Sitting down to draw on day three of my motivation experiment I couldn’t think of anything at all to draw. So I scribbled a few lines and shapes and played with smearing them:
I really don’t like this drawing at all. But forcing myself to draw something led me to experimenting with a technique that I later used in a drawing I did like.
Come day four I found myself again feeling completely uninspired. So I scribbled a few lines. Those lines made me think of a bat, so I developed them into one:
Four days into my experiment I had done the first drawing that I really liked something about. It was really not much more than a rough scribble … but I liked how it looked. That made me look forward to possibly drawing something else unexpected that I liked in the future: the beginnings of intrinsic motivation to continue drawing.