Look into my sketchbook

Happy Year of the Rabbit! It happens to be my birth year. I know that this usually means bad luck but I am taking on this year with the mindset of embracing opportunity and challenges. In the first month I have worked on my sketchbook that I started in November.

It is filling up nicely and I am really enjoying the flow that I am in creatively.

For the first time in a while I think I have found something of a sense of style. To put it into words at the moment would feel as if I am boxing myself in and that is limiting to my artistic practice at the moment. A few years ago I felt that compared to others around me I had no concrete style. I tried to replicate the things I saw around me or online. It did not feel natural at all.

Now I try my best to let go of perceived or real external pressures on how a piece of work should look and just go for it. Using acrylics, collage, watercolour, Posca, and gel pens has been fun in my sketchbook. The collection of finished and unfinished works are growing and making me want to expand onto canvas or bigger works.

Listening to podcasts is a favourite way of mine to add dynamic into my walks or background. Especially artist ones. There have been several about finding your style or what you want in your art. Exploring, consuming, creating art is one of the common answers in the different podcasts. I feel like I have been doing that unconsciously and now want to do more of it deliberately. Creating resources that can add to my personal and academic creative practice and see where it takes me. I have always felt grateful for my past self when I needed a resources that I had previously saved for “later”. I want to start doing that more consciously now.

I hope you do too. Some ventures are already habits that you can use for your creative, professional, personal, or academic journey. It doesn’t need to be about changing or adding something new to your routine. It might already be something being done unconsciously.