📝 A Year of Publishing
Big (creative) lessons learned after a year of weekly posts
‘Art is made a moment at a time, a day at a time (…) It is the making of art that makes an artist.’ — Julia Cameron
February is The Sketch Club’s birthday month and this is its first year. That means I have regularly published a post every week for the last 52 ones. A great commitment while having a full-time job as an architect and urban designer, but something I have truly enjoyed doing and has given me lots of creative energy.
These are some lessons I learned along the way that would apply (and certainly will) to any other creative endeavour, accompanied by an overview of some of my favourite sketches I did last year.
Good is good enough
This has been one of my mantras for the last year and something I keep reiterating. It’s a manifesto against perfectionism. Publishing and showing up weekly for the last year (and not writing the perfect post) has been my main goal. The Sketch Club is about sharing and connecting, not about writing the perfect paper or chasing the best grade. Only by doing, do we learn.
This is an attitude to life too - good is good enough. And it is so liberating.
There is no such thing as a lack of ideas
When I started publishing The Sketch Club at the beginning of last year, I had a niggling fear of running out of ideas at some point in time. I couldn’t have been more wrong about this: the more I look, the more I draw, the more I write, the more ideas and things to look at, draw and write about I come across. Scarcity can really be a mindset, and it only shows up when we are trying to be creative but we don’t set motion - we need to practice to get more ideas.
Have a plan but be open to change
It’s been good to have a plan and some ideas to get started, but it has also been important to avoid fixating on that plan and be open to change, to let the project take its own form without being an impediment for it to growing organically. To observe and learn about your own project from what others find interesting, to be open-minded about letting the writing do its thing, being more like a channel rather than imposing a rigid structure or theme.
Creativity can be achieved through different means
Drawing and sketching more during this year have unlocked creativity in other areas of my life. This is the unexpectedness of practicing any craft. Attention brings a deeper understanding of reality that can be associated with or extrapolated to other disciplines. The process of publishing The Sketch Club has encouraged me to look harder, and this has bled into my job as a designer, where I have found myself more fluent in problem-solving and storyboarding ideas.
Last, but not least, these next two are important lessons I am currently grasping, only after a year of publishing (this is a bonus for paid subscribers):
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