on habits

If you envision where you would like to be a year from not, or ten…what would you like to be doing? What would you like your day to look like? In order for that to happen, something needs to lead you to that place. And the best place to begin is by building a habit…a pattern in your life that looks like where you’d like to go.

Several years ago, well, maybe more than ten, I decided I wanted to follow my passion for art. Yes, I’m in the design and marketing industry, but everything is created on the computer now, and I really missed creating with my hands. I’ve always been an artist, but I wanted to have more time in my life for creativity, for letting my mind wander freely, to enjoy the process of making and creating. So I made the commitment to myself to get up early every day to paint. In the beginning, sometimes it happened, and sometimes there were days, or weeks, where there was just no extra time for it, with kids, a business and all the pulls in every direction. But little by little the habit formed and now I can’t imagine my life without it.

It's important to build good habits—in life as well as in your art practice. Just like working out, eating healthy or doing self-growth work, it's also important to build good art habits, like continually drawing, learning and feeding your artistic spirit.

So in our Inspiring Art group we are working on building good creative habits, and our first challenge is drawing—squeezing in time to draw for even just ten minutes a day on inexpensive paper, so it’s not precious, and with no pressure for outcome, just to have fun. Because you just need to start and the rest will fall into place.

So how will you start building your own creative habits?