How To Enjoy Drawing? A Guide To Finding Inspiration Again

One of the weirdest things I feel as an artist is not enjoying drawing. I don’t feel this regularly, but I’m not too fond of it when it happens. I talked to some friends, and sometimes they feel the same. Thinking about the possibility some artists would not enjoy drawing anymore made me wonder: if that ever happens, how can you enjoy drawing again? 

To enjoy drawing again, you need to identify what makes you have a bad experience and try a different approach. Most artists enjoy drawing again once they interiorize why they liked drawing in the first place and focus on the process of drawing instead of the result. 

However, this is much easier said than done, and why artists stop enjoying drawing varies tremendously from person to person. In this blog, I will guide you through some of the most common reasons artists stop liking to draw, with steps and solutions for each reason, as well as give you helpful tips and simple actions you can take to enjoy drawing to the fullest. 

How To Enjoy Drawing Again?

I want to start answering this topic more profoundly by sharing with you how I started feeling I didn’t enjoy drawing. And this is something I can take to almost any hobby I pursue. And it is also something that will probably help you understand why you stopped enjoying drawing too. 

If you want to skip this part and jump into the guide immediately, click anywhere in this paragraph, and it’ll take you there. 

Everything happened in this order. 

• When I started drawing for the first time, I had no high expectations of my drawings; I just did them for fun or because I was bored in classes or things like that. At this point, on a scale from 1 to 10, I’d say I enjoyed drawing a 5.
• Then, I remember I started to like some of the doodles I did, and even some people would find them interesting and praise them. So after that, I also drew in my spare time sometimes. At this point, I’d say I enjoyed drawing a 7.
• As I saw improvements in my drawings, I started drawing even more. I remember showing my drawings to anyone I could as a way of validating my art. I was really into it at that point, so I enjoyed drawing a 10. 
• Everything was fascinating; taking in little drawing challenges and conquering them was very enjoyable. However, things started to decline a little bit at this point. As I improved more, I wanted to tackle more demanding challenges, and since I couldn’t do it, I would sometimes get frustrated and draw the usual or stop drawing for a while. Based on expert artists’ advice, I figured I lacked some core drawing fundamentals. I started practicing these fundamentals, but they were honestly kind of boring. At this point, I enjoyed drawing a 9. 
• I had been drawing for a while, and multiple things started to annoy me as I became more mature and critical of my art. I would begin to compare my art to other artists my age or younger than me and try pushing myself to draw things I knew were out of my league. The result was what you were expecting: I couldn’t make my drawings look how I wanted them to look, so I became frustrated with my skills and drawing ability. I would start losing patience when practicing my fundamentals and stop drawing after the first failed attempt. This period was the most critical in my artistic journey and the moment that made me quit drawing for a long time. Not being able to accept a failure calmly hindered my progress greatly because I couldn’t learn new things without making mistakes. On top of that, I started associating drawing with negative feelings like rage, frustration, and disappointment; I completely forgot why I began to draw in the first place. At this point, I enjoyed drawing a 2.
• After all of that, I replaced drawing with almost any other activity. Going out, video games, shows, etc., would be things I’d do instead of drawing. On top of that, college and other adult-like responsibilities took most of my time, so I didn’t draw for many years.

I was never again able to enjoy drawing again until I became aware of the sentence below:

We stop doing the things we love because we forget the feeling of doing them for fun and replace that with a desire to be good at them.

I let my desire to be better at drawing overrule my patience, expectations, and love for drawing. I let it mix my drawing experience with many negative feelings, so I naturally stopped drawing. However, I can now draw and enjoy drawing to the fullest because I understand what things trigger bad feelings, but most importantly, I now know how to control those feelings and use them to my advantage. 

Without further ado, let’s jump into the guide. 

Guide To Enjoy Drawing Again

I will divide this guide into the two crucial factors to enjoying drawing: mentality-wise and practice-wise. First, I will present you with a problem you may or may not have and then give you a solution, or multiple solutions, based on what has worked for me and a little science on habit creation and a growth mindset.

Click on the topic or question that aligns with you or interests you the most, or feel free to read everything the guide has to offer. I’m sure you will find a lot of value in it!

