Halftank Fuel: How I changed for the better through daily drawing practice ✍️

I am a creature of habits, and one small habit has been helping me for years.

For years, I have done one digital drawing in Adobe Illustrator every day. I started my practice soon after I started teaching Adobe software at a local university. I started doing this to not only get better, but also to contribute to a regular practice to lead to mastery of something. But surprise: the closer you get to 10,000 hours of doing something, the more you realize that there is so much more to learn!

Over time, I have discovered much more about my creative practice by doing a little bit of it every day. This has informed my approach to things like defining innovation and creating products. Here are three things that have improved my product practice:

1._I allow myself to be bad without apologizing, to get better

When I started out years ago as a web designer, I let my perfectionist self get the best of me. I never wanted to show ANYONE my work in progress. I was so afraid that I would get negative feedback. This fear took me years to unlearn.

Feedback, both positive and negative, is something I need to encourage because this is how I get better. By doing a daily drawing practice, I am now much more comfortable with doing something bad, not just a drawing, and showing it to someone. I can now see what I am doing in that particular moment does not have to define who I am. Even the best soccer players do not score goals 100% of the time, and not every drawing I’m going to do is going to be the best ever. And I’m fine with that.

2. I train my brain to solve problems

If you try to draw something every day, some days are much harder to find ideas than others. Working with daily prompts helps with this. I do a search on Pinterest for “drawing prompts march” and I can find dozens of prompt calendars. These prompts are usually one word, usually a noun, and your mission is to draw your interpretation of that word or phrase.

Having these prompts on a daily basis has improved my skills at problem solving. For example, a recent prompt I had was “crane”. There are so many interpretations of that one word alone: it could be a bird, it could be a machine, it could even be an action (crane one’s head). It is a small thing, but over time this has helped me see things differently when figuring out solutions to all kinds of things.

3. Getting faster as well as better

I have been using Adobe Illustrator to do these drawings, as one of my goals was to get better at using it. I wanted my drawings to feel more “natural”, like they came from a pen or pencil instead of a bunch of clean shapes. Over time, I have been able to focus on using tools that has confounded me in the past. Yesterday, for example, this meant learning how to use Gradient Mesh tool. Over the years, I have focused on many of Illustrator’s MANY tools and have my skills have been leveling up. I spend about 20 minutes a day on this, and over time that 20 minutes have resulted work I am much happier with.

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I have found that a daily drawing practice has given me a lot of lessons that I use in my life every day. I imagine that a daily practice of just about anything you are curious about would have similar results. It has made me more collaborative as well as more creative, by getting out of my own head.