I am a part time painter. I work for most of the year and am off from mid June until late August. During the summer I paint as much as I can (among other things). With my medium of choice, watercolor, it seems that repetition and practice are essential to building momentum. While a single painting may only take a couple of hours to complete, at least most of it, the painting’s degree of success (or failure) depends in part on how much time I had spent painting in the preceding days and weeks and months. By the end of the summer, painting feels effortless. At the beginning of the summer it often takes a while to get back into the rhythm.
I don’t think to much about my artistic practice in the summer. I have more time and that gives me space to do what feels right. It is the rest of the year that I think about. I am in that season of life when there is a lot to do. I have to balance work with being a dad, keeping the house clean, cooking, exercise, sleeping and more – it is a lot. Art becomes an afterthought.
I have explored various strategies for keeping on track with art in the off season. Mostly this has involved attempting to track my painting habits, with the thought that tracking will make me attend to the amount I am painting (or not) with the overall goal of increasing its frequency. This made a certain amount of intuitive sense to me. And official scientists had even studied variations on this thought. Burke et al., 2011 conducted a systematic review of self-monitoring and exercise regimens. Self-monitoring, the authors helpfully defined as “recording dietary intake and physical activity so that individuals are aware of their current behaviors.” This is exactly what I tried to do, except with painting. Burke et al,. 2011 found positive results: “A significant association between self-monitoring and weight loss was consistently found” they note.
Korotitsch and Nelson-Gray (1999) in their review article call what I am talking about a “reactive effect” and note that reactive effects have been documented in a variety of “clinically relevant areas” including: hallucinations (Rutner & Bugle, 1969), paranoid ideation (Williams, 1976), ruminative thinking (Frederikson, 1975), insomnia (Jason, 1975), alcohol consumption (Sobell & Sobell, 1973), amphetamine abuse (Hay, Hay, & Angle,1977). I do hope it is obvious that things that are “clinically relevant” are usually things that you are trying to do less of, and that painting is decidedly not clinically relevant. But the point stands: there is some evidence that keeping track of something can help you change your behavior.
Oddly, there may not be much connection between your ability to accurately keep track of what you’re doing (or not doing) and that activity’s influence on your behavior. Korotitsch and Nelson-gray (1999) note “There is little correspondence between accuracy and reactive effects, and the former is not necessary for the occurrence of the reactive effects of self-monitoring.” And they cite a list of studies: Broden, Hall, & Mitts, 1971; Fixen, Phillips, & Wolf, 1972; Herbert & Baer, 1972; Lipinski & Nelson, 1974; Marshall, Lloyd, & Hallahan, 1993. Anyway, my point is that there is some evidence that recording a behavior helps you do more (or less) of that thing and professional people study this and argue about the details.
A couple of years ago (2024 to be exact) I gave my best effort at tracking my painting habits in an effort to increase them. Spoiler: it didn’t work. I did get some fun graphs. For example this one charts the number of paintings of did of various sizes. I kinda overdid the quarter sheets that year.
Or there is this one that shows the number of days and the number of paintings I did each month. A huge spike in the summer time is the most obvious feature of this graph, as well as an increase in the number of days during which I did more than one painting ( where the red line is higher than the blue line).
iAnd here is another graph of number of painting days and number of paintings, by week instead of month. A similar pattern is evident. It is interesting to note how in the off months, I was sometimes working on one painting across multiple days (blue line below red) but then in the summer it was the opposite. The July dip is more pronounced, although I am unsure of its cause.
And this graph is perhaps the most stark illustration of my painting habits that year, with the percentage of days painted by month. In the summer I was painting 75 percent of the days or more – pretty impressive really. But then the rest of the year: meh. May was particularly uninspired.
In short it was a fun experiment but, no, tracking my painting habits did not seem to increase the amount I painted or the consistency of my painting habits – witness the sharp fall off in September or the abrupt drop in May. I tried to track my painting habits again in 2025 but I stopped after a couple of months. Keeping track of my painting just seemed like a chore.
My thinking about this whole topic changed when I read the book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. This 2018 book was a wildly successful best seller, yet somehow I had never heard of it until recently. While perhaps a technically self-help style book, its recommendations are concrete and unlike anything I had read before. The book basically teaches you how to puppy train yourself. We are creatures of habit, and by subtly building in rewards and punishments into our daily routines, we can shape those habits. This book was very applicable to my failed “paint every day” project.
The most useful part, I thought, was what Clear calls the Two Minute Rule, which stipulates that “When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.” (Clear, 2018, 162). In other words, habits start out small. Running a marathon starts with putting on your shoes (less than two minutes); Writing a book starts with writing a sentence (less than two minutes). For me, I suppose my modification of this rule is “Two Minutes Is Better Than Nothing.” Investing in a painting for me at least takes an hour or two, which I often just don’t have time for. Rather than just wishing for more time and energy in my day — and failing — and not painting at all — I started trying to focus on sketching – for at least two minutes. Even when I was busy or tired or felt like I couldn’t do it. I have been sketching with pen or pencil or even adding in a little watercolor. But the important thing is to do it just for a little bit. I like painting from life. So if I am to keep the habit, I can’t always go off looking for beautiful or interesting scenes to sketch. I have had to modify my expectations a bit. Now, I sketch things I find around the house. Or I do a master study, often from books my kid has around the house, like the old Tintin books by Herge, or the illustrations in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
The other interesting concept that the book introduces was the idea of “habit stacking.” The author introduces it as if it were a mathematical formula:
The habit stacking formula is: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT]” (Clear, 2018, p. 74)
The idea is quite simple and intuitive: the best way to add a new habit into your life is to add it to a habit you are already doing. The umbrella concept here is “implementation intention” — the idea that if you plan about when and where you will act, you are far more likely to actually follow through. Clear cites a 2001 study that people who had a day, time and place in mind, in advance, for exercising had twice the rate of follow through with that exercising. I am not sure there is a simpler implementation intention other than “I will do it after I do this other thing that I always already doing.”
So for me, this means that my art habits, my painting habits, my sketching habits, don’t happen in isolation, but in the context of my life and all the other habits I have. I have developed a morning routine, including a walk/jog, and time to sketch fit nicely into the routine. I “stacked” that habit onto the other ones. And I have been working on sketching — even just for two minutes — when I get home from work. Another habit stacked.
And finally of course, I had to make a habit tracker — a spreadsheet — like I did before in 2024. Only this time I have a whole new perspective. Now, my goal is not to paint every day somehow, someway. instead, my goal is to keep my habits stacked. So after my jog, I have to do the sketch. I don’t need to think about trying to do the sketch every day. All I have to think about is doing the one thing after the other thing. That is is the big shift in perspective. Of course doing the one thing after the other thing, and keeping my habits stacked, leads to daily or near daily habits. But that is not my focus at all. It is a slight distinction, but it makes all the difference.
One thing that I have found particularly helpful is the “daily score.” As part of my spreadsheet, I set up a formula that gives me a daily score, basically the percentage of the daily habits that I track that I actually completed. I find it unexpectedly motivating. Below is my daily score for the first 90 days of the year or so. The blue is the daily score, and the red is the 7 day average. I have been all over the place with my scores. That is true. But I will see how it goes. And the fact is, I have been sketching more regularly than before.
