50/50 rule is crushing my enjoyment of drawing. Help needed (long rant inside)
4:50 PM, Monday July 31st 2023
I've been struggling with the 50/50 rule a lot, because it seems like it is specifically designed to demotivate me with all of it's constraints.
First, I struggled a little bit with what to draw, because what I drew casually, just for fun, was things around me, like objects on my desk or outside (I have a big garden with thousands of flowers and trees). However on the page for the 50/50 rule, this kind of use of reference is strongly discouraged - if not out right forbidden - in the first few weeks. So I abandoned what I used to draw for fun and looked for other ideas.
The same page also encourages to draw what I want to draw when I get the skills to do it well. But the thing I'm most interested in BY FAR, is drawing and hopefully, eventually painting people - portraits and figures - specifically and very deliberately from life and photo reference. But that use of reference is wrong, so again, too bad I guess.
I tried looking at people and drawing them from imagination, but it was a deeply unpleasant experience. Then I draw a little bit from reference and it ignited my will to draw more. So I forced my self to draw from multiple photos and again found it dire. So much so that I started dreading the whole idea of 'drawing done for the sake of drawing' as it's described in lesson 0 and started to look forward to doing the exercises. Except I stopped enjoying them because of the knowledge that every minute spend doing those, means a minutes forcing myself to do something I found not only extremely unpleasant, but also ultimately useless in my learning process. Which hurt extra much, because it felt like a waste of time, which is quite precious to me. Not because I have little of it, but because I'd much rather do other courses and go through drawing books (something I find immensely fun) in the time that I have to spend on '''''play'''''.
Yesterday I tried to just draw the first thing that came to my head and for some reason it was a pirate ship. I did a little childish doodle and started to draw different objects from the ship on the side (a barrel, anchor, lantern, ect.). This was somewhat stimulating and filed up a few minutes of the mandatory play time, which even felt a bit like play time, for a change. But then I got an idea to draw a scene of a podcast studio on a pirate ship. Add some silly jokes and props in the background and make all the equipment fit the theme. So I googled some microphones for reference and drew several, then I got some reference of old wooden planks and recreated them also. This is the exact process that Uncomfortable himself showed in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWgXSxxEjgs&ab_channel=Proko). In fact, this is where I got the idea to follow the process from. The whole thing was so engaging and fun that I spend nearly 3 hours doing this to different parts of the studio. And then I realized that non of it counted towards my 50/50 rule time, since even though I was preparing to draw something from imagination, I've filled up several pages and spend all this time simply copying the reference.
This made me really mad and I didn't even go back to doodling after, because it soured my experience with the sketchbook. I'm sure I'll get over it and will go back to drawing something, but I really don't seen the point in following any of the rules listed on the 50/50 page, because it does not benefit me in any way listed there.
'It'll help develop skills that do need to be developed at some point'. No it wont. I'm not even saying that because I want to focus on drawing from life, but because I can (and did) learn plenty from drawing from reference, so doing exactly what the 50/50 demands, might eventually lead me to learn these still, but it certainly wont 'help me'. It will and it already did pull me away from doing exercises and drawing in a way that makes me develop these skills faster. So it might help those who do not draw at all outside on drawabox exercises, but not me.
'The "Downtime" spent on things other than active learning, preferably in a more relaxing fashion, will help you process the things you’ve learned, and absorb them more fully.' I know, that's why I want to draw and have fun doing it. The way that the 50/50 rule does that, forces me to draw in a fashion I don't find relaxing or complimentary to the course materials. Unlike drawing from reference.
'Cleanly separating work and play allows us to do each whole-heartedly.' Which is why I feel I should be allowed to 'play' and not be forced to follow strict rules, greatly limiting my enjoyment from the process of drawing. That's not play, that's just extra work. Work I wouldn't mind a little bit, but 50% of the time... That's way too much, it leaves me no time to actually draw what I want to, the way that I want to.
I tried to follow the instructions at first and it's gotten so bad that I started to associate my Wacom tablet only with the painfully unpleasant process of forcing myself to draw without reference. I dug out a sketchbook and it somehow help a little bit, for a moment, but then yesterday happened and I'm still not looking forward to completing my 50/50 rule.
This might be a somewhat of a common experience and I'm sure others have struggled greatly with the 'play' part of the course, but I feel extremely frustrated with it, because 'drawing for the sake of drawing' was something I loved before drawabox and now I can't do it. It's stressed throughout the course all the time that I have to follow the instructions as closely as possible, so I don't want to go against any - even the smallest - of suggestions.
Maybe I could survive on doodling random stuff from imagination, like I did with the pirate ship, but I genially can't see a single benefit of that, over just drawing how I want to. So what should I do? Just suffer through and first few weeks (which is not much longer I suppose) and then try to adjust to the multiple references or quite the course? Or should I just ignore this one instruction and draw in a way I find fun and productive? When I write it like that and looks like a rhetorical question, but I seriously don't know, drawabox is so autistically incessant on never-ever-and-under-no-circumstances-ever-at-all letting you delineate from any tiny instruction, that I want to be careful with how I approach it, since I trust these rules are made in this every specific and narrow way for a good reason.
tl;dr - 50/50 rule is supposed to encourage 'drawing for the sake of drawing', but due to its restrictions on the use of reference, it took away all my will to do just that. Help.