Mentality-wise

1. Progress-oriented vs. results-oriented mindsets: Overcome frustration and learn to love any progress. 
2. Your expectations exceed your ability: Break the loop of not loving your drawings and create something you can be proud of.
3. Don’t let your desire to be good at drawing overrule your passion: Learn to approach mistakes as an opportunity to learn and improve at drawing.
4. Comparing your art or progress with other artists: Recognize your progress without hindering your passion for drawing.

Practice-wise

1. What To Do When Drawing Is Not Fun Anymore?: Understand what’s keeping you away from drawing and make it an enjoyable experience again. 
2. How To Enjoy Drawing When You’re Bad?: Identify your drawing level and make a plan to improve over time. 
3. I Can’t Draw Anymore: Find what part of your drawing process changed and draw again. 
4. Can You Make Practicing Drawing Fun?: Learn how to approach demanding drawing sessions with ease. 

Mentality-wise

Progress-oriented vs. Results-oriented Mindsets in Drawing

When you start to draw, almost anything you finish is a win. And, in many cases, you would improve at it very quickly in the early stages. But well, it turns out that when you start almost any hobby, your learning curve tends to be on a very high trend until it hits a plateau as soon as you encounter more complex concepts and techniques. 

Improving so fast when you start to draw shouldn’t be a problem, but it becomes one when you start feeling “stuck” in your drawing progress based on the last thing you drew. On top of that, the amount of information you have regarding drawing increases the more you draw and study, meaning that the gap between you and your drawing goals may increase significantly the more you know about drawing. 

Problem: Improving so quickly spoils us into thinking that we will be able to improve linearly forever and become godlike artists in no time. For most people, the problem this tends to create is the following: they can’t enjoy or appreciate what they draw, and they become frustrated about how slowly they’re improving; even further, sometimes, this gives people the impression that they are going backwards instead of moving forward. This frustration comes when you focus on the results instead of the progress you’re making. 

Solution: You must shift your mindset to think progress is better than results. Thinking this way is much healthier for you, but this is important because our brains learn new things irregularly. To illustrate this point, see the image below.

As you can see, the only way we can see a linear learning process would be to see the results in larger brackets instead of day-to-day comparisons. If I tell you to show me a drawing you did yesterday and compare it to the one you did today, there will be minimal improvements. Instead, if I ask you to compare drawings that are two years away from each other, the improvements will be very noticeable. Perspective is important. 

In summary, the solution to being frustrated at your progress would be to see things on a larger scale. Do not compare your progress from day 1 to day 2. Instead, compare your drawings from today to the ones you did 1 or 2 weeks ago. 

Tip: This exercise works much better when comparing the same or similar subjects. For example, if you draw straight lines every day for a month, you can easily compare the lines you did on day one with the ones you did on day 30. But if you compare straight lines to circles, it will be harder to see your improvements. It doesn’t have to be straight lines; you can draw skulls or anything else daily. 

Your Drawing Expectations Exceed Your Ability

Another prevalent issue that makes us feel like we can’t enjoy drawing anymore is when our expectations exceed our current drawing skills. Having high expectations is a great thing, but something that needs to be regulated. For example, we cannot study engineering for a week and expect to build a spaceship the next morning, but we can expect to understand a formula that will bring us closer to building a spaceship. We tend to be very impatient and demanding of ourselves. Although this could be good in some situations, it can certainly make you feel frustrated and disappointed in your capabilities. 

Unfortunately, one thing that grows along with the desire to improve at drawing is our expectations. The more you draw, the more you will expect from yourself. Thoughts like: “Why can’t I draw this if I’ve been drawing for so many years?” could cross your mind constantly when you’re frustrated. And the answer to it is straightforward: you can’t draw whatever you’re trying to draw because you can’t draw it yet and you need to practice more.

Problem: Your expectations are way above your drawing skills, and that causes you to feel you’re not a good artist and another avalanche of negative feelings. Even worse, this makes you want to stop drawing, which will not make you improve at it. 

Solution: Take on fights that will challenge you but that you can still win over time. Something that has worked wonders for me to visualize this is to give things a level of difficulty from 1 to 100, where 1 is extremely easy, and 100 is extremely hard. Then, give yourself a drawing skill level from 1 to 100 and pick your next fight. Initially, it was messy for me, and you will probably give yourself and your challenges incorrect values. However, the whole point of this exercise is to adjust your expectations and pick your battles wisely. 

