You Do Not Need to Draw Everyday – You Just Need to Draw a Lot
When people say to draw everyday, their implication is that it will help improve your art.
However, artists are all different. They have varying amounts of time to spend on making art. They may be hobbyists, students, self-teaching themselves, or working in an art field. While artists can most certainly draw everyday, they should not feel like they have to.
You may love drawing everyday if it is therapeutic and purely fun for you. If you are trying to complete a drawing challenge or meet a deadline, then again, you may want to draw everyday – at least in the short term.
If you want to get better at making art, it may be more beneficial to put less focus on drawing daily. Instead, concentrate on drawing for a large number of hours and actively search for ways to improve your drawings. After all, if you draw everyday, but you just draw doodles, it will not help you improve your art.
Drawing Everyday Can Cause Fatigue
Working on art everyday can get tiresome, whether that is physically or mentally.
Do not be afraid to take a day off from drawing if your hands or body are feeling sore. It is important to take measures to avoid injuring yourself, which could make you unable to draw. So take time for breaks and try to get some physical activity instead of sitting at a desk all day.
Drawing everyday can cause mental fatigue as well. If you are finding yourself mentally exhausted, your drawing abilities may start to plummet. You may not want to draw everyday if it is severely impairing the level of content you are producing. Drawing everyday can cause you to feel overwhelmed, you may get frustrated that you are not improving quickly, or you may hit a learning plateau.
If you have other responsibilities outside of drawing, you may feel bad for missing a day of drawing. Or you may feel guilt for not making the time to draw everyday. This can cause you to want to quit and give up all together.
Art block is a common experience for artists. So this is another reason you may not want to draw everyday. If you are lacking inspiration, you may need to take some time off from drawing. You can instead take some time to learn other skills that are related to art. You could also research art blogs and watch tutorials on drawing, or find a book and read about how to make better art.
Most Other Types of Learning are Not Done Daily
It is very strange that the advice “draw everyday” is given so often in the art community. The majority of skills learned in life do not require daily learning. Kids take entire summers off from school, chefs eat out sometimes instead of practicing their cooking, and not even students aspiring to become doctors study everyday.
The majority of artists spouting the advice to draw everyday are not professionals. Also, very few professional artists say you must draw everyday. Usually, instead, they advise just to draw a lot and to draw often. For example, Aaron Blaise, a former Disney animator, and super skilled artist, talks about this subject on his YouTube channel. He said he personally does not believe artists must draw everyday.
Drawing Everyday Does Not Guarantee Improvement
Simply drawing the same thing over and over or filling lots of sketchbooks does not ensure that your art will improve. If you are drawing everyday hoping to improve your art, there are more effective methods to improve your art.
In order to improve your art, you must take time to study, read, learn, watch tutorials, and look at other art. You also must draw things that are outside of your comfort zone or you will only be able to draw very few subjects well. Additionally, drawing everyday, but only for two minutes is not a very large amount of time. That is why drawing everyday does not guarantee improvements.
Do Draw Everyday for the Short Term
You do not have to draw everyday for the rest of your life, but you can periodically set goals to draw everyday for the short term. Daily drawing challenges can be an effective way to improve your art.
For example, Inktober is a short term challenge to work on improving your linework. This challenge is effective because the goal is to draw everyday for a month, but with a specific goal in mind to work on. Also, drawing everyday for a month is a more achievable goal than drawing everyday of the year.
100 Days of Making Comics is a another short term drawing challenge. This popular challenge is to continuously work on your comic for 100 days in a row. The reason why this is a good challenge is because there is an actual productive goal in mind (to get a lot of work done on your comic) rather than just drawing something random everyday.
Time Management is More Important Than Drawing Everyday
Drawing everyday does not guarantee that you will make a lot of art. If you want to make a lot of art or improve your art, your goal instead should be to manage your time wisely.
For example, you can use time management to set a weekly drawing schedule. This will help you get a lot of drawing hours in, even if you do not draw daily. Set aside certain times/dates in your schedule that you can dedicate to drawing.
There is a saying that 10,000 hours are required to become a professional artist. There is no reason you must draw every single day in order to reach that many hours of practice though. Rather, if you schedule a certain amount of hours to work on drawing each week, you can still reach that goal.
Also, if you want to meet deadlines or finish a comic quickly, you do not have to draw everyday. Instead, you can just set goals of how much work must be completed by a certain date. This way you can draw when you feel like it, rather than forcing yourself to draw everyday. Using this method, I am able to create my comic, which is pretty long, even though I do not work on it daily.
Draw Everyday OR as Much as You Can
As previously mentioned, every artist is different. You can draw everyday if you want to. But if your goal is to improve your art, there is no need to stress about drawing every single day.
However, just because you do not feel motivated to draw, does not always mean you should take a day off. You should definitely draw everyday for short-term challenges. Likewise, you should push yourself to draw as much as you can without going overboard.
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