This was written April 29 and April 30, 2024 as part of the 2024 Learning to Draw People Challenge
Introduction
Welp, it’s officially been a month since the start of my hiatus, and I really want to get back into it. I may have “fallen” twice already, but I’m planning to keep getting back up and figure out what works best for me! As mentioned in April Update, I feel ready to resume this challenge, and have some thoughts on how to approach it this time.
When will I resume?
This is the most obvious question: when shall I actually resume? My current plan is to resume the challenge on Monday May 13. Why that date in particular? Two main reasons:
- I have a Final Exam on May 10, and want to make sure to study for it before it happens.
- With the new strategy I want to implement (discussed below), I would rather start on a Monday as opposed to a weekend (Plus it also be my birthday weekend).
Strategy
General Schedule
One of the things I’ve noticed with the previous runs is that I manage to last maybe a week or two before my motivation and energy both start to wane (along with an increase in sleep deprivation). Similarly, it seems that while working on projects, I tend to have “short-term” bursts of high motivation before getting fatigued, and I’m wondering whether I could make use of that. Accordingly, I want to try out a “week on – week off” strategy, where I have a full week of daily drawing, followed by a full week off, and rinse and repeat. This would hopefully help me make better use of my motivation, and also lead to a better life balance, since I could use the week off towards other activities (such as exploring Taiwan).
I have not yet decided whether I’ll also be drawing during the weekends or not, I’m still torn between the two alternatives. I’ll probably see how my first week goes before deciding. Still, 5 days every two weeks is still be better than my current track record.
Also, I want to retain the ability to get “credits” to help manage unexpected situations. As mentioned in Learning to Draw People Challenge – Take Two, it allows me to draw during an off-day to gain a “credit”, which can be used to “skip” a normal day of work, although without affecting my normal posting schedule. I believe it was a really good addition to my last attempt.
Additionally, and very importantly, I’ll once again want to “review” the new strategy at the end of the first week. Although by the nature of this strategy, I should also have a review after the second week of drawing for a proper evaluation.
Stats
One of my concerns has been how long each individual session takes. Thus, I decided to look at some statistics. Thankfully, I recorded some of that information. Here is a screenshot of some of these stats:
One of the first things to notice is that drawing was about a third of the duration (articles taking twice as long to write), which seems a little intense. Similarly, reviewing the article sometimes took about as long as writing the article, which also seems off. Therefore, I would like to modify how I tackle these sessions to (hopefully) spend my time more judiciously.
Individual sessions
Following the above, I think I should streamline my process and make it more consistent. Here are a few changes I would like to try:
- I would start with the drawing phase as per usual, but with a notebook in which I would take timestamped notes.
- After drawing, I would review the video, take screenshots, and take additional notes.
- With the images and notes ready, I would clean up and rearrange the notes into logical topics, sketching the narrative. (While the exploration should remain mostly linear, the rest of the article and the takeaways could be better presented). The end-result should consist of different sections, each with a very rough draft.
- With a rough sketch ready, I would flesh out the article for a proper draft.
- The final step would be to review the article.
My intuition is that, while it feels intense for an article to take longer to write than the time spent drawing, it kind of makes sense, since I need to analyze the process, internalize, and synthesize what I want to write about it. However, the writing phase being twice as long (which happened on a few occasions) feels concerning. In a similar vein, it feels like reviewing should not take longer than the actual writing. I feel like it realistically shouldn’t take me more than 2/3rds as long. Still, I haven’t yet decided what ratios I should aim for, and it will probably require experimentation too. I expect to start with initial guidelines, and which will evolve over time (or be discarded entirely).
I will, however, keep in mind that there might be a reason for such ratios to arise naturally. Accordingly, I will remain open to the idea that these ratios might be ideal. Nonetheless, I think cleaning up my process and trying something new won’t hurt, and might give me valuable insights and new tricks.
Motivation
Another addition to this run is a larger “mid-term” goal. In the past, I was simply learning to draw different things, with no clear goal, nor project I was working towards. I think that lack of direction worked against me, both in terms of motivation and having a clear learning plan. Accordingly, I decided to instigate a project. The goal would be to make a small “manga scene” consisting of a few panels chosen ahead of time (through a description). It would be aimed at building different skills throughout the panel progression. This would include a single persistent character (modeled consistently), as opposed to blindly following the models in my book.
Ideally, I would be to practice the skills required for the panel a few times, before moving on to the actual panel, which I could add to the sequence. The scene I’ve envisioned is not the most exciting, but I’m hoping it can serve as motivation and that I can get something out of it, no matter how “simple” it might feel. And I think it might be cute, interesting and maybe insightful to see a few pages of panels where we can (hopefully) see my gradual growth.
Conclusion
Stay tuned for my third attempt, which should start May 13, and will utilize a new strategy. Hopefully, this should work better, and also be a little more interesting for all of you, since I’ll also be working towards something more tangible.
Take care everyone, and remember to stay curious!
This post is followed by Learning to Draw People Challenge – Upcoming Project