I've been thinking about this a little for the past few days, especially now that I've begun to actually work on the Artwork page on my personal website, and can visibly compare my various drawings from over the years - and also from a comment I left on a blog recently, giving suggestions to someone who wanted to distance herself from her phone a little for the summer. This mainly comes from an artistic background, but I imagine it also applies in a lot of other fields, as motivation can be found everywhere.
Motivation?
Motivation. The drive and excitement that enables people to easily get up and do something. Throughout my time on the internet, I've seen many online artists (myself included) often excuse their lack of recent drawings, with demotivation being the main reason, if not one of them. Now, I'm not denying the existence of artblock, where no matter how hard you try, even if you have the paper right in front of you and the pencil you're holding is mere centimetres from touching it, you just cannot bring yourself to draw anything, and your mind is completely and utterly blank. I've experienced it many a time, and it does occur. Nor am I here to discuss burnout, or busy schedules, or exhaustion, or feeling overwhelmed. I'm specifically talking about cases where people are effectively "too lazy" to draw. They have little incentive to do so, and they don't feel like doing it (even if they want to), so they don't.
This, I fear, is the main reason why I've noticed something of a decrease in the amount of drawings I've made beginning in 2022-2023, especially in 2025. First of all, I got addicted to just scrolling on X or Reddit or whatever else I was using, and because scrolling is both addicting and time-consuming, that was the initial source of my demotivation. I still wanted to draw, and still enjoyed drawing, but I enjoyed the dopamine hits more. After that, it was my "digital hermeticism" era, so to say: when I deleted my accounts on X, Reddit, Discord, and DeviantArt, I was no longer actively surrounded by people who constantly posted their drawings, or hosted art competitions or challenges, or participated in art trades, or commissioned other artists; naturally, I felt less of an inclination to draw, even if I might've wanted to. Thirdly, even after I'd quit social media, the way I listen to music tends to have me off in a world of my own, dreaming up scenarios and plots for this OC world I've had in the works since at least 2011. This sounds good on the surface, but you have no idea just how much time I've wasted doing exactly that, and never writing or drawing any of it.
Yes, you could argue that my art has improved quite a lot, hence it taking a little longer and thus putting out less drawings naturally, but the reality is also that over the years, I have conditioned myself into this permanent period of demotivation for drawing. I have, however, made some efforts to change that, and that is what I want to share with you.
How to Motivation, or rather, How to Push Forward Without It
- Give yourself a concrete reason to draw other than "I want to." As nice as it can be to follow your human passions when they really encourage you to do something you enjoy, but emotions are fickle things, and have a worse attention span than you do: more often than not, once you've been drawing for a bit or when the going gets tough, that "I want to" will turn into a "meh, I'll do it later" or "I'll get back to it tomorrow" and you lose the momentum. You need to find ulterior motivations for why you want to draw more frequently, such as wanting to decorate one of your bedroom walls by the end of the month. This also ties into my next point:
- Set some sort of quota, or include drawing in your weekly timetable. I find that if I don't specify when I'm going to do something or how much I'm going to do, I don't get around to it. What's helped me is sitting down for a second, and thinking something like "Okay, I'm going to set aside one hour on this day of the week between 3pm and 4pm to do just drawing," or "Today I'm going to get 5 small sketches done before dinner." You may also want to be more specific, such as "I will spend between 3pm and 4pm today studying wood, its texture, and how light reflects on it, and practicing that with reference images." That way, you know exactly how much you're going to do and preferably when you're going to do it, so when the time comes around to actually draw, unless if extraordinary circumstances arise or you're experiencing exhaustion or artblock, you have little excuse to shy away from it. Remember that this requires some discipline, as it's incredibly easy to just completely ignore anything you set for yourself if you don't put your back into it.
- Surround yourself with people who do the same thing and interact with them frequently. A good subconscious way of encouragement and peer pressure is to actively communicate with people who also draw on the regular. When it comes to online spheres, I'd usually give out a word of caution due to mainstream social media possessing very addictive and infuriating tendencies; this, however, is not a mainstream social media, nor is it modelled after them, so you're at a lower risk of doomscrolling here. Stick your nose deep into the forums, dissect peoples' profiles, stalk the blogs, become the human spyware of FriendRewind groups, and find other artists on here, while hopefully having some more things in common with you than just art - yes, drawing is a good starter to conversations and friendships, but it would be preferable if you had more in common than just the one thing. Remember to communicate frequently as well, since there's quite the temptation to just lurk and ghost people on here after a few "hi"s and "hello"s are exchanged!
