New Idea: Drawing Morning Pages (Doodle Edition)

Even as a professional illustrator, I sometimes hit a wall of not being able to draw… to just draw.

With no specific purpose, just for fun.

It's been a nearly constantly struggle for YEARS to get myself to do so - probably because it's "safer" not to. But I really want to be drawing more, because I believe just making marks on paper is a great way to general ideas and stimulate creativity in general.

Like many creative people on an artistic journey, I've read the Artist's Way (at least a good part of it), which encourages one to file three notebook pages with stream-of-consciousness writing every morning, as a way to remove the "junk" from floating around in your mind and clear your head for the day before you (at least that's what I got from it).

So I decided to try it for my drawing habits… just fill two pages of my moleskin sketchbook each morning, with line, shading, dots, whatever - just to put something on paper and force some stuff out of my head. I've only been going for five days so far, but almost immediately the lines began turning into things -I've started making purposeless drawings… just for fun, just because I can!

I'm so used to having a specific PURPOSE to draw, that just making lines and seeing where they take me is a wonderful & surprising journey. I'm really enjoying it so far.

*The only drawback (unintended pun, d'oh!) is that I'm getting into and spending too much time on them. But I'm not necessarily against spending the time. At least not right now. At some point I might challenge myself to do faster/time limited drawings, but right now I'm just happy to be drawing and I'm going to go with it.