How to avoid distractions 🤳 when drawing ✍️

1. Start off by writing down or typing up a task list of your drawing plan. I suggest you download my One Page 📰 Drawing ✍️ Plan to get started. Organizing your thoughts and what you want to accomplish is a crucial first step at avoiding distractions.
2. Lacking drawing confidence, meaning being unable to draw what you want to draw when drawing can be extremely distracting. What you should do is accept your failures and always be striving to improve at drawing. Accept that it takes many hours of experience to achieve skillful drawing levels.
3. Establish a dedicated drawing area in the place that you live. This area should only be used for drawing and not for anything else but drawing related tasks. Possibly this means you may want to remove any and all distractions from a room. Take it one step at a time. Here is my drawing space for your reference
4. Avoid noise from roomates, music, and video's. Background whitenoise could work, but more often than not it is just as distracting. Some people think they can listen to classical music when drawing, but this is still distracting to an extent. We lie to ourselvels that we can multitask. In short, we can't.
5. Establish a daily drawing time. In which you say that during this time period say 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. you will draw.
6. Silence your phone or better yet turn it off. In these days of social media, everyone is addicted to their phone. Me included. Personally for me it is so bad that when I am away from it for long enough, I hear phantom text messages. In short, text messages or notifications when I haven't received anything at all. For some people, a dopamine detox could be beneficial. We are in the age of being slaves to addicting algorithms.
Sometimes, the distractions maybe too much. At that point, I suggest visualizing a feather and adopting some type of mindfullness breathing technique. This way, you could accept that you were distraction, and get back to drawing.
7. Avoid eating or drinking when drawing. This fits into the multitasking category. Additionally, before you drawing time avoid eating foods that make you feel sluggish 🐌
8. Caffeinate ☕ up before you draw. But don't drink coffee when you are drawing! After a long day of work, I need a caffeine boost to draw. You could do tea 🍵 as well. I usually do both.
9. Establish or figure out your cut-off time. For me, it's 9:30 p.m. and at that point I know I can't focus enough to draw. So I make sure to draw way before that time hits. Everyone is different, but learning your cut-off time is a good first step.
10. Sometimes there maybe nothing that you can do. As I live with my parents, they can be a bit loud sometimes. This makes drawing and for that matter recording videos for YouTube impossible. Now I am grateful that I have a place to live, especially considering these times. But if you can, drawing in a quite part of your house could be best. If you could goto a library or internet cafe, even better. Although this isn't possible for me because I don't have a car...

In short, this article is about you learning about yourself. Only you know the distractions within your environment. I always thought that the best way to tell that you are really drawing well is that you are in the drawing flow state. The flow state is hard to describe, it is one of those you know it when you experience it kind of things. Possibly this article on the Flow state could help explain it better than I could. I hope this article Helps you out! Until next time ~Lars