Most artists don’t just draw: they sew, they decorate their houses in interesting ways, they cut their own hair, they make origami bats, they bake, they sing, they make music, they go BIG with the Christmas decorations…
What other things does your creative brain like to do?
Here’s what my creative brain is obsessing about at the moment.
Let’s share our other creative projects. I am excited see what other forms of creativity are happening in the Pencil Pals community.
I can procrastinate wildly from illustration work ( which I love🤷🏼♀️), and find myself deeply involved in making unrelated crafts !!
Recently I made art kits for a little stall at a winter fair - each kit had a small jar of handmade oak gall ink, pack of watercolour paper and a bundle of small, medium and chunky, carefully chosen sticks to draw with !! There were acorns in jars sprouting baby oak trees, tiny woodland creatures prints....the list goes on 😆... next on the avoidance list .. homemade Christmas crackers ! it’s fine it won’t take me long ... 👀💫
I have a 'craft habit' too, I try and rein it in otherwise it would take over from my main work, but I let it loose at Christmas! One of the projects I commit to are homemade crackers, they are a faff and the snaps don't always work but it's fun to shout 'bang' at the dinner table 😆
I throw pots on the wheel that go right back into the clay bag after I've finished making a mess. Failing spectacularly on the reg helps release me from the pressures of (doing good work in) illustration and design!
Yes! I bought a knitting pattern for a sweater for the Sylvanians and I even found very thin knitting needles but I haven't started it yet, I don't know if my knitting skills are up to it.
I have to stop myself from having too many creative pursuits otherwise I feel I will never get any good at anything! So alongside drawing and painting I have in the past dabbled in pottery, silver clay jewellery, weaving, printing, chocolate making... I could probably go on but you get the idea! Trying to be strict with myself and stick to just one hobby for a while!
I know that feeling so well! I have to make sure I do one thing at a time, otherwise nothing would be done properly and my brain would explode! I have sensible school teacher voice in my head telling me to calm down Helen!
Reading through these, this is my issue.... or is it a super-power? Weirdly,I just bought 180 pom-poms to make garlands, made pottery for gifts I'm wrapping, have two big solo art shows next year (where I'm planning on having some video and animation in the corner (which maybe I'll find too challenging and not do:)), a picture book coming out next spring, and so many wonderful cookbooks to devour, just finished some visible mending and started a sweater. As I'm reading all of this I'm realizing why I don't feel like I have enough time in the day. I think I'll ask for blinders for Christmas. I so appreciate other creatives do this too.
This is incredible! I thought I do a lot of things, and feel like there’s never enough time in the day, but this is definitely an another level! Do you ever sleep?
Ha! Just seeing this now. Yes! I sleep hard. I slept 10.5 hours last night. (are you visualizing somone hitting a wall? I am:)) I'm back after Christmas to prioritize deadlines and schedule in a little creative playtime. Really enjoy your substack, and Happy New Year!
I LOVE your beautiful flags Helen 😭🥰 I must say, I’m so impressed reading all the comments. My craft activities are so crummy 😅 I’m too impatient to learn actual skills in my leisure time. I’m at cushion-cover level with my sewing but that doesn’t stop me. But can’t do dressmaking because it would involve measurements. When I was a teenager I used to make ‘jewellery’ out of tins and coat hangers 🤣 It was dangerous. My next project is: can I make an Ebay toy clock (the sort for children to learn the time on) work as an actual clock by somehow attaching clock components ?🤓
I do too many things 🤣 I knit, crochet, dye/spin yarn, weave, sew, embroidery, draw, paint, photography, make dolls and miniatures, stop motion animation, bake, thrift and decorate my old house, write, sing. Thankfully my brain likes to hyper focus on only one at a time so I just cycle through everything. I like to learn a new craft every year like a birthday present to myself. This year it will be making brooms haha. I’m also learning to make my own linen. We grew flax last summer and I’m going to process it and turn it into a tea towel (probably dyed with flowers I grew).
It’s so much fun reading through these comments...and a relief that there are so many other creatives that can’t help dabbling in many other things. Besides painting and felting I love to sew, knit/crochet, and a papercraft. I just got one of the fancy cutting machines and having fun learning how it works!
I love to try lots of different crafts and art forms and I have a tendency to go a little nuts and have too many personal projects going at once. I especially love to bake, crochet, make journals and cards, and quilt. For 2024 I decided to force myself to complete a project before starting a new one. But then of course I decided to make handmade gifts for the grandkids. So I’m working on two cloth busy books and one crocheted Wild Thing. (Baking is part of my regular routine so that doesn’t really count as extra.)
