Building Boundaries of Enjoyment: Creative Practice
What have you been doing just for fun lately, that's just for you and your own enjoyment?
For me, it's been drawing. I spent a portion of my Spooky Season drawing for Inktober 2021 after I decided to set aside a few hours throughout the month to complete a prompt here and there.
My artistic abilities aren't great, and I would not have been able to get through even the first prompt without the help of free clip-art on Google Images, but I have surprised myself in many ways.
Here are some of those ways:
I'm better at drawing than I thought. It's all far from perfect, but you can take a look at each of the drawings and guess at the prompt that inspired them.
I actually find sketching the outlines and colouring them in as a sort of meditative activity. I'm the type of person who likes to quit things that I'm not instantly good at (who's with me?), so I was wary about trying out visual art. I spent my childhood doodling but I never graduated much farther than that. You can imagine my surprise then when I wasn't just completing the pictures, but I was having fun and reaching a state of calm while doing it.
Each piece takes less time than I originally thought it would. Another aspect of my perfectionist tendencies is that it's difficult for me to start things because my brain convinces me that it'll take endless hours to do the task perfectly, and that perfect is the only acceptable result. Since I started out this project knowing each of my finished products would be less-than-perfect, it was easy for me to push past this limitation and dive right into drawing, even with all of the imperfect lines and slightly-off colour choices. This leaves me surprised at the end of each section, thinking "wow, that did not take long at all". I'm hoping this perspective spreads to other, more serious tasks that I need to do. I'm sure I'd save more time if I actually did things right away instead of spending hours panicking about them first.
Bodies of work are easy to produce when you do a little bit at a time, instead of trying to squeeze a year's worth of output into one stressed evening. As a university student I was a procrastinator, I'd stress about an assignment for days until my fear of failing kicked my motivation into gear and I'd write a whole paper in three hours, just barely submitting before the deadline. In some ways, I still work like this today, but it's getting better. This drawing practice has shown me how much can get done if I put in a little effort consistently over a longer period of time than if I were to try and draw 15 photos by midnight on October 31st, stressfully attempting prove that I participated in the event without really enjoying it or creating an environment where I can learn from the work I did in the past.
Speaking of learning from earlier work, this practice has shown me that the ability to learn as I go makes starting imperfectly so worth it. Is my most recent sketch better than my first one? Well, they're all similar in skill-level, but I learned a lot more about the app I use, the techniques that work for me, and how I like to draw all from starting where I was on Day 1 and allowing myself to learn as I go. This has proven to be a better than placing an expectation to learn all that there is out there about drawing and colour theory before putting Apple Pencil to Paperlike Screen Protector.
Image description: Multiple frames in across two photos, there is a hand drawn clip art of; apple pie, a wing, a lantern, a tombstone, a broom, a jack'o'lantern with 'EAS' sketched into it, a grey owl, a spider, a guillotine, and an embroidery hoop with 'EAS' stitched onto it
How does this relate to boundaries?
In our current society, we’re constantly inundated with the message that if you aren’t making money off of something then it’s not worth doing. Often (but not always) to make money off of a skill, you have to be at least half-decent at executing it.
That leaves little room for trying new things just for fun and exploration, and I’ve even considered taking up drawing and other forms of visual art with the intention of monetizing my creations down the line. Participating in 2021’s inktober was a very specific decision to let myself do something that I’m not that great at, to learn, to fail, and to maybe end the month with something that I was proud of. Something just for me, just for fun.
That whole process is a boundary in itself, it was a decision that I made to quiet the external noise and lean fully into an internal desire without forcing myself to validate that desire through sales and recognition. I’m share these reflections, and the drawings, with you, not for your validation (although I hope these doodles make you smile!) but as something to think about.
Where are you putting too much pressure on hobbies or aspects of your life that should just be leisure?
Alternatively, what have you been doing just for fun lately, just for you and your own enjoyment? What have you learned from this practice? Will you be taking those lessons forward into other aspects of your life?
Final Thoughts
This is hitting the blog way later than October, but Experimental Audio Scene Newsletter members got to read this post months ago and they were given an opportunity to respond back to the conversation.
If you want to get these kinds of updates in the moment, rather than weeks or months after the fact, consider joining the mailing list!
Thanks to @lanylevendula, @uusikuuu, and @caitlinmccarthyart for the daily prompt posts that inspired these drawings. If you want to see those prompt lists, click on their @s to be taken to the specific posts.