Category: how-to

A series on the creative process.

What if you stop making art?

dannygregory1 Comment

In a recent email, Brad wrote,

“You mentioned once that there have been times in your life you haven’t sketched as much…some lengthy period of time going by without picking up your pen. Does this still happen to you, this lack of motivation to sketch? How do you get through it? Do you force yourself to pick up that pen, or do you let the period of time just play itself out and not worry about it?”

— Brad

Well, Brad, I haven’t shaken those infernal dips and yips yet.

Like recently — I have been so busy that I haven’t had an awful lot of time to draw for fun. Or to write more than my weekly essays.

What with the impending holiday season, I am also feeling a little paunchy and out of shape, so I’ve been going to a wonderful trainer. It took me a couple of months after the excesses of the summer to overcome my torpor, put down my beer glass and french fries, and drag my fat butt to the gym, but I finally did it, and immediately, I felt better. Now I know I am on the road to regular exercise again.

It’s the same with drawing. I get busy (ironically, telling other people to draw more), time dries up, and my sketchbook gathers dust.

I don’t press it too hard.

I think forcing yourself to draw when you really don’t want to is a mixed bag. Sometimes, it will jolt you out of the blues; sometimes, you will just come to associate your blues with the practice of drawing.

My main thought, Brad, is give yourself a break. Just set your sketchbook aside and feed your muse.

The key for me is to keep allowing myself always to be inspired. Not to beat myself up but to stay positive. To look at art, to stay engaged.

Try looking at others’ work in books and videos and on Instagram, and see if they inspire you. I am a big fan of a BBC series called “What artists do all day.” It’s available on YouTube and watching it often stirs my pot, as it were.

I know that one day soon, I will once again feel the itch to draw. And when I do, I’ll have that familiar flood of neural chemicals that make me feel relaxed and centered and in the world.

It just starts with one little drawing, one bump over the doorstep, one decision to put my gym clothes on rather than roll over and hit the snooze button. Even a dreadful drawing makes me feel better than a blank page.

We are grown-ups. We don’t need to beat ourselves up or let the monkey in our heads do it for us. Just remind yourself that it’s fun, then come up with an assignment for yourself.

Draw 100 dogs. Draw 30 faces in 30 days. Or 30 shoes. Or 30 crumpled sheets of paper. Draw every meal you have this month. Set your alarm 30 minutes early and paint the dawn.

And though this isn’t an ad, I have to tell you how helpful Sketchbook Skool is in keeping people inspired. Come to the Skool Yard. Sign up for Spark at Sketchbook Skool and take a few classes with Janis and Jason and me.

Whatever you decide to do, make it fun, suspend judgment, relax, and just think of it as dirtying some pages.

Soon, you’ll be back in the groove, making and happy again — I promise.

Miss my blog? Do this.

dannygregory3 Comments

I haven’t blogged here for a while. But I am still thinking and writing — and breathing. And I want to share what I’m making with you.

But I don’t want to make you have to drag all the way over to this website to read it. Instead, I will send my blatherings directly to you — if you tell me where to send ’em.

Just click here and give me your info. I’ll do the rest.

Live Drawing Parties

dannygregory8 Comments

Greetings from my bunker to yours! Let’s get together and draw a little. It’ll pass the time, break the isolation and make us feel calm and centered.

Here’s the deal: Every day at noon ET, I will go onto YouTube and Facebook and share a lesson from the vast SketchBook Skool archive of lessons. Then we’ll work on it together.

I did it for the first time today and 350+ people showed up — we had a lovely time. (Recording below)

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How to cope.

dannygregory20 Comments

Image: Dawn at the Newark airport. I’m going on vacation.

These are times of worry, stress and anxiety. History is thrashing around like an avalanche, the solid ground is shifting, the familiar landscape is collapsing.

We shrink when a stranger coughs. Wildfires. Politics. Economics.The news cycle is unrelenting.

