Welcome to the monthly project, every month paid subscribers get a 5-Day project that you can do in ten minutes a day(ish). These project help keep your artist diaries fresh, and serve as a great way to jump back into a regular creative practice.

Upgrade to unlock this and all previous projects, along with access to share your work in the community. Plus instantly unlock a 15 day Guided Plan to: Start a Daily Drawing Habit — Delivered daily to your email.

Fancy art materials can be a problem.

There is this phrase that I love from Lynda Barry’s book ‘Making Comics’. She talks about a type of drawing that are: “crude, quick, disposable and anonymous”. This is the kinds of drawings that kids make, and it’s probably why they have so much fun making it.

Yes we want to make beautiful art, but it’s useful to also have a part of our process that allows the kid artist in us to come out and play.

In drawing 100 faces in 5 days, we’re going to explore this type of childish drawing for 5 days.

Let’s get started!

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Each idea in themselves can serve to unlock our latent abilities and serve as a base for future growth. Taken together these aspects will give you the confidence and tools to be able to draw anything.

As usual the project consists of five ten minute assignments, designed to be taken one a day, be warned these exercises are so enjoyable that you might end up spending hours.

Here’s what we’ll cover.

Day 1: Mark Making

Day 2: Shapes

Day 3: Blocks

Day 4: Blobs

Day 5: Better Stickmen

This project is part 3 of Start a daily drawing habit - a gameplan

We need a place to collect play and collect our inspiration, record our days and explore ideas. Some people keep sketchbooks and journals, but those label can create an expectation and pressure.

An Artist Diary, is something much more intimate it’s a place that we can write and draw in, but we could just as easily make a painting, and stick in some interesting pieces of paper and ephemera.

We’ll be doing some of that in this project. (And more in a future project)

Over 5 days I will offer you 5 ways to fill your artist diary.

Some use this as a menu, others have picked a default and kept going with that, ideally this will be an inspiration and you will develop your own ideas.

These are the modules we’ll cover.

Day 1: Draw One Line a Day

Day 2: Daily Diary

Day 3: Free Writing

Day 4: Daily Comic

Day 5: Start with an image (the messy page)

Ten Minute Artist is a community of creatives who believe in the power of a daily creative practice. By taking Ten Minutes a Day to practice our creativity, we build that creative capacity that transforms the mundanity of daily life into opportunities for new creative expressions.

This might mean some thing special in a sketchbook, but it could just as likely mean sparking a meaningful conversation, or solving an impossible problem in your life or the lives of those around you.

Algorithms, divide us and dehumanise us, turning us into nothing but mindless consumers. Exercising or creativity is a tool for freeing ourselves from imposed programming and writing our own scripts

“Start a Daily Drawing Habit, a 15-day gameplan (10 minutes a day)” is available to all paid subscribers.

Paid subscribers also get a new 5-Day project each month.(10 minutes a day) It’s a way to keep momentum, jump back in if you fall off, and stay connected with the community.

The Project Library houses all previous projects, this lets you pick a creative challenge to suit your moment in the journey.

Join the Community!

As soon as you join, I’ll walk you through the Starting a Daily Drawing Habit Gameplan, through a series of daily emails. There will be room for you to share your work with the community and you’re free to reply any of the emails to ask me questions if you need guidance. I look forward to seeing you inside!

The entire premise of Ten Minute Artist, centers around our ability to be present, energetic and tap into the creativity that is in us and around us, and bring some small portion of that onto a page each day.

This means existing in time in a certain state, to make space and time for our art. The good news is that all you need is 10 minutes.

This project is designed to be taken over 5 days, but if you want to work through them more quickly, go for it!

Day 1: High Voltage Time

Day 2: Time Tetris

Day 3: Taking Time

Day 4: Alive time

Day 5: Sacred Time

Join me and hundreds of Ten Minute Artist in the gallery (link at the end of each day’s assignment)

Ten Minute Artist is a community of creatives who believe in the power of a daily creative practice. By taking Ten Minutes a Day to practice our creativity, we build that creative capacity that transforms the mundanity of daily life into opportunities for new creative expressions.

