Making Art a Habit!

Draw Draw Draw!

For the past few months I have been thinking a lot about my desire to draw more. I've mostly been focused on finishing GLYF and the Terror of Tusk (my new mini comic) but I knew when I finished the comic I wanted to finally make a go of forming the habit of drawing daily. See for my whole life, almost, I have loved drawing and creating art of many mediums but the moments where I actually sat down and worked on getting better have been very few and far between. Usually it would be in spurts of inspiration. The problem with that is 1 it's not a very effective use of time to wait for inspiration and 2 Inspiration usually comes at the most inconvenient times.  So it's time to make the habit stick!

What's the Doctor say?

Just before I began to write this blog post i did a google search on "how long it takes to form a habit". I definitely remember people suggesting a specific amount of days but i couldn't remember what that figure was. Right at the top of the search was actually a pretty interesting article on the subject. Apparently the figure that is usually suggested is 21 days in reference to a book written by a plastic surgeon named Dr Maxwell Maltz that was published in 1960. Dr. Maltz suggested this because he noticed it took about that amount of time for amputee's to get used to a loss of a limb. You can see how this may not really be a practical gauge on how many days it's going to take me to form a new habit.

The article went on to discuss results from a study done in 2009 on the subject which i wont get into detail on but the basic results that they found was the big "it depends" answer that seems to apply to everything in life lol. So what it depends on generally is the difficulty of the habit you want to form and the self discipline of the person. What they found was an average of about 66 days to form most habits of moderate difficulty. All that said i think that the goal of drawing every day is probably more on the medium to easy side of the difficulty scale.

My Goal

So this is what i think i will do. I will round the number of days out to 60 days for at least 5 minutes a day starting today. I may blog about it here from time to time but I don't want that to hinder my progress. It's not always easy to get to a computer and post a blog. What i will do however is take a picture from my phone each day and post it on all the social media outlets that my phone automatically posts to. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr are the top 4 so feel free to fallow me on any of those if you'd like to keep up with the progress.

Who's coming with me Man!?!?!?!?

I'd also like to invite you if your interested to draw with me during this time and see if you can form the habit as well. Or heck it could be just anything that you would like to form into a daily habit. And it's no biggie if you start later than me you can always just do it till I'm done or keep going past me. Actually if I'm successful then I won't be stopping once the goal of 60 days is accomplished. See the goal is to get to a point where the habit you want to form becomes automatic where it is actually hard NOT to do it. So let's do this together! I'd love to hear what habits you'd like to form and if you feel inclined to come along with me Id love to hear about your progress so we can keep each other encouraged. :)

Here is a link to the article on Habit Forming if your interested http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/09/how-long-to-form-a-habit.php
also
My Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Flickr links!

Thanks for checking in!!!

And stay tuned, I'll be posting the first sketch tonight!

God Bless,
-Marshall aka Calmplex

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