I still don't know what to call this project. All I know is that I want it to happen. I want to spend a year drawing as much as possible, learning to improve my skills, but more importantly, learning to calm the critical voices in my head that make drawing so unpleasant. I want to find a way back to childhood, back to when drawing was FUN.
October is an amazing, crazy month. Birthdays, anniversaries, Halloween, Thanksgiving (my favourite holiday - and yes, here in Canada we celebrate it in October)... and I'm moving. The days are getting shorter, the last of the green leaves are turning colour and falling to the ground, and that inescapable winter chill is starting to creep in. It's a month of celebration and transition. What better time to sharpen my creative muscles and focus more clearly on the world around me?
This month, my creative challenge is back with #InspireOctober.
Last week I wrote about the importance of rituals, habits, and routines to help you stay creative every day. This week I have just the thing to help you with that goal! Introducing #InspireOctober, a 31-day creativity challenge that will inject some inspiration into your creative practice every day this month. It's easy to play along: Each number on the calendar is a day of the month. Using that day's prompt as a jumping off point, take a picture or write a short post and publish it on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook with the hastag #InspireOctober. That's it! Full "rules" (there are no rules though, really) below. Enjoy!
To stretch our creative muscles a little bit each day in October. To open our imaginations and share our stories.
1. Use the words above as prompts to create a story: either a visual image or a small piece of text each day.
2. Post the story you create to Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook using the hashtag #InspireOctober, along with the word that inspired it. Follow me on these platforms for even more inspiration.
3. Interpret the prompts any way you want, literally or off-the-wall figuratively.
4. Use any media you want. Try to stretch a little bit and think about the different stories you can tell with each word. Will you sketch or paint a picture? Make a collage? Take a photo? Use found objects to make a sculpture? Take a video? Use found text? Transcribe overheard conversations? Create a map? Of course, if you want to use all photographs that’s fine too!
5. Do as many or as few as you want, in any order you want. I don’t want to stress anyone out, so make this challenge whatever you need it to be to have fun.
6. Share with your friends! The more people we have playing along, the more fun it will be.
The challenge starts tomorrow and will go to the end of October. I hope you’ll join in on the creative adventures!
In July I ran my first creative challenge and it was a lot of fun. Incredibly challenging, but a lot of fun. This is what one of the participants had to say about her experience:
All in all, I've had a blast. Not all of them had been winners, but I've felt a definite sense of pride at what I've accomplished. It was something to look forward to everyday in July.
I'm really glad a few people were inspired to look at their days a little differently during the challenge. I know it certainly stretched me and I learned a lot. Here are some things I thought about throughout the month:
Thank you to the small but dedicated group of people who played along with #InspireJuly. You inspired me and made it all worthwhile, and thanks to your effort you can look forward to many more creative challenges in the future. If you didn't keep up with the challenge as it unfolded, I've collected the majority of the posts in the following Storify. Enjoy, and I hope you'll join in next time!
Welcome to my very first creativity challenge!
To stretch our creative muscles a little bit each day in July. To open our imaginations and share our stories.
1. Use the words above as prompts to create a story: either a visual image or a small Tweetable piece of text each day.
2. Post the story you create to Twitter or Instagram using the hashtag #InspireJuly, along with the word that inspired it.
3. Interpret the prompts any way you want, literally or off-the-wall figuratively.
4. Use any media you want. Try to stretch a little bit and think about the different stories you can tell with each word. Will you sketch or paint a picture? Make a collage? Take a photo? Use found objects to make a sculpture? Take a video? Use found text? Transcribe overheard conversations? Create a map? Of course, if you want to use all photographs that's fine too!
5. Do as many or as few as you want, in any order you want. I don't want to stress anyone out, so make this challenge whatever you need it to be to have fun.
6. Share with your friends! The more people we have playing along, the more fun it will be.
The challenge starts tomorrow and will go to the end of July. I hope you'll join in on the creative adventures!
Last month I challenged myself to draw 30 sketches of Edmonton (my home city) in 30 days, and I invited people to join me in the challenge. The goals were to create new perspectives of the city and to create a consistent creative practice while breaking down creative barriers. It was hard! Though I didn't make it to 30 and there were some days when the last thing I wanted to do was sketch, I learned a lot. I've decided to share some of the photos and a bit of my creative journey throughout the month. You can see all my sketches and those that other people sent in on the project blog at sketchesofyeg.tumblr.com. The first sketches I did felt liberating and exciting. The idea came out of a desire to be creative every day, and to encourage others to be creative, and at first I felt like this project was really going to help. I was bringing my sketchbook everywhere, finding inspiration in unlikely places, and even pushing myself to draw while I was with people.
And then something happened. I started to judge my sketches more harshly. I started to feel embarrassed when the sketches I was posting weren’t perfectly accurate and polished and I was frustrated that they didn’t look the way I thought they should. Soon I saw my daily drawing as a chore, rather than a fun way to inject creativity in my day.
What went wrong?
I forgot to let the project be fun. I started to feel like I was in art class again and was worried about getting a bad grade (the reason I didn’t do a major in Art, or a BFA, was that I was worried the schooling would make me hate making things – I think it was the right choice). Even though I had invented the project and I had stated that the goals were not to create perfect replicas of things I saw (that’s what photographs are for), I was feeling responsible to some sort of invisible judge and it was defeating the whole purpose. Once I realized what was happening, I worked on trying to let that judgment go and enjoy the last week of sketching.
Here’s what I learned throughout the month:
1. Take the pressure off. Yes I had made a commitment to sketch every day, but I hadn’t made a commitment to make flawless works of art every day. No one was going to give me a grade. No one expected it to look like a photograph. Looking at the Urban Sketchers website was a huge help as it showed me that even “really good” artists don’t get perspective right every time, don’t draw straight lines, and use squiggly lines to represent trees and people.
2. Slow down. When I was in a hurry to get a sketch done I was never happy with the result. If I spent time really looking at my subject and carefully figuring out how that would translate to the page, the compositions would work out much better. This made the experience more enjoyable in general since I found myself really looking at things I might have only glanced at in passing.
3. Speed up. Conversely, I tried not to be too fussy. I’ve read that it’s better to sketch quickly, without trying to get every line in exactly the right place. Once I had a general idea of how the image would fit on the page, I tried to work quickly so that my negative inner monologue wouldn’t have time to catch up. I also tried to look more at what I was sketching than at my paper.
4. Other people are so impressed by the fact that you’re drawing in public that they won’t think to criticize you. There were times when I felt so self-conscious about having people see what I was sketching. But I’ve never had anyone tell me it wasn’t good and I needed to focus more on that. I finished a sketch while sitting with some friends and one of them said, “I’m amazed that you did that. I was just sitting here talking and you whipped that out. I couldn’t do that.”
When the challenge ended I was relieved that I didn’t need to sketch every day. But now I almost wish I had extended the challenge so that I could work through the struggle and find joy in it again. A friend told me that whenever we do something that’s really important to us, there will be times that we hate it and times that we love it and we just have to keep working through the ups and the downs and doing the work that matters most to us. I still carry a sketchbook around, looking for inspiration and ideas, though I definitely feel less motivated without the daily deadlines!
Are there areas of your creative life that are important to you but somehow still really hard to get done?
