Low impact creative rituals to do daily(ish)
The first ritual: five minute freeform doodling
Hi I’m Keila. Perpetual weird art kid. I write zines and articles to help you build a sustainable creative practice. To work seasonally, each quarter of the year follows a theme.
March is about Artful Emergence and is the final part of The Art of Wintering series.
In this month’s Artful Emergence zine, a theme is low impact creative rituals. Something that is easy to do everyday(ish), it’s easy to do when you had a long day, or when you feel supremely uncreative.
The next three posts on this publication are talking about the creative rituals I personally use.
Let’s talk about the first one, freeform doodling.
What is freeform doodling?
The first time I read The Artists Way years ago, I learned about free form writing. It’s where you write continuously for a set period of time without pausing or editing. The ultimate objective is to keep the pen on the paper. It does not matter what you are writing. Keep the pen on the paper even if you a re writing “this is stupid” for pages. The thing about it though, is eventually something comes out.
In this spirit, I try to have a daily(ish) freeform doodle session. It’s good to think of it as doodling because it’s not as serious as drawing. Personally, it helps me to keep these in a “messy art journal”. It’s a notebook full of lists, little poems, ideas and doodles. A bunch of stuff is scratched out and not drawn for people to see. The notebooks I use are made up of cheap grid paper that I don’t feel bad messing up. I use a black pen so I’m not tempted to erase.
Here’s a flip though of an old “messy art journal”
How to do it
Set a timer for only five minutes. It’s surprising how much can come out in this small amount of time.
All that matters is you dont pause or edit during the time frame. You can keep this low impact by focusing on keeping your hand moving versus what is being drawn. Even if you are just scribbling, the session is a win. For me, what comes out are mostly little people, made up animals, or spirals.
These aren’t polished drawings, these are in the “messy art journal” so they are messy. For some reason my mind needs that delineation. It’s a practice that is more automatic than rational. However, these doodles can grow into other work. Feel free to use these as a jumping off point when doing other work.
Don’t know where to start? Try this:
Start making a spiral. Try getting the lines as close as possible without touching them. You can even pretend you are going to get electrocuted if the lines touch. I picked this up from the amazing Lynda Barry in the Book What It Is. She also has this awesome video about creating characters with random shapes I enjoyed. I’ve found that matching your breath with the movement of the spiral is a good way to get in your body while drawing. You can expand this to other patterns of abstract shapes.
Think of your mind as a collection of characters that are in your head. What do they look like and what do they say? Are they human? How can you draw them as simple as possible? A character that always seems to come forth in my doodles is a chain-smoking (I don’t smoke lol), coffee drinking, devil dude who loves to talk sh*t. He’s my perpetual mean 15 year old that lives inside. I love him, he says all the things I want to say but can’t.
Blind contour drawings. This is where you draw an object or person from life without looking at the page or picking up the pen from the page. It’s easier if you pretend you are touching the shape of the object which the tip of the pen. Personally, I like to get a mirror out to make self portraits. But you can draw your hand, your drink, the object that is closest to you.
This article was going to be three creative rituals, but it got too long. Check out the second next Wednesday and the third next Friday.
In the meantime feel free to check out the Art of Wintering zines. Thanks so much for reading.
Signing off,
K
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I love doodling! My best ideas come out of it. When we can turn off all the worry and let our hands tell us a story.
Love the idea of personifying one’s inner selves! I started doing this with my very sporadic “Girls in the Attic” comic, named for King’s Boys in the Basement: I’ve got Darkness, Literati, The Bureaucrat, and Inner Child (plus side appearances from The Inner Editor, and The Evil Cynic Cloud of Doom)—it’s so fun to play with them and to think about how they react to things. 😅 also how I react to them