I relate so much to having too many personal projects! I have to be strict with myself or I make my own head spin! The cloth books sound amazing! Lucky grandkids!
Ha. So true. My life is stuffed full of muggle things these days I don’t have enough time for the drawing projects I’ve committed to, but my brain find the lack very frustrating and fills itself with gazillions of ideas for me to obsess over!! I have been playing with Procreate Dreams for a commission and I’m loving it sooooo much, I’ve been wanting to do some more animating and so this is the perfect excuse 😜
Oh Emily, are you getting to grips with Procreate Dreams? I can’t wait to get in there and discover what it can do! Hopefully I’ll get some time this Christmas! I might ask you for some tips.
Im loving it so much!! I think I could fall down a deep exciting rabbit hole and never come out again! 🤣 I’ve been doing a little bit of frame by frame animation in procreate and hankering after more. It’s soooooo good. You’ll love it 🥰 happy to share tips!
I’m gathering up supplies to make “gingerbread” ornaments with Davy this week. The dough is cinnamon and applesauce and you bake them like cookies, but they keep for years.
Very nice cutouts! I recently completed a paper cut out illustration with a Cinderella theme inspired by a course I took with Mark Hoffman. Here are other few areas of Art I love to dabble in:
1. Woodworking (I make bunny castles, potty frame holders for bunnies) (Wood Arts)
2. I play Guitar and Ukulele and enjoy writing my own music (Music Arts)
3. I am 1st degree blackbelt in Tae Kwon Do (Martial Arts)
4. I enjoy working out with both weights, but especially calisthenics (Body Art)
5. I make art for apparel (Clothing Arts)
6. I make custom pattern designs for home decor (Home Arts)
8. Writing and Illustrating (traditional and digital) Kidlit, particularly Picturebooks!
9. Business Negotiations and Contracts (Art of the Deal)
I made a repeating pattern in Illustrator using colours which matched my favourite towels; had it printed on blackout blind material with Maake and made 2 bathroom blinds!
Just listened to your podcast with Steve Lenton, so good! His impression of me and Katie was so funny, he turned us into Georgie lasses! I sent it to Katie for a giggle. Loved hearing about your studio next to the train line too. We lived in a flat next to a train line in Motspur Park, and we used to watch vases wander across the mantle piece.
I LOVE his wonky impression of you! So sweet. I also love how the trains become part of your life when you live near the tracks. My dad lived in a tiny converted shop in Fulham when I was little and every time a district line train went underneath, the Virgin Mary he’d bought as a weird present for my mum used to rattle under her glass cloche
lovely flag! Besides drawing I design and make machine knitwear. Its about 50 - 50 I knit then have to paint or draw which then leads to a new knit idea. I have also done pottery in recent years, my efforts were very amateur, but the teacher used to show my sketchbooks around so the the wobbly pottery was forgiven.
Wobbly pottery sounds lovely, I always buy the wobbly pieces at pottery sales. It’s interesting to hear your knitting informs your drawing and vice versa.
I like to mend my boys clothes!! But I need to be careful to not make it all too much about me (obviously, it’s their clothes!! Haha!) so it’s getting quite tricky these days.
So true! I infuse that creative mind everywhere. I like cooking, decorating, weaving (cf Sheila Hicks) is so relaxing, ceramic and pottery is liberating too, doing my hair... etc the lost goes on.
It is a second nature (or the nature) to use that creative spark!
Yeah, I agree! I do look to YouTube videos on those hacks to cut and style. I expand that into beauty hair treatments as well. Oh, I have experimented a lot 😄
I’m not sure this counts. But as a side hustle me and my girls run a slime business. We put together fun and bonkers slime kits and host slime parties and workshops. I hate the washing up after the parties but everything else is great!
Dance! I used to be an avid swing dancer and seem to forget every few years how much I like it and then once I remember, get obsessed for a while. A great counterpoint to learning to draw which doesn't have me moving around all that much. Sometimes when I try to be a grown up...one who GETS THINGS DONE, creativity will just burst out uninvited and before I know it, I'm playing piano or or ukulele or cooking or singing or (most expensively) trying to create a new wardrobe. Never mind that I'm not especially talented in any of these areas.
Love this! I signed up to Substack after the chapter on The Good Ship Illustration course. Very excited to be here. I am starting out again after a long break, looking to get writing and illustration work for clients. But outside of that for fun, I play the ukulele and write songs, bake chocolate chip cookies quite a lot, read more books than I have time for, and dance a lot in the lounge. My mind is constantly jumping from idea to idea and getting inspired by the world around me.
