Hello peeps :),

I haven’t sit down to do drawabox in 1 month. I know it doesn’t sound like a lot, but I’m a very distratecd person, and I have this tendency to leave things unfinished. To build up the habit of drawing and getting this far in the course has taken me a lot effort. Now, the resistance to sit down and draw is strong, and when I do, I start feeling frustrated and anxious.

I fell off the wagon because halfway through lesson 3 it was clear that I was repeating my mistakes. I went to discord and got good feedback. The thing is that although there’s plenty of people in discord giving good feedback, its not as reliable and regular as I wanted. I wanted on the spot feedback to revise for my next session. And plenty of times I didn’t receive it (which is normal, I get it, its ok). However, thinking that I was just repeating my mistakes endlessly made me feel like I was going nowhere, and at a deeper level, that I was wasting my time. This frustration started to pull me away from the course, from the track I spent so much time following.

Also I want to give back to the community. I want to give feedback and correct homeworks, and I couldn’t figure out how to open time to do that as well. A big part of this is that I’m not very good at managing my time, and being consintent with schedules. This also frustrated me

I also felt like I was losing contact with the previous lessons because I wasn’t practicing properly. Practice, to me, is to refresh the knowledge and skills from previous lessons. To not forget about what you learned. The problem is that I’m slow, so doing an exercise from the past (i.e some sausages or some intersected forms) with care, ghosting and planning the lines, took me too much time and energy. By the end of the practice time, I was already kinda tired, and this affected the actual session. I feel like I don’t know how to practice.

This and what I wrote in the other paragraph made feel disconnected from the progress I already made, and unsure of how to keep going forward.

Last, but not least, I was focusing too much on the course and was leaving no time to drawing for fun. I actually stopped drawabox willingly (this was a mistake). Because I told myself that I needed to focus only on drawing for fun and going online to explore art that I liked. I didn’t see that drawing for fun (expression) and drawabox (craft) are two separate activities, and they both need their time and space. If you focus too much on drawabox you burn out (which has happened to me before), and if you focus too much on drawing for fun you lose track of the course (and it’s hard to pick it back up).

Thanks for reading this far :) Tell me, friend: Have you had similar problems? How do you practice? Do you manage to balance doing the course and giving feedback?

Drawabox is hella hard, so it's a good thing that we have our community.