Is there anyone else out there whose suffering from having 100 beautiful sketchbooks of which you’ve used just one or two pages? Rest easy, neither has one of the most prolific illustrators of books in Australia, Bruce Whatley.
When Bruce posted this to Instagram, I felt my entire body relax. I too have many half-finished sketchbooks. A library of reminders about the times I read another piece of advice about drawing everyday, saw some wonderful sketches of people who practice like this, and thought, right, now is the time for me to do the same thing.
But sure enough, 2-3 pages into a beautiful new sketchbook, the momentum fades. The only time I’ve ever been able to keep it up is when I’m on holidays and not spending my day commuting to and from my day job. There’s some part of me that wishes I could be like ‘them’. The ones who sketch. The ones who draw something, anything, everyday. But most of the time, I just don’t feel like it. I’ve had a hard day at work and my creative energy is spent, or, I value other things more (like spending time with my wife and cat).
You might be different, too
Hard and fast ‘rules’ for a creative practice have never worked for me. Write 1000 words a day, drink a cup of celery juice every morning, meditate at 5:45am on days starting with T. They’re blanket statements, said by a few people, but assumed to apply to many. But we’re all different. Each person works in their own way, and has their own limitations. Family, life, work, health, it’s different for everybody. So what works better for me is doing the work to understand my own constraints, and then optimise for that. For example, I’m a morning person, so, in general, I do my most creative or focussed work before people wake up. It also means that at night, I rest. I’ve tried working around this, but it never works. Not only do I produce less interesting work if I work at night, but the ‘habit’ doesn’t stick.
I think the only ‘rule’ is that there are no rules. Everyone is different, so we do what we can, when we can, and if it’s not how others operate, then that’s OK.