This might mean something special in a sketchbook, but it could just as likely mean sparking a meaningful conversation, or solving an impossible problem in your life or the lives of those around you.

Algorithms, divide us and dehumanise us, turning us into nothing but mindless consumers. Exercising or creativity is a tool for freeing ourselves from imposed programming and writing our own scripts

“Start a Daily Drawing Habit, a 15-day gameplan (10 minutes a day)” is available to all paid subscribers.

Paid subscribers also get a new 5-Day project each month (10 minutes a day) It’s a way to keep momentum, jump back in if you fall off, and stay connected with the community.

The Project Library houses all previous projects, this lets you pick a creative challenge to suit your moment in the journey.

Join the Community!

As soon as you join, I’ll walk you through the Starting a Daily Drawing Habit Gameplan, through a series of daily emails. There will be room for you to share your work with the community and you’re free to reply any of the emails to ask me questions if you need guidance. I look forward to seeing you inside!

Every month I drop a new 5-Day project, to help you add some variety to your daily creative practice, or to serve as a ramp to gently invite you back in if you’ve fallen off. Whether you make art for the pure joy of it or if you’re a working creative professional, I encourage you to try a Ten Minute Artist practice.

The practice of creating something for yourself daily, even if only for ten minutes.

In this project we’re going to talk about MAKING COMICS, here’s what we’ll cover:

Day 1: Daily Comic and Meditation (here)

Day 2: What did you do yesterday?

Day 3: Transitions

Day 4: Character and Story

Day 5: Lettering

Welcome to Day 1 of : Making Comics

In the image above you will see two books I bought with the same title 16 years apart. I started with the Scott McCloud book, because that was the one recommended by comic superstars of the day.

I probably resisted the Lynda Barry book, partly because I already read a book on ‘Making Comics’ that felt exhaustive. Now I know that the books couldn’t be more different.

Scott’s book was all about the ‘rules’ of making comics. Which in hindsight is not the best place to start, useful, but it’s like learning grammar before learning how to cry for milk.

Both crying and speaking are effective forms of communication, but one comes from a direct and primal place and the other contains layers of protocols and accepted norms.

Lynda Barry teaches, comics as a natural language.

Scott McCloud teaches us the Rules.

I’ll dip into both books, and I’ll give you a framework to explore both the natural language and grammar of making comics in your daily ten minute practice.

We’ll learn by doing, starting with this assignment:

Daily Comic & Meditations

An assignment.

I acknowledge that you will probably need 10 minutes for the comic and another 10 minutes for the meditations, so if you’re pressed for time, break the assignment up into 2 parts and spend 10 days on them rather than 5.

For the next 5 day’s we’ll be setting up spreads in our Artist Diary, like so:

On the left page, we will start with an exercise you might now be familiar with which is the Ten Minute Visual Journal Method, it’s a starting point and we will evolve it each day.

Draw 4 squares, that serve as panels and use them to answer these 4 questions.

What did you do yesterday?

What are you working on?

What’s coming up?

What are you grateful for?

Grammar notes:

Notice how on my page the ‘gutter’ or space between panels don’t align on the top row and the bottom row. That is your first lesson in leading the eye, this method, leads across the page after the first panel instead of testing it to move downwards.

A present side effect is you can have frames of different proportions which can be useful for pacing and framing different subjects.

You see comics capture a series of moments, and the width of a panel is one way to make the moment linger, of flash by.

Primal Language:

Now fill the panels by answering the questions. Imagine yourself inside the panel experience in the moment, whether drawing the past or the future, draw it as if it’s the present. Enter the moment and live it on the page. If you imagine or remember a conversation from that scene, write it down.

Don’t over think it.

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