drawing Every Day for 1 Year

Back in May, I wrote a post about how I’d been drawing every day. Since then I have continued, until this Christmas, when I finished one year of drawing every day. I have 365 drawings that I can look back on from this year, and I must say it is wonderful. I really can’t imagine how I did it, with everything else I do. Not that I am the busiest guy in the world, but just remembering to do it every day seems like it would take a toll on my tiny attention span. And I guess it did. Some days it almost didn’t count as I was doing it after midnight, but as long as I have all of them and did one within 18 hours of any given other, then I call it a win.

Like before, I can’t attest to it doing my skill any great service. I now know I can draw things I didn’t know I could before, but that’s about it. I’m still really glad I did it. I think I improved on my time and my simple skill, such as straight lines, etc. I’m really glad I did it, and I hope to keep doing it for a very long time, just like that. I would encourage anyone else who likes drawing or art to do something similar, as having a goal (1 a day, even with no time limit, is a goal) that has easily observable milestones will make all of those other little things that are harder to measure easier to cope with, and handle. We might not see measurable effects of them in years, but I can see that on Christmas last year I started drawing every day. Now, one year later, I have done it for one year, and I have the paper to show for it, and that’s wonderful.

On Drawing Every Day

I’ve been drawing every day for a while now. And I’ve got to say that it’s still pretty fun. I haven’t been going nearly as long as some people, though. I just find it exciting to come up with something different to draw every day. Something to freshen my mind. Every day I get to draw something new and exciting. And if I can’t think of anything, I can always do better at something I tried before, or look at it from a different angle.

My Notebooks almost used up.
My Notebooks almost used up.

Some people would say that it improves your drawing skill to draw all the time. It does to a point, but it depends on how you work it. I, being a cartoonist, prefer simple lines and shapes, so my drawing skill in the detail department hasn’t improved much. But in the time department I’m very much ahead. It takes me less than half an hour to do any given page a day, which is a major improvement over the hour it took before. And even a half hour is still the max: usually it takes ten to twenty minutes.

I started just to keep drawing things. I do cartoons every day and sometimes that gets boring, and sometimes I can forget how to draw some things. This helps with both. Though some days I don’t want to do it, like I don’t want to do everything else, but doing it feels so nice after the fact. Looking back over my sketchbook and being able to see a drawing for every single day is great. Seeing how I’ve progressed, or how much detail I put into one drawing, or the lack of detail that is left for the viewer to fill in, creating a personal emotional attachment.

Though it hasn’t helped me very much in the realm of my drawing skill, it has been a very rewarding experience, and I’m going to continue doing it. It is my hope to at some point amass a library of sketchbooks that I can thumb through. I hope that I do continue and I hope that you reading this will consider doing something similar. Whether it is to improve your drawing skill, just for the  love of drawing, or to get the satisfaction of doing something similar. I will continue to do so and I would love to see other people do so.