Need Painting Inspiration? Try This Notebook Practice.

Keeping the ideas for paintings coming is something every artist has to find a way to deal with...

Creativity isn’t always an endless flow, available whenever we want it. If only that were true!

But that doesn’t have to stop you from being able to paint one of your great ideas any time you want.

There is a solution. It’s easy and can be fun--but you’ve got to actually do it to get the results of having ideas on demand, or something as close to it as possible.

Enter the humble notebook...

You’ve heard this one before, but if you aren’t doing it--you are really missing out. Let me tell you a little about it, and see if it doesn’t get you a little bit excited about the possibilities.

OR--if you’d rather have long periods of time where you are looking for ideas and hiding from your blank canvases while binge watching shows you’ve already seen-- then go ahead and skip this one!

Still here? Great! Now let’s get into it!

A really useful thing you can do as a painter--beginner or not-- is to keep a regular visual log.

Get or grab a sketchbook or notebook with 50 pages or more. It should probably be one with paper that can take some light painting as well. Something better than newsprint--but not as fancy as watercolor paper. It should be simple enough that you don’t care about using it up fairly quickly, but nice enough that you feel motivated to bother doing it in the first place.

Ideally you’ll have lots of them in the next year, so keep that in mind.

The best ideas tend to come after having a hundred so-so ones---and you may not know it’s a good one at first.

It could be an idea from the future that came in a bit early. Think of it that way, and keep documenting them.

So every day--or as often as you can-- just open it and see what comes up. Fill it from front to back so that you can see your progression.

Some good things to add are:

Written notes/ideas
Pencil sketches
Pen and ink studies
Small paintings of details
Color stories to try
Color mixing notes
Some kind of back story for a painting
Brush techniques
Skin tones
Shadow effects
Inspiring clippings/photos
Lettering practice

Once you have a lot of practice with this, and find subjects you are really into, you’ll find them filling up the pages--which makes your book more interesting to flip through later.

If botanicals are your thing, decorate the pages with succulents, wildflowers and thorny thistles while you wait for more.

Meanwhile your hand is moving...

A good idea is to draw some of the elements you plan to use in paintings later, and get pretty detailed. Then add some paint colors to remind you of the palette you were thinking of, or maybe as a way to see what might work together.

It’s nice to look back and see a mix of all of it.

Some days the pages will be filled up with notes in the margins, other days it’ll be some light sketching of nothing much. That’s creativity, you just have to show up and see what happens (and if it’s not much at least you tried!).

Over time, it shows you things you wouldn’t have seen otherwise. It can also turn a few random marks on the page into an idea for a painting that you didn’t see coming. (That’s a bonus!).

Eventually you’ll find a rhythm, and it’ll be one that you’ll get to know well. Expect ideas to happen since the pressure is off to do anything “official” or finished looking.

No one needs to see it, and you can get started right away...

So when you’re in the next creative dry spell, it can really help to flip back through the book and let things jump out at you as they will, or dig deeper into something that you had always meant to try.

So keep those ideas wrangled together in a notebook and no longer suffer the FOMO of lost ideas that were SO GOOD--if only you could figure out where you put them...!