How sketching every day boosts my creativity

Every artist knows the value of a daily sketching habit. One of the first things we learn is the importance of using a sketchbook to draw freely and practice various subject matter.

In this age of the internet where we share much of what we do online, it’s easy to create pressure on ourselves for everything to be polished and worthy of posting. Approaching my work in this way in the past has left me feeling drained of ideas and resistance towards creating anything.

Since last week, I’ve been using my sketchbook every day to counteract this pressure. I spend 30 minutes each morning committed to filling at least one page with something.

What I choose varies. Some days, I sketch directly from reference images with the intent of practicing specific subject matter. For example, one day this week I looked up images of monstera plants and practiced drawing leaves.

Some days, I just allow myself to doodle random things and see what comes out of it. One of my doodles was this office space filled with plants. I wish my office could look like this, but I can’t seem to keep anything alive!

This practice has been helping me to feel more in flow with my art. Because I’m sketching every day, there’s zero pressure for anything to look good. If something comes out ugly, I’ll just try again tomorrow. I can create a large volume of work and improve through quantity.

However, this practice also allows me to focus on quality. I have a book filled with ideas that I can pluck out and refine. The goal is to put my skills to the test and see if I can expand my comfort zone just a little more.

I implemented this by refining the doodle above. Drawing a detailed environment like this was challenging, but now that I’ve done it, I feel like I could do it again and again.

I’m going to continue with this commitment going forward. There are days where I feel a lot of resistance towards it, but I do it anyway. Similar to exercise, it kind of sucks to get started, but once I get going it’s not so bad and I feel amazing afterward.

New Stickers Available!

This week I revisited my existing patterns and created stickers from some of the motifs.

I did this first with my hibiscus flowers. I had drawn so many of them so I picked my favorite and you can now own them in a variety of colors to stick on your journals, water bottles, laptops, or wherever you love to put your favorite stickers.

I did the same for my vineyard patterns. I actually had some leftover motifs that didn’t work for any of my patterns, but they make for cute stickers. I released these earlier this week, and the white wine sticker is already a hit!

That's all I have for you this week. If you're enjoying these newsletters, is there someone you know that might get value from them as well? Spread the love by forwarding this along.

Thanks for reading and have a good one!