Ten Minute Artist

Taking time to express and documenting my humanity in a week that is already full!

Ten Minute Artist, is based on this idea that you don’t need a studio in Brooklyn, or a cabin in in the woods, or someone to choose you before you can start making art, which is a way any of us can express and document our humanity. And you can do that in as little as ten minutes a day.

Today is a start of another busy week, I’m co hosting an Art Quest session with Jen Gubicza and an Art Gym Session with Katie Stack, a Gameplan Cohort and Finishing art for a picturebook, while on the back burner I have a book pitch, planning for a retreat.

But instead of jumping into all of that, I’m starting with my daily practice of making something for myself for Ten Minutes.

At least I will attempt to.

After Twisting my pen on, I find myself once again with a blank page, and the usual barrier that prevents me from making the first mark easily. So I put down the pen..

using a day date stamper to make the first mark

.. and pick up this date stamper my mom gave me, set up todays’s date, and boom.. I’ve committed to the spread, the date stamper is equal to the task of breaking that first barrier, maybe we can talk about why in the comments.

Drawing boxes for comics

So I start by drawing a box and dividing it into four panels, I call this the ten minute visual journal method , having this little scaffolding helps me never have to think about what I’m going to make while always producing meaningful and valuable results.

In the first panel I draw and write about a moment I had yesterday.

Then I move quickly to what I’m working on today.

Next I make a panel about something that is coming up

And I wrap it up by choosing to focus on one aspect of my life that i am grateful for, today I drew my family as a collection of hearts, inspired by something my kid told me yesterday.

In the past this would be the whole exercise, but these day’s I’ve added a second page where I write the answer to the question, “where is your mind going to now”, I’m watching in real time as the next though floods in, pulling me down from this creative state of self expression and creativity, to the survival mind.

Which is of course important, but it’s also the place where anxiety and animosity come from, it’s a more animal than human state. But I listen and write it down, I keep my hand moving and filling up the page by asking ‘what else..’ whenever my hand stops moving. And at the end of the page I stop.

I’m allowing myself to pay attention to this internal dialogue, to respect it.

There was once a prophet who said that the voice of God, is not in the great wind, the earthquake or a fire, but in the quiet whisper. I write down the whisper.

And that is how I use this practice to center me and orient me, while also building a catalogue of inspiration that I can draw from in the future, where everyday is recorded and remembered.

Don’t let your days blend into an endless forgotten blur, instead take ten minutes for yourself to make some marks and listen to that quiet whisper inside of you, it is divine.

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