Don’t Let Your Desire To Be Good At Drawing Overrule Your Passion

The pursuit of learning almost any art starts with passion. We found drawing, we tried it, and we liked it. However, somewhere on the road, we began to crave knowledge and technique so much that we forgot we drew because it brought us joy. Usually, people who do art for a living are more likely to feel this in the short and long term. 

What most artists tend to experience, I included, is that we are less patient with our mistakes. Even worse, some people start to over-examine their drawings to find errors in a negative way. In other words, we begin to give destructive criticism to ourselves. It is like we forget that drawing, like any other art, is a continuous learning experience and that no one is exempt from making mistakes. 

Problem: You want to improve your drawing skills so much that it makes you blind. Since you want to get from points 1 to 3 so quickly, you’re not seeing that you first need to learn some things to beat at point 2. 

Solution: Anything bad that happens to us in our lives is unfortunate but also an opportunity to be better. As Theodor Seuss Geisel said: “When something bad happens, you have three choices. You can either let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you.” If I extrapolate this to drawing, any mistake you make is an opportunity to improve your drawing skills. Your mistakes will show you and guide you to the next thing to need to focus on. They express your drawing level and the things you need to improve on. So be grateful for mistakes because that means you still have room to continue improving. What I enjoy about drawing is the challenge. 

Tip: We’re very good at sensing when something’s wrong in a drawing. However, identifying where the mistake is can be problematic. If you’re having this problem, I recommend drawing things from references while you become better at identifying errors. Another thing you can do is post your art to forums like Quora, Reddit, or such and ask people to point out the mistakes you may be overseeing. 

Comparing Your Art Or Progress With Other Artists

Another problem most artists have when drawing for a while is that they start to feel bad when they compare their art to other artists. In today’s digital era, comparing got a lot easier. Although these amazing artistic creations motivate some artists to improve their craft, they also make other people feel they’re not good enough. 

Comparisons can be really good or really bad, depending on how you use them. For example, if I only had two comparison references to measure how good I am at drawing, the result would likely be highly wrong. Let’s say those two points of comparison are Michelangelo and I. Compared to him, I would probably be a 1 out of 10, but if I compared my drawing skills to someone who doesn’t know how to do it at all, I could be a 10 out of 10 because there aren’t any other points of reference. 

Problem: You’re comparing yourself to others without considering the whole picture. Every artist has a story and didn’t get their skills magically; no one does. These simple comparisons make you feel like you don’t have what’s needed for drawing, but the reality is that anyone can learn to draw. Another problem with comparisons is that we often make them to see if we’re good or bad at something, but that doesn’t bring any value to our artistic goals. 

Solution: Don’t make the mistake of comparing things using only two reference points; include all the things you need to take into account. Think about these aspects: how long have this person been drawing compared to me? Have this person taken art classes? For how long does this person draw everyday? What drawing style does this person have? How much free time does this person have compared to me? Have this person studied perspective, shading, form, etc? Think about all the things you may be missing, and then compare that to not only one artist, but hundreds, and then you will get a much accurate result that just saying: this artist draws better than me, hence I’m bad at drawing and there is nothing I can do to change that.

But in the end, what can you gain when comparing yourself to others? Validating if you’re good or bad will not bring you closer to your goals. Instead, if you use these comparisons to set up goals and implement things other people are doing to be better at drawing and add them to your drawing routines. Most artists are very generous and will share everything they did to reach their drawing level. Follow them and you will learn a lot from them. 

Tip: This will sound cliché, but I have to say it: everyone is different and learns things in specific ways. What works for you may not work for me, and so on. If you implement the drawing routine of the artist you admire the most, and it doesn’t work, that doesn’t mean you can’t draw; it means that her/his routine doesn’t work for you. So include as many things as you want in your drawing routines and see if they work for you or not. But do try them; the only way you will find your full potential is by trying new things. 

Now that we have broken down how to approach these feelings of not enjoying drawing with the right mentality, we will also go deeper into the actions you can take to make drawing more enjoyable. 

Practice-wise

What To Do When Drawing Is Not Fun Anymore?

Like many things in life, variation is key to making things more exciting. Although the ideal thing would be to enjoy doing the same thing over and over again, that’s rarely the case for most people. So then, when it comes to drawing, what can you do when drawing is not fun anymore? 

To make drawing fun again, you must add some variation to your drawing routines and focus on enjoying the process. Since drawing tends to be repetitive sometimes, you can make it fun by setting milestones and comparing your progress over time. You can also make drawing fun by exploring new styles.

However, this is easier said than done. So, I’ll elaborate and give you actionable tips you can implement right now to start making drawing fun again. 

First, you need to identify what’s making you not have fun when you draw. To help you find the reason, you can use the cases below:

Possible problems:

1. The exercises you are practicing make you feel bored or frustrated. 
2. You’re drawing things because you have to and not because you want to. (Maybe you do art for a living, or you are at a drawing school/university)
3. You feel like you draw just because. 

Possible solutions:

1. If the exercises you are drawing make you feel bored, you need to focus on why you’re doing the exercise and not how boring it feels it is. If you’re doing the exercise because you want to improve at it, then check how much you have improved to keep you motivated. On the other side, if you feel frustrated, that is a sign that the exercise could be too difficult. Try another exercise that has the same difficulty, or give yourself a break and try it on a different day; sometimes, you can perform better on another day after a good night’s sleep. 
2. If you’re drawing because you have to, it is normal to feel resistance when doing it. In most cases, anything you have to do will create that feeling. The solution to this would be to create a schedule that includes drawing, assuming that is something you want to do, in a way that doesn’t interfere with other things you want to do in your life. Gaining control over the activities you do will make them easier to perform. 
3. If you’re drawing without a purpose, you need to create one. Make a plan and set a goal to make your drawing experience more exciting. 

If none of these approaches applies or works for you, it could be a good idea to write about why you draw, or why you’re not finding any fun with it anymore. Our brains are complex, and they need to be convinced of something to put in the effort to accomplish goals. Answer yourself: why do I want to draw? 

Let’s jump into the next example. 

How To Enjoy Drawing When You’re Bad?

Enjoying drawing by itself could be complicated if you don’t have the right mentality about it, but feeling you are bad at it will definitely make it drawing a challenging activity to enjoy. This is normal, feeling you’re bad at anything can feel demotivating, especially if you constantly fail at it. However, I have a question for you. Weren’t we bad at everything as soon as we were born? Being bad at something doesn’t mean you will always be bad at it for the rest of your life, it just means you are not good at it yet. And if that’s the case, what can we do to enjoy drawing when we’re bad at it? You need to accept that there are some things you can’t draw, and with that in mind, apply the instructions below:

Problem: You have all the disposition to draw, practice and create amazing art. However, every drawing or illustration you make doesn’t look like you had in mind originally. You keep at it, but the same scenario repeats over and over again until drawing feels unsatisfying, frustrating, and boring. 

Solution: Just like many things in life, there is a ladder of steps we need to take before we reach the top. It is not possible to go from step 1 to 20 in a single move. That’s why math teachers first teach how to add and subtract before they teach you how to multiply or divide. You can’t just simply multiply without understanding the previous concepts. Drawing is the same. For example, let’s say you are watching a tutorial about drawings heads and the first step is to draw a circle, but you can’t do that yet; why are you watching a tutorial about drawing heads and not learning how to draw circles? You need to accept your current drawing skills and understand that you can eventually draw heads, but that first you need to know how to draw circles. Once you complete a step you can readjust your short-term goals and tackle the next challenge. 

I’m not saying that to enjoy drawing you need to make drawing easy. Don’t only draw things you can already draw, there’s no improvement at drawing if you don’t try to draw things you can’t draw yet. Just don’t pick overly complex challenges if you haven’t conquered easier challenges yet.

Why Can’t I Draw Anymore? 

Another thing many artists experience, I included, is that sometimes we can’t draw something we used to be able to draw before. We find this hard to believe, but it is very common for our brain to forget anything we don’t practice and repeat constantly. To give you a quick example, how much do you remember about high school to the same degree you remembered it prior to taking an exam back then? 

As you can see, the things you still remember are the things you kept doing. Now, depending on how deep you are into drawing, you may know about the number of hours it takes to understand a subject. Apart from that, you may also know about the exorbitant number of subjects you can study, which is anything that exists. And as you may be suspecting, all of the things you study about drawing are things that can be forgotten if you don’t revisit them every once in a while. 

Possible problems:

1. You stopped drawing for a long time, and when you sat down to draw you couldn’t do it, or at least you couldn’t do it as well as you could before. You’re “rusty”. 
2. You have been drawing consistently, you can draw some things very well but you can’t draw something you could draw before. You’re not rusty at all, but you just can’t get your hand to draw the subject you’re trying to. 
3. You recently learned something new, and that conflicts with the previous drawing knowledge you had. 

Possible solutions:

1. Don’t panic, your drawing knowledge is still in your brain, but you need to help it remember it. It may take you a week, a month, (or more if you didn’t draw for 20 years or something like that), but you will get back to your drawing level pretty quickly. And of course, the more you draw, the faster you’ll get to your previous drawing level. If simply drawing more doesn’t help you get to where you were, proceed to the next solution.
2. This solution applies to both cases: people who stopped drawing and people who draw consistently and suddenly can’t draw something. Almost every time you can’t draw something is because you’re out of practice with that specific subject. The most common problem for artists tends to be perspective because it is a subject present in every drawing, and when your perspective fails, almost everything else fails as well. If that is not the case, you need to narrow down the things you are not being able to draw and focus on studying the specific subject alone for a couple of days to refresh your memory. You’ll see that you will be able to draw things again after revisiting your studies. 
3. In some rare cases, you can learn something that overrules your previous ideas. If this happens, it is usually because either the new or previous knowledge you have of something is wrong. For example, if you always drew heads in a certain way, but now that you studied their anatomy, you can’t draw as easily as before, or they don’t look good, it’s because you’re re-learning how to draw them, and your brain is trying to forget what it already incorrectly learned. 

All in all, if you cannot draw something you could before, it will mostly be because you haven’t practiced it in some time. Let’s go to the next part of the guide now.  

Can You Make Practicing Drawing Fun?

Practicing drawing can be a daunting experience if you don’t have the right mindset about it, but it can be specifically harder if you don’t have a support system for your drawing sessions. Although everyone’s drawing experience is different, if you are practicing drawing is because you want to improve your drawing skills, and if practicing itself is not fun to you, then you need to bind the experience with a defined goal and a time limit. 

Possible problems:

1. Your practice drawing sessions are too long. 
2. You are not tracking your progress.
3. You haven’t defined when to stop practicing and move on to the next subject. 

Possible solutions:

1. Face the problem with a different mindset. You know you need to practice, that’s why you do it, but the longer you do it without a break, the harder it becomes. So if your goal is to practice drawing for 2 hours, and you think that is too daunting, then practice for 30 minutes and see if you feel like you want to practice more or stop at that mark if you found your limit. Once you identify your limit, push it little by little until you get to the number of hours you would ideally practice for. Just as people can train to run a marathon, you can train yourself to study for long periods of time, but bear in mind that every person has a limit, and it’s not like you can train yourself to study drawing for 20 hours straight on a regular basis and ignore all your physiological needs.  
2. Tracking your progress is not something that will make practicing drawing more fun, but rather something that will create positive reinforcement with the activity. Keep a record of your studies and compare your results within a reasonable period. Learning requires time and sleep, so if you want to see accurate differences and improvements, you should compare your results within a week difference. Once you compare your drawings, finding that you got better at them will be an amazing, natural reward for the effort you have been putting into practicing. If you don’t see improvements, give a week more. If you don’t see improvements in two weeks, then that’s a sign that you need to practice differently. 
3. Instead of practicing a certain subject until you “get good at it”, give it a time limit. Getting good at something is too ambiguous, so it’s easier to tell yourself you’re going to practice for 1 month and after that, you stop. One month of practice will make you improve tremendously in almost any subject, and after that, you can define the next goal. That goal could be the same subject or a new one, it depends on what you want or need. It is easier to run when you know where the finish line is and push yourself even more when you’re about to cross the line, but if you don’t know where the finish line is, every second of running will feel harder. 

And with that, my guide for enjoying drawing and finding the inspiration to do it is over. I will write more about this whenever I learn more about how we approach difficult things, but if you are into the psychology and science about how to push ourselves to do anything, I would highly recommend reading the book “The Mindset” by Carol Dweck and listening to “The Huberman Lab Podcast” on YouTube. 

Wish you guys all the best with your drawing goals and dreams!