Starting and ending the year with small daily journaling actions
Exploring visual vocabulary with color swatches and contour drawings
The quest for daily art practice is something I keep coming back to. I make a lot of art, but I don’t easily fall into a regular routine of doing the same thing day after day. Sometimes I wonder if daily art is really appealing to me, and after all, isn’t that why I do this job? In 2020 I kept an almost perfect daily nature journal for a month or two and wrote this blog post about it. In December of this year, I found myself enjoying my journaling practices but looking for something simple that I could do for myself to draw every day. I’m interested in finding an action so small it can be done in a minute or two, yet interesting enough that I think about it, and am curious to see what it looks like. In October I made a color swatch a day for a while and really enjoyed that.
This process led me to explore my visual vocabulary. How do I like to draw and paint, and what kinds of things am I curious about? I loved the color exercise because it combined looking inside myself and observing my surroundings. Some days my color swatch was about a feeling, and some days it was about something outside, but my favorite days were a combination of the two. I also like the science and art of mixing different pigments together and seeing how they blend and separate. For example, cobalt teal blue (one of my favorite colors) has heavy particles that almost always separate when mixed with other pigments.
The other thing I love to do and never seem to get tired of is contour drawing. Sometimes done blind (without looking at the drawing), this process of slowly tracing the shapes of a subject with one continuous line feels intimate, meditative, relaxing, and surprising to me. With my pen, I am tickling my subject and probing into its depths, while also working from some inside fold of my brain that doesn’t always do the decision-making. I started making one semi-blind contour drawing a day. They are semi-blind because I would look at the paper sometimes to match things up in space. Because I like collections, I did them all together on one spread and I enjoy how this became a succinct diary of these days in Vermont.
I decided I would try to combine these two to keep a daily sort of “diary” where I do one color swatch and one contour drawing on the same paper. It is a good intersection of the two small practices that are easy for me to do yet also interesting enough to want to try them over and over. I’m going to keep doing it and I’ll let you know how it continues. So far, the main issue is that I like to do the color swatch first, and it takes a while to dry, so I can’t quite sit down and do it in one go, but I’m enjoying it.
I am curious what your experience is with small daily creative actions. Is there something small and simple (that can take under two minutes) that you’d like to practice every day?
I’ve happily just come across your publication and this one was my first read, which I really enjoyed, thank you. I’m pretty new to drawing and am also exploring paint (watercolour, gouache). I have one of those Art Toolkit palettes too, they’re fab! I have come to love the concept of blind contour drawing and feel for me it’s more than a way to practice drawing, it’s an end in itself. I’ve been doing something similar in my smallest sketchbook, doing a blind contour on one page then adding a little colour in paint to it, and finishing up with a paint doodle on the opposite page using the same colour/s. It feels like it’s becoming a habit and could carry me along when I’m stuck with what to do next.
I'm arriving late to your newsletter but I love your work and I'm happy to have found it (via your Happy New Year! email update).
A number of years ago when I was in a different job and often frustrated with my inability to practice my writing craft as much as I needed to, I started a practice of writing at least one good sentence a day in my journal. That ultimately led to my first book, which ultimately enabled me to quit my square job and devote my life to writing. So I am a big fan of the magic that can come from a small, dedicated, daily practice that doesn't necessarily have to begin as a Big Deal.
I went back to see the sentence I wrote the day you posted this newsletter and this is it:
2023_0111: Taking lunch in the Ninepipe Cafeteria where, cold as it is, the only others passing-by to eyeball the newcomer and perhaps offer a snarky observation or two are the magpies and the crows.
I should tell you the "Ninepipe Cafeteria" isn't a cafeteria at all. I was on a lunch break and I just set up the camp chair I keep in my truck to eat my lunch beside a frozen pond under some scraggly willows and cottonwoods in the Ninepipe National Wildlife Refuge, which is on the CSKT Reservation in Western Montana.