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Danny Gregory: I help you make art again

Each Friday, I send advice, ideas, stories and tips to 25K creative people like you. Author of 13 best-selling books on creativity. Founder of Sketchbook Skool w 50k+ students

Featured Post

⏳ The Time I Didn't Spend.

When I was 27, I almost learned to play the piano. I’d gone to a dinner party, and the host—a film editor, not a musician—sat down at an old upright and played something slow and emotional. It wasn’t flashy. He used both hands, sure, but he wasn’t showing off. It sounded like he was speaking with the keys. I remember thinking: I want to do that. The next morning, I looked up local music teachers in the Yellow Pages. Then I paused. It would take years to get good. I imagined scales, clunky...

For the last quarter century of his life, my grandfather spent hours each day at his word processor, writing recollections, essays, and articles. He had been a doctor, but like many aging artists and writers, he turned to the page to make sense of the life he had lived. Every decade, he wrote a new version of his autobiography—hundreds of pages of translucent, onion-skinned remembrance. Some he mailed to me or my mother, but most sat in desk drawers or binders, unread, unappreciated. When he...

Each morning, I would stagger out of bed and sit at my kitchen table with a journal and a pen. For the next fifteen minutes, I would fill three pages with whatever oozed out of my bleary brain — anxieties, questions, nightmares, prognostications. It was part of my quest for clarity and perspective, a journey that had led me through religion, philosophy, self-help, and finally to Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Her book prescribed a weekly artist’s date and morning pages, and I had dutifully...

” … I recently read, I forgot where, that gimmicky [drawing] methods, e.g. left-hand work, blind contours, upside down, etc, is a not legitimate way to produce a finished, repeat 'finished', work. Meaning I can understand it is a great practice skill sharpener. And yet, I would probably be willing to agree that unusual limiting techniques are a bit gimmicky for finished art. But yet, some of the great pieces of history appear exactly as though one were altering his or her usual perceptions...

As a small child, I would rearrange the books on my little bedroom bookcase by color and height, alphabetizing authors, titles, subjects — a four-foot librarian. A book has always been a place for me, more than just an object. A place of adventure, discovery, and safety. I can do anything inside a book and never worry about the consequences. Be a pirate, a wolf, an astronaut, a king. I would walk down the street reading, lost in my book, transported, bumping into trash cans and grown-ups’...

Jenny and I have been watching a 4-part TV show called "Life After Life," based on a book we read several years ago by Kate Atkinson. The TV show is as wonderful and thought-provoking as the book. It's the story of a woman who dies again and again only to be reborn in the same time and place with a chance to do it all over again. Despite being killed by her own umbilical cord, by drowning, falling out of a window, a pandemic, a murderous husband, and many other slings and arrows, she returns...

When I was born, my name was Daniel Gregory. Before I was out of diapers, I was known as "Danny." Sometimes when my mother was trying to seduce me into doing something I was reluctant to do, she would call me "Dan." And of course, in any legal circumstance, going through passport control or signing up for a credit card, I was "Daniel." I had fantasies of being arrested because I'd called myself Danny, two bald scowling cops in a small room grilling me on why I was an impostor going by an...

When I was 16, I went to the Rhode Island School of Design summer program. I arrived as a pretty insufferable and opinionated know-it-all — no doubt the reason my mother was eager to let me run off to Providence for a couple of glorious months of art classes and unsupervised dorm life. One week, our design teacher gave us a tough assignment: use up an entire #2 pencil to create a single drawing. The next day, the classroom walls were lined with the results: sheets of paper grimy with...

At the west end of our garden, we have three enormous Chinese elms. They tower some thirty feet, a little cafe table and chairs tucked in their shade. A month ago, the tree on the right began to pump out fresh spring leaves. When my pugs and I strolled our street, we saw that the neighbor's elms were all getting leafy, too. But our other two elms remained skeletal, as naked as they'd been since fall began. I looked up at their bare branches and started to worry. What's going on with them? Are...

There’s a photo I saw recently of a Model T Ford parked in the middle of a dusty Kansas field. Its back wheels are jacked up off the ground, a rope looped around the axle, and trailing off toward some kind of agricultural contraption. The car isn’t driving. It’s threshing wheat. When Henry Ford designed the Model T, he probably didn’t think of it as a grain mill. But that’s what happens when a tool gets into the hands of people who don’t just want to own it—they want to use it. Twist it, hack...