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
⚙️ My Perpetual Motion Machine.
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Sometimes when I go to the gym, I have to really drag my ass there. I am tired, low energy, whiny, wincing at the idea of exerting myself again. But I always leave revitalized, reenergized, and glad I came. Always. It's a predictable amnesia—my body forgets yesterday's post-workout high the moment today's effort looms. My studio is the same sort of place. There are times I avoid it. Or use it to watch YouTube videos and answer emails. An office, not a workshop. But these days, I’m going through a creative spring, and I can’t wait to fling open the door each morning. I’ve been drawing and painting and writing seven days a week. I’ve filled dozens and dozens of sketchbook pages with tempera, ink, watercolor, pencils, and collage. It’s been glorious madness. At first, I was out of practice creating so regularly, a little stiff and sore. My first day was mediocre and cramped, and I worried I’d squandered my ability to make stuff I liked. Or maybe I was condemned to a long period of disappointment before I felt confident and rewarded again. But my recovery has been surprising. Within three days, the ideas started to flow, and so did my lines. My creative muscles didn’t atrophy for long; they remembered their purpose, and they plumped up, rippling and bulging once more, chomping at the bit and raring to go. Creativity isn’t just a practice or a chore. It’s a perpetual motion machine that feeds on itself. The more I do, the more I can do. When I lose my creative habit, it’s almost always lurking perfectionism. When I drag my feet or feel blocked, it’s usually because I fear I can’t make anything good. I tell myself that it’ll be a disappointing and exhausting slog. Anything I make will suck. But when I commit to my daily art habit again, I stop worrying so much if any particular piece is good or bad. I know I’ll make a lot of crap — but I’ll also make a lot of brilliant, surprising stuff. The key isn’t the quality. It’s the quantity. The odds move in my favor the more often I step up to the plate. You gotta be in it to win it. For me, the joy is in the doing. The more I create, the more I think about it when I’m not in my studio. Ideas fly at me from the ether, in the shower, in my dreams. I wake up with my brain buzzing. I plunge into risky experiments because I can afford to fail. There’s lots more where that came from. People complain that they don’t have time to make art. But that’s rarely the problem. I have time because I make it. I’m focused. I prune things out of my life so I can do what I really want. I don’t piss away energy on unnecessary things. I don’t watch sports and crap on TV. I sleep a little less (though when I do sleep, I sleep a lot better). I value every moment because I want to spend it making art. Rekindling my passion doesn’t add more hours to the day. But it does reveal how much time I was wasting on activities I didn’t really care about. Ironic but true: the more I focus, the broader my creative world. When I first started to keep an illustrated journal some 30 years ago, it was like a high school crush. I couldn’t wait to get back to it, to explore new things and make new discoveries. Today, I felt that same quickening of my pulse. I want to try out a new composition, do a little four-panel cartoon, break out my designer gouache, and fill all my fountain pens with different inks. There’s just so much to explore and play with. That's the thing about creative momentum—once it starts rolling, it carries you as long as you stay on the ride. Your pal, Danny |
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
Why am I writing this essay? Because it’s almost Friday, and I always send out an essay each Friday. Because I’m a writer, and writers write. Because (most of the time) I love doing this—arranging ideas, picking words. Because I want to see the finished piece. And feel that sense of satisfaction. Because I do this for you. But more, I do this for me. But does it matter why I do this? Absolutely. Because if I mistake my motivations and I’m fuzzy on my goals, I could end up looking for answers...
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...