This is so true. I too cut my own hair (can' stand the boredom of the hairdressers and coming out looking the same!). I like to move plants around the garden, move furniture around, re-paint walls spontaneously and find new things to cook. I think it's because our minds are always looking for the new or interesting...
oooo ooo... I made Christmas wrapping paper last year and this year I made gift tags. Crazy how much joy and pleasure these simple tasks give me... I'm at my most happy and most content when I'm creating no matter the outcome.
then theres the unfinished knitting projects.. apparently i look like someone playing the bagpipes when I knit... its not natural for me. hence the unfinished projects. and sewing. I do like to sew. I want to try woodworking too but I'm not there yet. not enough time. not enough energy!
I get in the mood to make little books. I watched a tutorial once and now I just do my own thing. I rarely measure so things are a bit wonky but I love them. Filling or using them is a different story 🤣
Apart from drawing portraits and sharing my thoughts about these several times a week by video here on Substack, I am slowly learning piano. It’s been a year now. It’s so hard for me! But I’m impressed by how far I’ve come since not knowing nothing! I also knit and want to sew.
I can procrastinate wildly from illustration work ( which I love🤷🏼♀️), and find myself deeply involved in making unrelated crafts !!
Recently I made art kits for a little stall at a winter fair - each kit had a small jar of handmade oak gall ink, pack of watercolour paper and a bundle of small, medium and chunky, carefully chosen sticks to draw with !! There were acorns in jars sprouting baby oak trees, tiny woodland creatures prints....the list goes on 😆... next on the avoidance list .. homemade Christmas crackers ! it’s fine it won’t take me long ... 👀💫
I do the same, I rebel from doing what ever is on my desk/ next on the list 😂
This kit sounds amazing!
I have a 'craft habit' too, I try and rein it in otherwise it would take over from my main work, but I let it loose at Christmas! One of the projects I commit to are homemade crackers, they are a faff and the snaps don't always work but it's fun to shout 'bang' at the dinner table 😆
I throw pots on the wheel that go right back into the clay bag after I've finished making a mess. Failing spectacularly on the reg helps release me from the pressures of (doing good work in) illustration and design!
Wow, that sounds like meditation on a whole new level! Heavenly.
I like to sew tiny clothes for Sylvanian Family animals 🐭 I found some Japanese patterns that are so cute and perfect.
Wow, they must be so small. You must have excellent eyesight and precision.
I want to do that too! I want to learn how to knit a tiny frog and then knit clothes for it!
Have you seen India Rose Crawford's knitted frog videos? They make me want to start knitting again! https://www.instagram.com/indiarosecrawford
Yes! I bought a knitting pattern for a sweater for the Sylvanians and I even found very thin knitting needles but I haven't started it yet, I don't know if my knitting skills are up to it.
I have to stop myself from having too many creative pursuits otherwise I feel I will never get any good at anything! So alongside drawing and painting I have in the past dabbled in pottery, silver clay jewellery, weaving, printing, chocolate making... I could probably go on but you get the idea! Trying to be strict with myself and stick to just one hobby for a while!
I know that feeling so well! I have to make sure I do one thing at a time, otherwise nothing would be done properly and my brain would explode! I have sensible school teacher voice in my head telling me to calm down Helen!
Chocolate making? Wow!
Reading through these, this is my issue.... or is it a super-power? Weirdly,I just bought 180 pom-poms to make garlands, made pottery for gifts I'm wrapping, have two big solo art shows next year (where I'm planning on having some video and animation in the corner (which maybe I'll find too challenging and not do:)), a picture book coming out next spring, and so many wonderful cookbooks to devour, just finished some visible mending and started a sweater. As I'm reading all of this I'm realizing why I don't feel like I have enough time in the day. I think I'll ask for blinders for Christmas. I so appreciate other creatives do this too.
This is incredible! I thought I do a lot of things, and feel like there’s never enough time in the day, but this is definitely an another level! Do you ever sleep?
Ha! Just seeing this now. Yes! I sleep hard. I slept 10.5 hours last night. (are you visualizing somone hitting a wall? I am:)) I'm back after Christmas to prioritize deadlines and schedule in a little creative playtime. Really enjoy your substack, and Happy New Year!
