I’ve read, in the glut of “how to keep your new years resolutions” things that have been showing up in the past week or so that it is better start one habit at a time, in order to be more likely to actually succeed in building and maintaining it. This is probably good advice, but sometimes I feel like I have so many bad habits that need breaking, and so many things I need to start changing about my life, that I want to start them all now. Probably a bad idea. So, today, I decided that I need to work on developing a habit of drawing. Yes, I’m an artist, and I don’t really draw, or, don’t consider myself very good at it. Mostly, I’m just out of practice, because I don’t do it nearly enough. So today I recycled a lot of paper. Because it’s all about practice, and I’m more likely to open my sketchbook and do something if opening it doesn’t make me feel inadequate by forcing me to look at skills-that-are-crap-when-I’m-rusty. And, really, after a few hours of warming up, I’m not too bad at this drawing thing, and practice will definitely help. So, here’s to creating new habits, like drawing every day, and here’s to tools to help you do it. Like pixelovely’s Figure Drawing Training Tool, which is damn useful for practice.

And to remind me that sometimes process isn’t everything, and doesn’t need to show (so I’m allowed to toss/burn/recycle/feed-to-the-cat my bad drawings) here’s a quote from Annie Dillard’s “The Writing Life” (italics mine):