Photo: Erik Mclean

What is the 50% rule in drawing?

The 50% rule is simple. All of the time you spend on drawing is to be divided into two equal portions. One half will include anything and everything you do with the purpose of improving your skills.

drawabox.com - Lesson 0: Getting Started | Changing your Mindset | The 50% rule

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But why?

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.

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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.

drawabox.com - Lesson 0: Getting Started | Changing your Mindset | The 50% rule

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