I LOVE your beautiful flags Helen 😭🥰 I must say, I’m so impressed reading all the comments. My craft activities are so crummy 😅 I’m too impatient to learn actual skills in my leisure time. I’m at cushion-cover level with my sewing but that doesn’t stop me. But can’t do dressmaking because it would involve measurements. When I was a teenager I used to make ‘jewellery’ out of tins and coat hangers 🤣 It was dangerous. My next project is: can I make an Ebay toy clock (the sort for children to learn the time on) work as an actual clock by somehow attaching clock components ?🤓
I love the sound of your dangerous jewellery! And hand cushion covers are the best. Love the sound of your clock idea!
I do too many things 🤣 I knit, crochet, dye/spin yarn, weave, sew, embroidery, draw, paint, photography, make dolls and miniatures, stop motion animation, bake, thrift and decorate my old house, write, sing. Thankfully my brain likes to hyper focus on only one at a time so I just cycle through everything. I like to learn a new craft every year like a birthday present to myself. This year it will be making brooms haha. I’m also learning to make my own linen. We grew flax last summer and I’m going to process it and turn it into a tea towel (probably dyed with flowers I grew).
Incredible! A new craft every year, whilst keeping up the old ones sound like quite a task!
It’s so much fun reading through these comments...and a relief that there are so many other creatives that can’t help dabbling in many other things. Besides painting and felting I love to sew, knit/crochet, and a papercraft. I just got one of the fancy cutting machines and having fun learning how it works!
I think creatives can turn their hand to anything!
Lopi jumper I’m knitting for my mum!
I love to try lots of different crafts and art forms and I have a tendency to go a little nuts and have too many personal projects going at once. I especially love to bake, crochet, make journals and cards, and quilt. For 2024 I decided to force myself to complete a project before starting a new one. But then of course I decided to make handmade gifts for the grandkids. So I’m working on two cloth busy books and one crocheted Wild Thing. (Baking is part of my regular routine so that doesn’t really count as extra.)
I relate so much to having too many personal projects! I have to be strict with myself or I make my own head spin! The cloth books sound amazing! Lucky grandkids!
2023, that is.
Ha. So true. My life is stuffed full of muggle things these days I don’t have enough time for the drawing projects I’ve committed to, but my brain find the lack very frustrating and fills itself with gazillions of ideas for me to obsess over!! I have been playing with Procreate Dreams for a commission and I’m loving it sooooo much, I’ve been wanting to do some more animating and so this is the perfect excuse 😜
Oh Emily, are you getting to grips with Procreate Dreams? I can’t wait to get in there and discover what it can do! Hopefully I’ll get some time this Christmas! I might ask you for some tips.
Im loving it so much!! I think I could fall down a deep exciting rabbit hole and never come out again! 🤣 I’ve been doing a little bit of frame by frame animation in procreate and hankering after more. It’s soooooo good. You’ll love it 🥰 happy to share tips!
I’m gathering up supplies to make “gingerbread” ornaments with Davy this week. The dough is cinnamon and applesauce and you bake them like cookies, but they keep for years.
There’s creativity in everything we do, especially Christmas traditions. These cookies sound amazing!
I remember doing it as a kid so it’s all very full circle. 💫
Very nice cutouts! I recently completed a paper cut out illustration with a Cinderella theme inspired by a course I took with Mark Hoffman. Here are other few areas of Art I love to dabble in:
1. Woodworking (I make bunny castles, potty frame holders for bunnies) (Wood Arts)
2. I play Guitar and Ukulele and enjoy writing my own music (Music Arts)
3. I am 1st degree blackbelt in Tae Kwon Do (Martial Arts)
4. I enjoy working out with both weights, but especially calisthenics (Body Art)
5. I make art for apparel (Clothing Arts)
6. I make custom pattern designs for home decor (Home Arts)
8. Writing and Illustrating (traditional and digital) Kidlit, particularly Picturebooks!
9. Business Negotiations and Contracts (Art of the Deal)
10. Teaching (Art of Speech)
What a list! This proves the theory that we creatives have the power to manifest what we imagine. I’m sure there’s a David Bowie quote about this…
I made a repeating pattern in Illustrator using colours which matched my favourite towels; had it printed on blackout blind material with Maake and made 2 bathroom blinds!
Oh wow, that is brilliant! Making your house look like your art 😍
You’re so right Helen! I love your flags. I also sew and knit. I wonder if I can post a photo...
Just listened to your podcast with Steve Lenton, so good! His impression of me and Katie was so funny, he turned us into Georgie lasses! I sent it to Katie for a giggle. Loved hearing about your studio next to the train line too. We lived in a flat next to a train line in Motspur Park, and we used to watch vases wander across the mantle piece.
I LOVE his wonky impression of you! So sweet. I also love how the trains become part of your life when you live near the tracks. My dad lived in a tiny converted shop in Fulham when I was little and every time a district line train went underneath, the Virgin Mary he’d bought as a weird present for my mum used to rattle under her glass cloche
Loving the Ness cuckoo clock too 😂
Oh yes, we can’t post photos on Threads 😭 I always forget that, it’s so annoying!
Puttering in the garden. So much to observe.
Oh yes, me too. It feels very much like another form of creativity.
If I saw it or ate it I’d want to make it 🤣
Me too!
Yes I am a writer but I do all of the artwork and go big with my Christmas decorations. I also calligraph and scribble and doodle. Messy art.
Love the flag Helen! ✨😍 Aside from drawing I love cooking, if we can call that a craft jaja
Yes I agree, cooking comes from the same creative place.
I crochet or knit every evening! Choosing colours is my happy place. :) x
Oh yes, I can’t sit in front of the telly without some sort of creative project in my hands.
Hi Helen,
lovely flag! Besides drawing I design and make machine knitwear. Its about 50 - 50 I knit then have to paint or draw which then leads to a new knit idea. I have also done pottery in recent years, my efforts were very amateur, but the teacher used to show my sketchbooks around so the the wobbly pottery was forgiven.
Wobbly pottery sounds lovely, I always buy the wobbly pieces at pottery sales. It’s interesting to hear your knitting informs your drawing and vice versa.
I love this flag! Such great colours.
I like to mend my boys clothes!! But I need to be careful to not make it all too much about me (obviously, it’s their clothes!! Haha!) so it’s getting quite tricky these days.
Oh yes, I love a mending project too.
So true! I infuse that creative mind everywhere. I like cooking, decorating, weaving (cf Sheila Hicks) is so relaxing, ceramic and pottery is liberating too, doing my hair... etc the lost goes on.
It is a second nature (or the nature) to use that creative spark!
Thank you for this playful reminder ✨️
Yeeees to all of those things! Especially hair, I love changing my hair! 😂 I am always seeing new hair cuts that I get excited about.
Yeah, I agree! I do look to YouTube videos on those hacks to cut and style. I expand that into beauty hair treatments as well. Oh, I have experimented a lot 😄
I’m not sure this counts. But as a side hustle me and my girls run a slime business. We put together fun and bonkers slime kits and host slime parties and workshops. I hate the washing up after the parties but everything else is great!
Dance! I used to be an avid swing dancer and seem to forget every few years how much I like it and then once I remember, get obsessed for a while. A great counterpoint to learning to draw which doesn't have me moving around all that much. Sometimes when I try to be a grown up...one who GETS THINGS DONE, creativity will just burst out uninvited and before I know it, I'm playing piano or or ukulele or cooking or singing or (most expensively) trying to create a new wardrobe. Never mind that I'm not especially talented in any of these areas.
Love this! I signed up to Substack after the chapter on The Good Ship Illustration course. Very excited to be here. I am starting out again after a long break, looking to get writing and illustration work for clients. But outside of that for fun, I play the ukulele and write songs, bake chocolate chip cookies quite a lot, read more books than I have time for, and dance a lot in the lounge. My mind is constantly jumping from idea to idea and getting inspired by the world around me.
This is so true. I too cut my own hair (can' stand the boredom of the hairdressers and coming out looking the same!). I like to move plants around the garden, move furniture around, re-paint walls spontaneously and find new things to cook. I think it's because our minds are always looking for the new or interesting...
oooo ooo... I made Christmas wrapping paper last year and this year I made gift tags. Crazy how much joy and pleasure these simple tasks give me... I'm at my most happy and most content when I'm creating no matter the outcome.
then theres the unfinished knitting projects.. apparently i look like someone playing the bagpipes when I knit... its not natural for me. hence the unfinished projects. and sewing. I do like to sew. I want to try woodworking too but I'm not there yet. not enough time. not enough energy!
I get in the mood to make little books. I watched a tutorial once and now I just do my own thing. I rarely measure so things are a bit wonky but I love them. Filling or using them is a different story 🤣
Apart from drawing portraits and sharing my thoughts about these several times a week by video here on Substack, I am slowly learning piano. It’s been a year now. It’s so hard for me! But I’m impressed by how far I’ve come since not knowing nothing! I also knit and want to sew.
I never EVEr bake, but I tried two tiramisu recipes this winter. They weren't too bad! It's a lot harder than drawing. =D
Never time to be bored!
I am so impressed, sadly music isn’t in my creative skill set.
Yes sometimes assembling is a nice break from drawing, it’s about mixing it up I guess.