Day 01 of the 14 Day Art for Self Care Challenge on the Skillshare Discord, Daily Art Practice for Self-Care: 14 Days of Messages To Yourself with @jessicaswift

I’ve been having a lot of fun participating in the Skillshare Discord Challenges so I’m super excited for this 14-day challenge. I love that we’re following along with a single class over the course of two weeks (off on the weekends!) and doing art for self-care. I was feeling very “meh” in August about everything–my inactivity, my lack of inspiration to make art, my lack of art skills so the art I made always looked weird, my lack of motivation to do drills or practice to improve my art, my lack of “progress”, my lack of “time”, my lack of “income” and on and on it went. I’m hoping this self care art practice gets me out of this slump.

I’m also eager to strengthen my ability to hear and listen to my inner voice. A big source of my anxiety comes from overthinking and ruminating and getting lost in my own negative thoughts, so in my current mind, it feels like I’ve never heard my inner voice or listened to my intuition. I struggle with “tuning in” to my intuition, even though I do yoga and meditate almost every day. I’m not sure if that’s entirely true, because I heard my intuition telling me to leave my job, even though I was very resistant and barely listening and my intuition was basically having a full-on meltdown before I started hearing what I needed to hear. But I think I’m getting better at it. After going to a BBQ over Labor Day, for instance, I heard my intuition pretty clearly, “Just go for it. Fuck it, I’m going to do this art thing.” But still, most of the time, I’m not even sure what it really means to “tune in” to my intuition (I can’t even pick what I want to eat), so I’m really hoping that this challenge helps me develop this listening muscle.

I was going to go with drawing on the iPad in Procreate for this challenge, which is mostly what I have used in past challenges, but I wanted to try something different and use gouache for this one. And I really want to stick with gouache, because I always get lazy and default to drawing on the iPad halfway through a challenge. I also know nothing about gouache so I’m hoping to just play around with some cheap paints from Amazon and get a feel for how to use the medium.

For the paper, we use a meal delivery service and get more than a dozen meals a week that each comes individually wrapped in a cardboard sleeve. I’ve been saving all of these sleeves because they are just plain white cardboard and they felt like the perfect thing for testing paints, using as collage bits, scratch paper, etc. And I like that they’re all cut to the same size/shape so I’ll end up with a set of drawings that all look uniform. I eat at least one meal a day, so I’m hoping maybe this could turn into a daily “eat, draw, listen” practice.

As I’ve said, I really struggle with “hearing” my intuition so I for Day 01, I just started making some marks on the cardboard with two colors, yellow and red, and eventually came up with the word “enough.” I love fall but was feeling a little antsy, like where did summer go, this year just blew right by so fast. I feel this pressure and urgency to “do something” or to “get back to work” every time a new month or season rolls by. I feel like I’m not doing enough, being productive enough, working hard enough. I want to make this creative life sustainable, but I’m not doing enough to make it happen. And then I heard “enough” in a different way, in that I’m enough as I am now, my efforts are enough, my trying the best I can is enough. And also “enough” in sense of “enough with the negative self-talk, that is the least productive thing to be doing.” So “enough” is a combination of all these things.