Rediscovering the Joy of Creating

Play is essential for a healthy creative practice. It’s easy, especially as a professional illustrator, to get stuck in a rut and feel bogged down by your default approach. If left unchecked, this can quickly turn to burnout. The antidote? Creative play. 

Creative play—which we’ll define as art made quickly and experimentally, without the intention of generating income—can break you out of old patterns and help you rediscover the joy of making art. Lee, Sam, and Anthony have all experienced this as hosts of SVSLearn’s bi-monthly event, Freaky Friday, a live draw-along featuring fun, exploratory prompts. Generating and executing ideas unrelated to one’s typical subject matter within a predetermined amount of time leads to increased impulsiveness and limits overthinking. The results, while typically unfinished, are fresh and lively, often sparking ideas that can be applied to finished work. 

You can start your own creative play practice with a few simple guidelines. First, limit yourself to a small window of time—maybe ten minutes to an hour. It should be short enough that you don’t have time to overanalyze or edit your choices. Next, pick a prompt. It could be random (check out our old Freaky Friday recordings for some great ideas!), or based on something currently catching your interest. Finally, set your limitations. It could be anything from a restricted color palette to a limited number of shapes or brushstrokes to drawing with your non-dominant hand. Then, let yourself play! Don’t worry about the outcome; do what feels fun and free in the moment. Reconnect with the enjoyment that propelled you into art in the first place. 

At the end of your playtime, notice what you love about what you made. How can you incorporate this bold freshness into the rest of your work? The combination of creative limitations with total detachment from results will spark ideas and give you a sense of freedom, which you might not have felt in a long time.