Lesson 0: Getting Started

Our entirely natural obsession with drawing things that look good - to impress ourselves, to impress those around us, and to impress people on the other side of the planet whom you've never met - is above all else what holds us back. It stresses us out, and puts us into a state of creative paralysis. It pushes us to focus on nothing but practice, on training, on exercises, and leaves us drained. And worst of all, it makes us fear doing precisely the things for which we're learning these skills.

Oh, if I had a nickel for every student who declared "I can't draw that." It's such a common statement, but what it really means is "I can't draw that well right now, so what reason do I have to try?" Or more poignantly, "To try would be a waste of my time." And for this, I blame traditional academics. School makes us terrified of failure, and declares "success" as the only useful result. But I think differently.

There are a number of reasons why the 50% rule is extremely beneficial, despite how clearly frustrating and difficult it can be to follow:

It'll help develop skills that do need to be developed at some point, and doing it now will help you avoid some stinging disappointment later on.

To put it simply, it becomes a lot harder to learn how to play when you’ve developed the technical skill, and the expectations that come along with it. As a beginner, there are still some barriers of expectation, but it’s far easier to remind yourself of the simple fact that you are a beginner, and that any such expectations are utterly ridiculous. After you’ve spent six months, or a year, or two, “learning the fundamentals” though, if you find yourself still struggling to apply those skills to the things that are truly important to you, you might just throw everything in the garbage and quit.

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.

It helps us learn, and process the information we absorb through the lessons. In learning, there’s time spent actually studying, doing exercises, reading instructional books, and so on. We’ll call this the “positive” space of learning, the real meat of it. And then, on the flipside of the same coin, there is the “negative space”. That is, the time in between, which we spend on pretty much everything that isn’t active learning. Eating, sleeping, watching TV, reading fiction, hanging out with friends, or playing video games.

Traditional academics, and really anything that puts a lot of focus on achievement and ambition, focuses heavily on the “positive” space of learning, and in doing so, it makes us ignore and even reject the clear benefits of the other side. Taking breaks, pushing our brain to focus on other things, playing, and sleeping are all incredibly important for the simple reason that our brain needs time to process and assess what we’ve learned. It cannot do this while it is continually taking in yet more new information.

Those who cram for exams, rather than pacing themselves and spreading things out, encounter this frequently. In order to learn optimally, we must seek balance. Balance between work and play.

Cleanly separating work and play allows us to do each whole-heartedly.

It’s common for students to get bored and distracted when forced to study and work for too long, and this can result in aimless doodling on the side. While doodling isn’t inherently bad, as a lot of people doodle while listening to lectures and find it helps them better absorb the material, it does however impact how carefully a student might complete a drawing exercise, as it pulls away some of the cognitive resources we need to be using in order to complete the work to the best of our current capacity.

By creating clearly delineated times for work and for play, we are able to burn off that nervous energy, so we can focus our cognitive resources singularly on the task at hand when it’s time to work. This also means that when we play, having done our work at our best, we can more easily allow ourselves to play without shame.

Note: I cannot speak to how directly this applies to those of you who face learning challenges or conditions like ADHD, and I must leave it to you to try to apply this principle as well as you reasonably can. I can however say that we have students with ADHD (one of whom is currently a teaching assistant, as well as a freelance illustrator) who have worked through and benefitted from this course. You can read more about her experiences in this response she's given to another student in our community.

As the 50% rule relates heavily to mental health, I would be remiss not to take a moment to talk about depression. A lot of people out there will really struggle with the idea of doing something only to fail. As I've mentioned already, many of us have been taught that our value as an individual is inextricably tied to our ability to succeed, to the point where forcing yourself to fail (as this course will have you do quite a bit) can actively trigger depressive episodes. It gets that much worse when you consider how many people actively try and use art as therapy — not as part of a larger regimen under the guidance of a professional, but as their singular self-prescribed solution, and unfortunately it can make things worse.

For those of you in that situation, I strongly urge you to seek whatever professional support you can. Therapy with a trained professional isn’t about changing who you are, or attempting to fix you. Rather, at its core it’s about giving you the tools you need to better manage and understand your emotions, so that when you’re faced with a bad drawing, you can understand not just on a logical level, but deep within you that this does not in any way suggest that you yourself are bad. So, don’t be afraid to step away from this course, and to seek out that help. We’ll still be here when you’re better equipped.

There are a few questions we get pretty often in regards to the 50% rule, so let's clarify them right off the bat.

Should I be trying to apply the techniques from Drawabox while working on the 50% rule?

No. Draw in whatever way feels most comfortable to you. Drawabox is designed to have you drawing so much that you will have plenty of mileage to take the lessons and push them down into your subconscious. The lessons will become instinct. Rather, as you play, it’s better not to be too stiff and worried about technique. This is the time where you want to just let go.

Do I have to do my 50% rule in pen?

This question comes up simply because we really stress the use of pen and ink when doing the Drawabox lessons. Again, the answer is no. Draw with whatever tools you’re interested in using. A lot of students come to Drawabox really interested in digital media, but end up disappointed that we focus so much on traditional tools. I get it — I’m almost strictly a digital artist myself — and we’ll get into the reasoning for this later. Rest assured though, you are welcome and even encouraged to dive straight into drawing and painting digitally as soon as you like, for this 50%. This will also have the benefit of helping you get used to the specifics of using those tools, as this is yet another skill that is separate from these core fundamentals of drawing, and will need to be explored at some point.

Third: Can I use reference during the 50% rule time?

This is a difficult one, because the answer is both yes and no. It comes down to understanding your own intentions — are you reaching for reference specifically because you’re afraid to draw something badly? If that’s the case, if it’s something you just would not bother to try without the reference, then no. Draw it however you can, from your imagination, and let it go poorly.

If however you’re completely comfortable with that — perhaps after you’ve done your 50% rule time without reference for a few weeks, just to be sure — you can go ahead and use reference, with one major caveat: you may not simply work from a single reference image, effectively copying it as it is.

This is called a study, and it’s a useful drawing exercise that involves copying an object from observation or from a reference photo, in order to learn more about some specific aspect of it. As it is a tool for learning and improving, it falls under the same 50% as Drawabox and whatever other courses, lessons, exercises and tutorials you may be working through.

Instead, you need to make the decisions yourself, and merely use reference to fill in the gaps. For example, you may decide to draw a character astride a tiger, charging through a bazaar. Good luck finding a photo of exactly that to paint from. Instead, you’d find a picture of a tiger running, a person riding a horse, and multiple shots of market stalls, taking parts from each of them and incorporating them into your work.

To be completely clear, there's nothing wrong with reference, and you should not be interpreting the above as "reference is bad and you should never use it". If that's how you interpreted it, then go back and reread the section. Reference is fine - what we're talking about is the first few weeks of the 50% rule, where many students may actively sooth their fears of drawing something badly by hiding behind reference instead of using it as a tool. Once you're not doing that, reference is fine to use as described above.