I think this might be the first year I’ve actually started the year spending real time in my sketchbook. This year, on Monday, January 2nd, I started a creative kick-off with Paint With Me, my watercolor painting community. The idea of our kick-off was simple: 15 minutes for 5 days. We started on Monday and ended on Friday.

Inside Paint With Me, I provided a daily prompt consisting of a descriptive word and a reference photo to go with that word. I hosted a live session each day for us to complete our 15 minutes together.

To see a flipthrough of the first five paintings I did for 2023, check out the video below. I also included footage from the live recordings so you can see how far I got in 15 minutes - because some days I continued working to finish up my page.

In creating for even just a small amount of time each day, I was feeling different - in an inspired and refreshed way. I felt this way back in August when I took the community through Artful August (see my sketchbook flip-through here.)

I feel lighter, and more inspired…and wonder why I don’t make time to create every single day. (You’d think I would be a person with a daily creative habit, but that’s definitely not the case!)

For some reason, the feeling I had reminded me of a section I read in Big Magic, by Elizabeth Gilbert where she defines creative living:

“The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.  The hunt to uncover those jewels - that’s creative living.

The courage to go on that hunt in the first place - that’s what separates a mundane existence from a more enchanted one.”

Gilbert goes on to define creative living as “living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear.”

“Living in this manner - continually and stubbornly bringing forth the jewels that are hidden within you - is a fine art, in and of itself.”

She suggests through a story of a friend that creative living is “the best way [...] to unfold a certain beauty and transcendence within [you] that [one] cannot seem to access in any other manner.”

This: Accessing beauty and transcendence through living creatively.

I believe this is at the core of why we seek out creative outlets. It gifts us access to something intangible that we cannot get from any other source.

If you’re here, I think you’re on the hunt for buried treasure too, and I love that we’re on this expedition together.

Wishing you a year of creative living,
Susan

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