Your Art Queue: Keeping Track of Creative Thoughts

Most of the time I’m here telling you how to get right to art and all of those tricks to keep that practice going. Today, I wanna talk about what you’re doing when you’re not making art. (WHAT.)

Like a bunch of my other videos, this will probably be useful to those of you who work in other creative fields too. (But you should totally learn drawing too. It’s great. I promise.) A few weeks back I talked extensively about the idea of “study lists” to keep you going and drawing with a little sticky note. On one of those, I mentioned studying art I’ve been thinking about, but kinda left out the secret to knowing what art I want to study. It’s simpler than you think! And it’s similar to how we try to make it easy to start our daily art: we make it easy to save our ideas.

The idea is that you start to assemble a place for all of the art that you want to draw. Specific ideas, art you’ve seen that you want to study, lessons you want to practice. Separate from earlier where those were general categories of ideas, this is an active list that you add to and complete ideas from. “So like a commission queue?” You may ask. And, yeah, sort of like a commission queue, but MORE. We’re not just putting commissions here — you might event want to keep this separate from commissions if you do those.

Do you have a place for this already? Great, use that! Maybe it’s a simple note, or you’ve buried it into your grocery list, or you’ve organized a little gallery online. At the moment, I’m using Trello, but loads of services and apps have this style of board that you can drag cards around on. Heck you can even put sticky notes on your wall if that works for you. But it might be convenient to keep this digital for one big reason: you can add to it when you’re not at home.

Despite bringing my sketchbook lots of places, I don’t have it everywhere, but I do have my phone. Not only do I have access to stuff like Trello there, but I can also share directly to it from anything I have open. That’s the key feature we’re taking advantage of on your phone: the share button. If there’s art I want to study, I will share the image to the app. If it’s a website, share the link. And if I have a random idea, I yell at my phone assistant to save it. You can wire this kind of stuff up with Alexa, Siri, Google, pretty much anything – but they each do it differently and this isn’t the video for that. Alexa, remind me to draw in 15 minutes!

The point isn’t to get any specific app or service. Heck if you have an alternative to Trello I’m all ears. It’s to get your ideas written down quickly in a way that you can and will find later. Sometimes I find myself adding my ideas to my reminders app instead, or just writing them down on whatever is nearby. Or just opening up a voice memo and rambling it off. I do that with these videos! That’s fine too! Later in the day, when I get a moment, I add those to my board. Letting yourself have multiple places to do this is super useful. Be nice to yourself: start disorganized and work your way towards your one place when it’s convenient. You don’t have to only have one to-do list and be perfect about it. Organization falls apart when you expect perfection out of yourself. Embrace a little bit of chaos. That’s the real secret.

Do you have any favorite places for keeping your ideas and things to study? Where do you keep them all when it’s time to draw? If you haven’t done this before, give it a shot and see if you can integrate it into your life when you’re not creating art. It’ll help keep creativity and that drive to practice going and going. Go do something with that creativity and make some art! See ya back here soon.