Daily warm-ups—a new to me approach
/
One of the things I’m instituting in my art practice—or at least re-committing to—is a daily warm-up in my sketchbook (practice and play). The problem I’ve come up against before when I try to open with a daily warm-up is that I skip it.
The blank page looms, I don’t know what I want to do that day—so I don’t. I either have other art projects in progress or I have an idea for some final piece, and I launch into those instead.
But practice and play for no other reason than to practice and/or play is an important part of an art practice, i know that, both for building skills and discovering new ideas. Not to mention fun.
So I think I have the answer. I’m going to assign myself week by week something to explore. So maybe one week will be sketching from life and one week may be character studies and one week may be botanicals—whatever I want to work on.
My only rules are:
I have to stick with my commitment for at least a week before moving on to a new assignment,
I have to try to work in my sketchbook every day, first thing, for at least 15 minutes and up to an hour (and then, after a break and according to available time, I am free to focus on other work), AND
This is not finished work. These are experiments, studies and general explorations. My inner perfectionist is going to have to accept ‘unfinished’, ‘rough’ and ‘drafty.’
Finally, I plan to make my weekly warm-up assignments intentionally. That is, identify for myself what I want to learn more about, explore or practice for specific reasons. AND I won’t share warm ups every day—but I’ll be sure to post regular roundup updates here on the blog.
This week my warm-up assignment is to create collage+other media studies that explore repetition and a color story, and feature attributes of the kind of art I like, no matter the subject matter: bold shapes and lines, and high contrast.
As you can see in the above photograph, I started. I loved working on it, my inner perfectionist SO wants to go in and 'finish it—but this warm up session is complete and tomorrow is another day.
Bonus Links:
The case for the optimistic mindset…
Watch this Cheetah run in low motion…For me, the best kind of church