- Participate in contests and challenges. If nobody's hosting any, make one yourself. This ties into the finding community point I just made, as well as the timetable one to some extent. Challenges usually have some sort of deadline, as well as a common place to submit entries, where you can both send your art and check out that of others, so on top of quite literally requiring to finish that drawing on time to participate, you can also drool over others' entries! Some are daily, such as the famed Inktober, but there are also other ones! Artfight is a great example of this, where you only have one month in the entire year to attack other characters' OCs and gain points for your team, although I do wish it was a little more frequent sometimes. And like I said, if nobody's hosting any, you can absolutely make your own. I, for one, made my own challenge in 2023 to just draw one simple Springtrap meme per month to celebrate the canonical year of FNaF 3 taking place (unless if it's now been confirmed it happened in another year... I stopped caring much about FNaF lore after the RUIN DLC released, even if I plan to play Secret of the Mimic at some point). Nobody else took part, but I still chugged on anyways, with this being the final image:
- Struggling with phone addiction? Slowly find ways to replace most of your phone's functionality with separate things. I know this isn't directly art-related, and may not be related to anything else you may be thinking about doing more frequently, but I've mentioned multiple times in this blog alone that scrolling is addicting as hell. I never want to sign up to a microblogging site again. And because scrolling on phones is very time-consuming and life-destroying, it'll more than likely be a very welcome investment of your time to find other ways of doing things that do not involve your smartphone. Some you can probably find quite easily, such as only accessing non-SMS messaging apps and social media on a computer (assuming people even have computers at home these days), or writing your shopping lists or other notes in a... you know... notebook, or otherwise just leaving your phone downstairs and only using it in public areas of your house where people often come and go, so you're not tempted to stare at it in your bedroom or in a cupboard for half the day. Some things, if you want to avoid using your phone for them, will require you to spend some money, such as getting a dedicated MP3 player or CDs and an appropriate player if there aren't any rotting in a box somewhere, or a camera if you want to take pictures, and while I'd say those were worthwhile investments for me, that may not be the case for you. You don't need to ditch your smartphone entirely, I understand it's necessary for some things e.g. you need a primary mobile smart device for WhatsApp, you need authenticator apps, maybe you need Uber because there's no taxis nearby, but other things you can and probably should use other things for, so you don't become so dependent on the glass brick of flashing lights in your pocket.
This last one, I feel, is probably among the most important, so if there's one thing you take away from this blog, I hope it's that you should:
- Be accountable to someone. Like I mentioned before, this is a matter of both organisation and discipline. No matter how much you meticulously plan out how you will do things, if you don't stick to those plans, you'll waste your time and find yourself right back where you started. Someone in your life should be privy to your plans, or at least get a general idea, and check in on you often to see if you're still keeping up with everything. This would preferably be someone you're around quite a lot, such as a family member or close friend, but it could also be someone you chat to often online. So long as they know what it is you're doing (e.g. you tell them you're going to draw for an hour every day), and they ensure to ask you about it every so often (maybe every week?), it'll provide you with more reasons to actually go through with what you're prepared for. What you can do is also have the other person do a similar thing, and you keep them accountable about it the same way they do you, and I'd say that's probably the best outcome. If you really don't have someone, you can try to be accountable to yourself. In my comment on that girl's blog, I mentioned she could put up a sheet of paper somewhere public and add an extra tally mark to that paper every time she picks up her phone outside of her chosen phone time on that day - for art, it could be something like a calendar, where you tick off the current day if you've met your quota or stuck to your timetable, and if you didn't, write a reason why. Again, I'd suggest keeping it in a publicly visible place in your house or flat or whatever sort of building you live in so it's out there for people to see, rather than tucked away in a cupboard where it can just lay there and decay for all eternity.
The End
Whew, that was a lot, but I do hope this helps somebody out. Funnily enough, the challenge part helped me remain motivated to finish this same blog - I don't call them monthly blogs for nothing, after all! I'm December Winterwolf, and I hope you have a fantastic remainder of July. God bless, see you (maybe) in August~!
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