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How to grow healthy.

dannygregory12 Comments

My grandmother won prizes for her gorgeous chrysanthemums. She had a huge rose garden that was designed like a Persian Carpet. She had two full time gardeners who kept her topiaries trimmed and her lawns like billiard tables. She taught me to love making things grow and to respect the endless powers of Nature.

One of her pet peeves: “Why must Americans call it ‘dirt’? It’s soil. It’s earth. It’s not dirty. It’s wonderful.”

Last week, I thought about her often as we watched a wonderful film about turning dirt into magic. The Biggest Little Farm is a documentary about the Chesters, a cooking blogger and a filmmaker, who worked for eight years to transform a mistreated farm into a Garden of Eden.

Continue reading “How to grow healthy.” →

How to see dinosaurs.

dannygregory19 Comments

Last week, I spent a lot of time watching Floridians. There were a fair number of geezers in golfing shirts and slow-moving Cadillacs, but the most interesting creatures by far were the birds. Limpkins, buntings, grackles, curlews, grebes, plovers, loons and whipoorwills.

I love watching birds, even in New York where you mainly run across grayer species likes sparrows and pigeons. The park across the street is home to doves, starlings and the occasional woodpecker but the most exciting are the red-tailed hawks who nest on the top floor of the NYU library. They hunt in the morning and at dusk, usually pigeons, squirrels and rats, but rumor has it they show up with the occasional tabby. I always used to worry they’d snatch our miniature dachshunds and try to fly off with them while I gripped the leash like a kite string.

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How to handle perspective.

dannygregory29 Comments

I was working at my desk when the news flashed on the screen. Notre Dame was burning. The videos and pictures were heart-stopping and across the world we were joined by a sense of helplessness as a thousand years of history and culture exploded in flames. I had visions of a charred wreck left to hulk on the Seine, a post-modern monument to human fragility surrounded by rioting yellow vests. The toppling spire sparked a deep sense of dread in me, that our civilization itself was toppling, that our history was being erased, that humanity was all too vulnerable, that I too would soon be forgotten dust.

Twenty-four hours later, the fire was out, the damage assessed. It was extensive but appears confined to the roof. I read with relief that the cathedral had been heavily damaged and rebuilt several other times in its long history, and by day’s end almost a billion dollars had been raised to start the restoration. Within a day, we had gone from annihilation to resiliency to the Mueller report. Next.

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How to dabble.

dannygregory44 Comments

I’ve had a bunch of ideas and projects simmering on the stovetop of my mind and, because most or all of them may never get out of the kitchen, I thought I’d serve them up here and see what you think.

Mike Lowery just sent me a little book he made and had printed (How to Keep a Travel Sketchbook ). I loved the book but was also curious about how he’d had it made which turned out to be a company called Scout https://scoutbooks.com/ that makes little books of a certain size and length, and the cuteness of these little books, essentially pocket-sized pamphlets with kraftboard covers, reminded me of the books I used to love to make as a kid and I badly wanted to make one again. A similar impulse happened when I came across the Newspaper Club, a company that prints small-run newspapers, and I was obsessed with the idea of making an issue or two, but which, like my fantasies of letterpressing and screenprinting, died under a bleak vision of exhausted cardboard boxfuls of unwanted printed matter stacked to the ceiling of Jack’s former bedroom, sort of like the warehouse scene at the end of Citizen Kane but more ramshackle and sad. Anyway, the idea of making my own little books has haunted me since I was six and the fact that you can make them more easily and more professionally than ever keeps that flame alive.

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How to get great.

dannygregory9 Comments

You’ve probably heard of “The 10,000 hour rule”. Malcolm Gladwell popularized it in Outliers —  in which he posits that it takes that long to become expert at any skill. Gladwell’s distillation of the science behind “rule” has been debunked since then. Not surprising, our own experience confirms that there’s more to the story.

Think about driving. You’ve probably been doing it for decades. If you commute for an hour, you’ll drive 10,000 hours in twenty years. So are you an expert driver? Really? Could you win a NASCAR race? Do stunts in an action movie?

Continue reading “How to get great.” →