Sketching, changing mediums and cultivating creativity

I thought I would never sketch again. It has happened a few times before and I find it very tricky - it’s somehow possible to force a commissioned painting but with a sketch, it seems impossible.

A sketch has to be wanted, wished for and one thing that I really need in order to sketch, is a feeling. And to be honest, I just didn’t feel like sketching for quite a while. Then something switched and I started longing for the colour blue; I got myself a set of pigment markers in three shades of blue and began making small value studies which turned on something in my brain. I like thinking of sketches as small forms of visual poetry, and value sketches seem to have a similar quality to haiku.

For me, it’s about following the impulse, letting your heart take the lead and react to reality the way it wants. You have to trust your hand. 

 

 

These sketches, like many others that I've done, are celebration of memories, of my day-to-day reality as a mother. When I drew them, I remembered each of those days and it produced a certain warmth inside. 

Sketching simply makes me feel better. 

 

 

When I feel creatively stuck, one thing that seems to help is changing the medium, the size, the approach. Letting go of expectations and simply playing with the form. It somehow brings back the pleasure of creation and helps express myself better - with fewer means, more effectively. So if you're in this difficult place of not knowing how to move forward, just get some rest and then do something differently. Get out some markers, crayons, the stuff that made you want to create when you were a child.