The Curious Case Of The Creative Challenge
I want to start by saying that I am not a big fan of them, for two reasons:
One, children often create dangerous challenges for each other online, and it is a good idea not to normalize online challenges, at least for children.
Two, they tend to force you to do the same thing until you don’t want to do it anymore, and then some, which tends to lead to burnout. That is my experience, at least.
But challenges do serve an important purpose!
Learning to draw is hard in part because you are always, always dissatisfied with your work. You always see the mistakes in your work, the parts that didn’t come out the way you intended. And it’s always a downer.
Procrastination is about avoiding negative feelings. We want to avoid that feeling of disappointment at the end of a drawing session, so we go online to doom-scroll through a social media feed instead.
Our brains are little dopamine hit-seekers, and we are not getting the dopamine hits from drawing because the results always disappoint. Instead, the social media platforms are more than happy to provide us with a near-infinite stream of dopamine hits.
And that’s one thing the challenges also provide! If you do, say, some 30-day challenge, you may be burnt out after those thirty days and don’t feel like drawing again, but each day you did it, you completed the drawing or filled the sketchbook page, and you can feel satisfied about that, and you got a dopamine hit.
You get dopamine hits from doing challenges!
It’s quite a clever idea for art students to take on challenges, as it really solves a problem. We know we have to practice drawing a lot, and we instinctively feel that we need dopamine hits for the habit to keep going. The challenges serve two purposes: they get us to draw a lot while also providing us with those dopamine hits!
Given a non-dangerous challenge, which a drawing challenge usually is, of course, the only downside to challenges, in my experience, is that they lead to burnout as you keep forcing yourself to do something you are not enjoying anymore.
We do instinctively understand the issue: to keep drawing, we need dopamine hits at the end of every day, and we’re not getting them from our art as we see all the mistakes. Challenges to the rescue! They do give short-term dopamine hits, but they’re not sustainable.
So, are there sustainable alternatives?
Given that the problem we need to solve is to both draw and get dopamine hits from our drawing habit, these are things I found work:
Do Other Creative Activities
I’ll be honest; I often switch to writing or programming. For example, I am writing this article right now. I enjoy writing. And I get a dopamine hit from finishing it. My sensibilities regarding literature are not at a level where I am hyper-sensitive to parts that could have been written better, so I am also happy with the resulting text, and I get a dopamine hit. I also program, which I’ve been doing for a long time. Seeing something cool happen on screen, which occurs with a new 3D model or an improvement to one, gives me joy and a dopamine hit.
Choose Your Subject
I forgot which artist it was, it was either Alex Toth or Noel Sickles, but there was an anecdote that they had an off-day. Even the best artists do! We all have days when no drawing works out. At the end, they talked to a friend in anguish, quickly drawing a good-looking horse for them. “See! I can still draw!” At the end of the day, they reverted to drawing something they knew they could draw well, so they would at least end the day with a positive feeling and the consequential dopamine hit.
You can wind down at the end of a drawing session and draw something that looks good and that you know you can easily draw well. This can be something you practiced a lot, but it can also be something inherently easier to get right. Trees are easier to get right than the face of a beautiful woman, for example, because the face has to be very precise and symmetric, whereas the form of a tree is organic and can take on many fluid, good-looking forms.
Defining Beauty
I can really enjoy the beauty of a sketchbook page filled with failed attempts. The whole still looks beautiful, an endearing record of a heroic effort to tackle something. That realization can make me feel good and give me a dopamine hit.
Fire-And-Forget
You do get a dopamine hit from posting your work on social media. At least, I do. It becomes depressing when you see the statistics. The likes and follows always disappoint. So a thing that works is to fire-and-forget: post your work, and then immediately leave the platform!
Yours sincerely,
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