Use Timed Sketches to Silence Your Inner Critic

If you move fast enough, it’s hard for your inner critic to catch you. Today, I raced against time to get some quick sketches in, and was so focused on beating the clock that I didn’t have time to beat myself up.

I started with the clock at 2 minutes per figure below, keeping a mostly continuous line while sketching from a video of Teddy Swims singing with a busker. With this time constraint, I’m not going for much of a likeness. I’m just trying to capture the overall feel of the scene.

After Teddy (first name basis), I moved on to Adam Sandler singing at the Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary. Again, I set the time to 2 minutes. Maybe I could move the clock down to 1 minute, but I wasn’t feeling quite that confident. If you try this type of sketching constraint yourself, you’ll get a feel for how much time you want to allow.

I have so much fun with these timed sketches and am often happier with the result than I am with something I spend much more time on. They have a sense of immediacy and flow that I like.

And you can always come back and add watercolor, colored pencil, darker lines — whatever you decide — later on. That’s what I did in this timed sketch of a couple of dudes from pexels.com. For this one, I spent 2 minutes per figure on the sketch and then came back and added watercolor to one and colored pencil to the other.

There you have it. These timed sketches might not produce finished artwork, but they are great practice, and most importantly, they keep that nagging, negative voice quiet for a few minutes.

Try it out yourself and let me know how it goes. I’d love to hear about and see what you produce.