How to Get Looser with Hashim Akib
When Hashim Akib (Ep.50) was learning to paint he knew that he wanted to work loosely. But he’d finish a painting and realize that yet again, he’s drawn every line.
Akib comes from an illustration background. He’d worked hard for his drawing skills. But now they seemed to work against him. He didn’t WANT to draw every line. He wanted looser work.
He realized he needed an external tool. And he turned to the cooking aisle to find it.
What he needed was a timer.
A timer meant suddenly that he couldn’t spend forever on a painting.
He tried different amounts of time.
Too little time made him feel too rushed and left him with an incomplete painting.
While too much time meant he fell back into drawing every line.
Eventually he found that an hour was the sweet spot.
Put it to Practice:
Knowing when you work is finished is really hard…ESPECIALLY if your goal is to work loosely.
We have a tendency to cling to what we see in the image. We only trust a painting is finished when we’ve rendered it like a photograph… every detail in place.
But that’s not loose work. When you shift to trying to paint looser you have to make internal shifts. You have to relearn when a painting is finished but also how it feels to create it.
That’s why an external tool like a timer can be so powerful. It forces you to stop, not when you FEEL like it but when this external thing has told you to stop. Then you are forced to walk away and then come back and make intentional choices about whether or not you want to be finished.
Decide on an amount of time you’ll give yourself for your paintings. Set the timer and when it goes off, no matter where you are in your painting, call it finished. Then put that painting out of sight. After 7 days, come back to it with fresh eyes. Then decide if it’s actually finished or not.
This process might feel wobbly at first. You’ll create a bunch of work that is looser than you want. You’ll create a bunch of work that is tighter than you want.
But that’s exactly the path to where you want to head. This is powerful information. Use it to adjust adjust adjust until you find the amount of looseness that you want.