How perfectionism slows you down

Perfectionism dresses itself up as high standards, then behaves like a brake. It will not let you finish a piece, and it will not let you start one. You spend months, and the number of finished drawings barely moves.

A desk with a laptop and notebook

This is easy to check: count how many pieces you finished in the last three months. If it is fewer than five, the problem is the bar, not a lack of time.

One piece instead of twenty

While you polish one portrait for three weeks, you repeat the same motions twenty times. No new mistakes show up, so there is nothing new to learn from. Twenty different pieces give you twenty different problems, and twenty solutions.

Fear of starting, and unfinished files

A high bar is scary at the start as well as at the end: you already know the first sketch will not measure up. That is how a folder of files abandoned halfway piles up.

If at least two of those sound familiar, start with the piece on fear of the blank page. It covers how to get into the work.

Quantity versus quality

The quality of one piece is a result. The number of pieces is the learning process. You can only steer the process. So a goal for the month sounds like "ten finished sketches," not "one masterpiece."

Why the volume of practice decides it

Skill grows from repeats on different material. The hand remembers the motion, the eye remembers proportions, and the head remembers decisions. Twenty drawings of an hour each teach more than one drawing stretched over twenty hours.

Finish it, then open a new file

As soon as the piece reaches "you can tell what is drawn," save it and make a new canvas. Come back to the saved file only after a month, and only to review it. Mistakes are easier to collect as a list. Common kinds are described in the article on beginner drawing mistakes.

Time limits

Perfectionism cannot stand a hard frame. A timer works better than talking yourself into stopping: when the time is up, the piece is done. The first tries feel unpleasant. Then it gets easier.

A timer on the piece

  1. Set a timer for 40 minutes and pick one simple subject.
  2. The first 5 minutes are only composition and big masses.
  3. The next 25 are form, value, and color, with no small details.
  4. The last 10 are one accent, and that is all.
  5. Save the file with the date and close it without looking at it.

A deadline for each stage

If the piece is large, give each stage its own deadline: the sketch is one evening, the line work is two evenings, the color is three. The stage is closed even if you want to go back. That is how you reach a finish instead of getting stuck on the first stage.

A good-enough standard

"It feels off" is useless, because you cannot check it. Replace it with a list of three points written before you start. If the points match, the piece is done.

Three points that mean done

The points have to be checkable. For example: the silhouette reads at thumbnail size, there is a dark shape and a light shape, and the face is not lopsided. Everything else is an improvement, not a condition for calling it done.

Check

Shrink the piece to icon size and look at it from an arm's length. If the subject is clear, you have enough detail. Past that, you are polishing something the viewer will not see.

No more edits after you save

Once the file is saved, edits are closed. Write notes on a separate list and apply them to the next piece. Then a fix becomes growth, not an endless repair of one drawing. A step-by-step review of pieces that miss is in the article on what to do when you hate your drawing.

Work that is bad on purpose

The bar drops fastest on exercises where a bad result is part of the assignment. Your brain stops defending itself, and your hand moves more freely. Two of these a week is enough.

A five-minute sketch

Take a small canvas, one brush, and five minutes. The job is to fit a whole scene into that time, so details physically will not fit. Keep those sketches in a digital sketchbook and do not delete a single one.

The draw-it-badly exercise

Draw something crooked on purpose: skewed proportions, muddy color, a broken line. One rule: you may not use undo. A funny side effect is that some of these pieces come out livelier than the careful ones.

Time to draw, not just read

Theory fades in a couple of days if you never use it. Open the editor and spend 15 minutes on what you just read. That is enough for the skill to stick.

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Topics in this guide

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