*Guest post by Amanda Judd.
This is the second post of a three part series about ways to encourage your daily art journaling practice. The first post addressed the importance of showing up for yourself as an artist. Establishing a goal for your daily practice will help support your art making practice.
Having a goal allows you to focus on developing your artistry. It also gives you something to aim for. Maybe it’s a week for working on building up pages with stencils or a month of working with nature quotes or a year of being BOLD in your art making. If you’re just getting in the habit of establishing a daily art making practice, your specific art goal can help focus what you will do when you open up your art journal.
It’s good to go further than just figuring out what you really want to do. Ask yourself these questions: Why is this goal important? How will you get it? What could prevent you from accomplishing it? How will you know when you’ve accomplished it?
These questions are important to answer whether you’re working on a specific goal for a week, a month, the season, or the year. The answers help you prioritize your goals as well as root their significance to your creative development.
Time:
30 minutes – 2 hours
Materials list:
Art Journal (I was working in a 11×14 spiral bound, mixed media journal with 98lb paper.)
Markers and pencils
Paint: Acrylics
Palette knife and paint brushes
Ephemera, collage elements
Scissors
Adhesive (gel medium or glue)
Brainstorm things you’d like to be able to do as an artist and how you’d like to feel. Write them down. I started by making a grid not really knowing why or where that would take me. I ended up filling in the boxes with what I generated from my brainstorm.
Then, I covered it up using a palette knife and acrylic paint. This allowed me to move into the next step of seeing which of my many interests would rise to the surface. Which of all these ideas resonated with me the most? Or maybe some of the ideas join together into an area to explore creatively. This happened for me. You decide where you will focus.
After I picked something to work on, I asked myself these questions about my newly articulated goal: What do I really want? Why is this goal important to me? How will I get it? What is preventing it? How will I know it worked?
The answers to these questions will help clarify your goals and figure out what is necessary to attain them.
Creative goal setting is a great way to filter out paralyzing aspects of possibility that can arise when we sit down to our art tables ready to make art, any kind of art. By predetermining what you would like to work on and why, you create structure for your daily practice as well as flushing out a game plan to keep you motivated towards attaining your creative goal.
More About Amanda Judd:
I work over at Pink Love Studio. It took me a super long time to claim my artist title but I have. And now, I mix media with LOVE. For me, making art combines meditation, play and journey. It’s a process that teaches me about trust and acceptance;; an iterative feedback loop which fascinates me. It leads me on a journey into awareness plus creation. I work from here, eagerly.
URL: PinkLoveStudio.com
E-mail: [email protected]
For more art journaling ideas, check out some of these titles: