On day 19 of my experiment with drawing every day and observing the effects on my motivation I again found myself without ideas for what to draw. Part of my commitment to this exercise from the outset had been that the important thing was to draw something each day, not to draw something “good” or “interesting” every day. So for day 19 I settled with drawing out a pattern in curving lines without too much thought, then adding a little colour:
Motivation experiment day 19 – drawn 9/05/2014
This was done very quickly. I didn’t like the result at all, but I’d stuck with my commitment to draw and was happy enough with that.
On day 20 I thought of drawing another animal – but I didn’t want to trace this time. Instead I sketched out the outline from looking at a photo I had taken of a lizard then set about colouring it in:
Motivation experiment day 20 – drawn 10/05/2014
Day 21 was Mothers’ Day and I didn’t want to spend a lot of time drawing. A Mothers’ Day-inspired theme came to mind and I sketched it out very quickly:
Motivation experiment day 21 – drawn Mothers’ Day, 11/05/2014
My drawing on day 20 got no feedback when posted on facebook, whereas the day 21 drawing of the mother bird and her chicks garnered a few “likes”. However, because I felt that I had achieved something personally challenging with my lizard drawing, and had been surprised to do better than I expected, that drawing noticeably increased my intrinsic motivation to draw, but the positive feedback on the bird drawing didn’t.
