Time: How to deal with time crisis as an artist.
The world seems to move faster than ever.
Do you feel like you don’t have enough time?
We all have time, but it’s a limited resource, and we don’t know how much of it we get in our lives, so each of us must be assertive about how we spend this incredibly valuable resource.
As an artist, you might be aware of how much time you spend on your craft, and maybe you heard how much time your artist friends give to improve their craft. Although you know that your friend artist works for 5 hours a day on his drawing skills, while you work only 3 hours every day that doesn’t mean you have to give more time because more time might not work for you.
There is a huge return you will get from allowing yourself to work long hours on a piece of artwork or a study because more time means that you face more challenges so the opportunity of growing might appear faster.
Time has a very interesting quality, it can reveal or hide. As you have noticed in sports, photographers take a picture at the finishing line to reveal who was the first runner to reach the end of the sprint. Without that picture, the athletes would run too fast for the judges to decide who gets to pop and spray the champagne after the race.
Ask yourself: Is speed how you measure time beyond seconds, minutes, and hours? Maybe, maybe not, however, if you are an artist, and you would like to grow and improve your craft maybe speed can become the lenses through which you look at time. Like the quick shot of the photographer which stops the time for the judges to take a decision, you, as an artist, can slow down to get an insight into what is going on while you are drawing.
If you have a pen and paper around you, pick it up and draw two circles at different speeds. Give yourself 2 seconds for the first one and 15 seconds for the second one.
Great! Now, look at the result. It doesn’t matter which of the two circles is better and rounder, what matters is what happens during the drawing process. For the second circle, you had the time to adjust or decide how to travel that path, so your chances of ending up with a circle are bigger. Slowing down reveals a lot about what’s going on after the pencil hits the paper and starts moving around.
Musicians can’t slow down to see what’s going on because they have to stick with the tempo, however, time is a much bigger component in their everyday practice and development.
Slowing down while you are drawing will give you more control and more room to make decisions on how a simple line is created. While trying to figure out the right speed for you to control the line path, keep in mind what is too slow for you and find the sweet spot that works for you.
With all that said, there are times when you must go as fast as you can, and maybe you will develop other skills which you need as an artist. Sometimes, it can feel like gambling, trying to draw your idea super fast, and that’s all valid if you’re looking for something a bit more spontaneous.
I’ll end this with an answer and a question.
A: Slowing down while you are drawing will give you more speed in the long run, however, it can feel counter-intuitive to see how fast other artists are sharing new content every day.
Q: How do you choose the pace at which you are drawing?