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What took me by surprise this month, in the wake of choosing not to make any grand promises in the form of new years resolutions, led me down a path of intentionality that landed me square back into my old sketchbooking practice. It all began with an Instagram drawing challenge centred around birds, one of my favourite subjects to paint, and by aiming to participate in the daily challenge, somehow breathed new life into my art routine.
Over the last two years I had fallen into a routine where I had highs of pure creative spark, madly painting many peices at once and then going through lulls, buying into the idea that my creative process was like an ocean wave that ebbs and flows, needing the down time to balance out the highs.
But with that mentality and in those lulls, I was unintentionally losing my dexterity to work with my creative spark.
By rediscovering the art of daily practice, even just a few minutes a day helped expand my creative energy. From the start of the month, to now the end, I can track the opening up of my creativity that happened only because I committed to a daily art practice. Some days I would only have time to do a quick pen drawing, throwing down some quick watercolour or gouache to add colour. Other days I could languish and delve deeper into the art idea I had for the day. As the #birbfest challenge hosted by the lovely @monkeymintaka comes to a close, I have found that through this process, I have freed myself of any prior constructs of what I could and couldn’t do with my art.
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