Shelter is my guiding word for this year. It is a non-striving word. A shelter offers refuge, provides safety, and embraces calm and quiet.
Time has a sneaky habit of slipping away. Disappearing down a rabbit hole. Getting frittered away with errands and household chores and cups of coffee and random YouTube videos.
Or is that just me?
To counter such situations, I find that creating a specific day for a specific creative activity provides a shelter for my artist’s spirit.
I recently designated Wednesdays as Watercolor Wednesday. I do try to do a bit of art every day – collage, pen and ink, work in handmade journals (I love these) – as most needed supplies are close at hand on my desk. But lately I have been missing painting with watercolors. Because it’s an activity for which I have to gather supplies, I decided to designate this one day a week to make sure I have the paints and palette, brushes, bottles of clean water, towel, and inspiration at hand to start painting.
These sessions don’t necessarily have to last a long time, but enough to get my creative juices flowing. I do enjoy playing with the colors. I guess I inherited this interest in watercolor painting from my grandmother and her sisters. I have quite a few of their framed creations on display in my house, and these also offer inspiration.
As a freelance writer, my time is dictated by deadlines and setting up interviews and conducting the interviews and then doing the writing and editing and making sure that the work is turned in on time. As a dabbling artist, I don’t have that kind of structure, so I have to come up with my own projects and set my own deadlines.
There are tons of creative people on YouTube, and it’s a free and fun opportunity for me to learn new techniques. I can watch one of the artists and try to recreate the process in my own style and with what supplies I have. (And believe me, I have a lot of art supplies!)
Over the years, I have found that it helps to schedule daily or monthly creative activities. Sometimes I have challenged myself to do a small pen and ink drawing every day. Another time I challenged myself to do a small collage every day for a month. Or I create a handmade journal and fill it with images or scraps of decorative papers or my own sketches or even dried leaves found on a walk. The options are endless.
Scheduling times for creative endeavors doesn’t have to be for some sort of visual art. One can pick a day of the week to cook a new dish for supper, write a poem or haiku, play among the houseplants or garden, or work on a quilting or sewing project. It just helps to designate a time for creativity once a week to look forward to.
Setting a recurring date with myself and marking it on my calendar gives my creative life a time of its own and a shelter from the time-draining and mind-numbing trivia that can deaden my days.
Story and artwork by Lucy M. Pritchett
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