Ongoing creative progress… how do you keep making it?
It’s Christmas time and with the festive season comes… a whole lot of decorating! I have a clear childhood memory of my brother and I creating two immense paper chains to stretch across our enormous living room.
Having no fancy paper, we made our own — painstakingly filling each strip of paper with careful colour. We slaved, we sweated, we swore (no, we didn’t — we were too young!)
Pretty soon we realised we needed to focus on the length of the chains, rather than labouring over the perfection of the individual links.
The tension between beautiful links vs. long chains — it’s creative progress
We have to work it out every day.
It’s easy to get caught up producing something you’re proud to show off, but if the time and effort involved is too much, you do it a couple of times a month rather than daily. On the other hand, setting your mind to creating something new every single day means you can’t focus on perfecting each piece, but you do have a sense of growing momentum or skill…
So there are other creative progress benefits to creating daily
I think of these are adding links to the paperchain.
Working away at your cartoons daily reveals areas you want to focus on, and with a volume of work you see old skills dusted off, mediocre skills polished up and new skills developing. The momentum that you gather builds a sense of massive achievement.
I see this worked out with Da Vinci cartooning clients as well. Some produce just a few careful pieces, others sketch away with joyful abandon producing volumes of work everyday.
Yes, some people have more time
And some people just draw faster. That’s not what I’m talking about at all.
We are not clones and if we ‘compete’ it should be against our own best efforts, not one another. But there is definitely a case to be made for moving a little faster, and leaving some details undone in the interest of creating volumes of work.
When you start creating, your work is really not that great
Ira Glass of This American Life describes how there is a gap between what you want to create, and the quality of what you are actually producing. The sense of frustration is immense, because you have something in your mind’s eye and (in my case) you just can’t get it out into the world in that form.
His solution?
Do enough work.
Do HUGE volumes of work.
Put yourself of deadline to finish work weekly (or daily).
But surely there is a time for ‘perfection’?
Without a doubt. If you’re working on polished work, you need to add the fine detail, consider the contrast, makes sure the colour ‘pops’ with that extra energy. But in between that, there’s practice when you are honing your skills for when it matters.
Back to the Christmas decorations, then… I have some clear memories of threading those endless chains. I’m sure I did more than my fair share of the work ;).
I also remember that it was weirdly addictive…
… the longer the chain got, the longer I wanted it to be.
That’s momentum (and creative progress)
The value of momentum is immense, and for that reason alone, 30 rough sketches in 30 days wins every time. Sheer volume of work produces creative energy and it trains us to work faster too, so that when it needs to be perfect, we can manage that, as well.
Do you want to draw faster?
Create vibrant characters?
Enjoy your work more?
Shoot for less perfection, more volume!