Over the past months, my weekly drawing routine was to do constructive drawing studies throughout the workweek, and spend the weekend doing more fully-fledged rendered drawings.
For the most part, this worked great. On weekdays, I had no trouble getting to work quickly, after all I only had about 2 hours to spend. The drawings were nothing special. I would draw them on basic printer paper, I didn't do any rendering on them and I didn't even bother erasing the construction lines. They weren't meant to be pretty, they were just practice. Most of them looked something like this:
But when the weekend came around, I would bring out high-quality drawing paper, and I would do a rendered study. Suddenly, my anxiety levels would spike and I found myself dilly-dallying to get started for the day. And even after I got started, my anxiety usually remained very high throughout the entire drawing process.
I knew I had to make these rendered drawings less scary for myself, so it was time to switch my approach. Putting aside my regular constructive drawing practice, I decided to spend all of my practice hours doing rendered studies. This had several effects.
Now all of a sudden, I had to get started quickly with each rendered drawing, because I was doing them on workdays in my limited time block of only 2 hours. I would complete a drawing over a couple of mornings, which meant I was getting multiple starts and stops for each. The process of starting again and again helped to make it more "normal" and less scary in my mind.
Aside from that, I downgraded my tools on purpose. Instead of drawing rendered images on high-quality paper, I decided to do them on printer paper. Instead of using a fancy art pencil, I used a cheap school pencil... a hot pink My Little Pony pencil to make it extra silly.
The last change was mental. I would tell myself: I'm going to make a crappy drawing on a crappy piece of paper with a crappy pencil. It's just practice. I'm not going to post this. And with that in mind, I went ahead and drew this:
Reference by Grafit Studio: https://www.artstation.com/grafit
Much to my surprise, it didn't come out that crappy. And I did end up posting it, along with several others that I created afterwards.
But next was the real test. Did I really succeed in overcoming my anxiety? I brought out a large, expensive sheet of drawing paper, and a costumed reference image to add additional complexity. And when I sat down to draw the image, it felt tough but doable. Here's the result!
Reference by Andrey Zvyagintsev: https://unsplash.com/@zvandrei