Around this time last year, a few days before New Year's Day of 2022, I had begun practicing to draw. I can't remember there being any particular reason for doing so; maybe I was just bored. Then, on January 1st, I had the idea to make daily art practice for the entire year of 2022 my resolution. My goal was simple: I would practice drawing every single day, regardless of how long I spent, whether it was for an hour or only 10 minutes.
I proposed this idea to some friends who decided they wanted to join me in daily art practice. Although they had all stopped drawing daily within a couple months, I believe I would not have been able to complete this resolution without the momentum they gave me. Each day for those couple months, we shared our drawings in our group chat, and that was a lot of fun.
I managed to keep this up without missing a single day until this past October. From then, I began to miss the occasional day here or there for one reason or another, and I would make up for it by drawing twice the next day. When I started out, I would put a lot more time into serious practice since I wasn't too busy that winter semester (January through April) nor that summer. It was when my graduate coursework started (around September) that I really began to neglect intentional practice, rushing to do a quick sketch for the day more and more often.
One of the things I had set out to do during the beginning of the year was to develop some art style of my own. To do this, I practiced while referencing some images as the subject of my drawing as well as various artists' works for inspiration. I looked carefully at how different artists rendered details in their work and how those details came together. Unfortunately, I couldn't keep this intentional practice up as I got busier, and instead would just sketch something quickly each day. Consequently, I developed a sketchy art style throughout the year, which I first noticed becoming consistent near the end of the summer. This style had developed inadvertently, emerging by the techniques I used to render my subject quickly, and I wasn't too fond of it at first given it was not what I had intended.
And so, the two things I learned are as follows: practice requires time and practice requires intention. To the latter of these, I found that it's not sufficient to sit down and draw a subject, but to instead give careful though to the techniques by which the subject is being rendered. I suppose that all illustrations are, in some sense, composed of the heuristics used to simplify the subject being rendered (unless, of course, your goal is photorealism). Then, in order to develop an art style, one must pay attention to how these heuristics are applied. For instance, one must consider what aspects of the subject they draw with careful detail and what aspects they simplify or exaggerate. To the former of these points, this practice takes time. I did have an art style in mind, but having rushed my practice each day, the resulting art style I developed was quite different from what I had intended.
If I were to do this again the future, I would not make my goal to practice every day regardless of time, but to instead dedicated some amount of time I would practice—say a certain number of hours of each week. Furthermore, my practice would be goal-oriented, focusing on practicing specific strategies each week.
It's the end of December now, and the year is complete. So, have I learned to draw? Although I had begun this resolution with the goal being improvement in my skill, what I really ended up learning is how to learn to draw. And my skills did improve! They're not nearly as good as I had hoped they would be when I begun, but even a few minutes of practice each day did make a difference over time.