Your Creativity Knows What It’s Doing (Even When You Don’t)

Hello! It’s good to be back after an unexpected end-of-year break from this space. I’d love to share the latest drawings I’ve been working on, just for the sake of fun, play, and getting into one of my favourite mental and physical places — the creative flow state.

I took a break from social media over the holidays, and spent all my free time drawing wintry fruits and English still life tableaus, as well as diving into Dr. Tara Swart’s phenomenal new book The Signs: The New Science of How to Trust Your Instincts, which I highly recommend.

I came back to the studio feeling refreshed and ready for new ideas, concepts, and art to come through me. I picked one of my favourite ways to set myself up for a new season of creative insights, and set up the container for a new daily drawing challenge, which kicked off with a bang.

I was super happy with my digital experiments and was so excited about creating a new body of illustration work. But, one week into it, I started to notice, with growing dismay, that a familiar resistance was kicking in, which I also experienced last year when I proposed myself a summer drawing challenge.

My creativity, once again, was rebelling against my best laid plans.

Before Christmas, I had started a micro-trust practice of drawing 3 small thumbnails everyday, which sparked all sorts of ideas, and made me feel happy and committed to myself and my art. It also led me to rediscover the beautiful simplicity of colouring pencils — whenever working analogue in recent years I’d immediately resort to oil pastels or wax pastels, and hadn’t really used pencils all that much, but something in this season was really calling me to it.

Around this time I also did a talk and a workshop for the Masters students at BAU University of Arts & Design in Barcelona on creativity, how to have ideas, and how to foster play and experimentation. During the workshop, we explored how to quickly get into flow-state and bypass self-criticism through drawing techniques. In retrospect, the workshop felt like another nudge to lean even more into play for my daily challenge.

As I continued to try and develop digital illustrations for my drawing challenge, my creative spirit kept stalling. It wanted to go back to the pencils.

“What are you doing,” my inner critic said. “We need to make illustrations so that we can get commissions. These little pencil drawings are leading us nowhere.”

At some point during all the self-recrimination, my evolved consciousness kicked in. “That is bullshit,” she said. “It’s none of your business to judge where your inspiration wants to go. Your job is to follow it.”

So, highly doubtful, I followed it — and, slowly and patiently, watched the magic unfold.

My curiosity led the way, and I remembered how I was doing just that — going along for the ride of my curiosity — a few years ago, and it led me to gorgeous discoveries, creative fulfilment, and what culminated into one of my most experimental, innovative and successful projects yet — a body of work called GENIUS LOCI.

It included a wall art installation, a collection of innovative sculptures, and an exhibition to celebrate it — leading to gallery representation and sales. Perhaps the most important thing was that, through this project, I really reconnected with the architect part of me, a part I had rejected and squashed down in order to transition careers and become an illustrator.

Now, architecture had reclaimed its place as one of my biggest inspirations.

As I made time and space for these little pencil drawings, though, I knew that the point was simply to play, without expectation of outcome, without necessarily whipping up a whole exhibition, without trying to monetise them. And for some reason, this time it felt very hard, uncomfortable and scary, to do that in the public space of Instagram.

As I continued to show up for myself and my practice every day, though, allowing myself to follow the subtle tugs and simple ideas that lit me up, the breadcrumbs of the universe started to build up and make more sense, as they always do.

I drew a colourful, abstract Moka one day. I’d made that drawing years before in different medium, but something about it kept calling to me, and I drew it in rich wax pastels.

After sharing it online, a friend reminded me of Alessi’s other designs — Alessi is the iconic Italian manufacturer of the classic Bialetti Moka — and down I went in a rabbit hole of Mokas, remembering how much I used to love Italian industrial design, having studied it during my year as an exchange student in Rome during university.

So I drew several of Alessi’s iconic designs, creating a little triptych that felt very satisfying and brought me a lot of joy.

In an upcoming podcast episode with the great Matthew Lebaron, in which we discussed all things play, I had a real-time A-ha! moment during our conversation:

Play is open-ended, has no expectations, and is not performance. Which is why, in the last two times I proposed myself a daily drawing challenge with specific results, my creativity rebelled against it.

And the reason is, I believe, that since I’ve had my daughter, my body and creativity have completely re-learned how to play.

Play for fun. Because it feels good. Because it brings me joy.

And while I have reconnected with many forms of play since becoming a mother, my artistic and creative practice have demanded to uphold the same standards of freedom in play, because it is how intuition, divinity and purpose channel through me, and by following its gentle tug of curiosity, the next steps for my life and career becomes clearer day by day.

The catch is to hold it very lightly, with surrender, without expectation of outcome.

Three weeks into the challenge, I received an email regarding gallery interest for my Moka drawings.

But even if that had not happened, I was already happy and fulfilled with its results, and with the new ideas and insights that kept opening up to me as I showed up day by day. And that is, so often, how opportunities find me — when I am not seeking them for validation.

I’ve been doing daily creative challenges every year for the past 8 years, and it’s been one of the most important things for my growth as an artist and professional creative. Here’s how I do it:

1. Decide why you want to commit to a daily creative project. Improve a skill? Shake off the cobwebs? Generate new ideas? Create a new body of work? Fucking sick of your own excuses for not showing up? All valid, baby.

2. Decide what you’re going to do: drawings, songs, posters, floral arrangements, animations, zines—pick one.

3. Decide when and for how long: I usually start with 30 days (and skip weekends because I’m a mama). It could be 100 days or 365—totally up to you.

4. Decide how you’ll do it: constraints are beautiful and necessary. Choosing a medium, material, colour palette, or format creates more freedom, not less.

5. Decide where the work will live: I post on IG because daily accountability helps me drop the excuses, but it could be Substack, TikTok, a blog, or a WhatsApp group. Also decide the final form: online series, exhibition, zine?

6. Cut the bullshit with yourself. Do you really not have time—or are you afraid of showing up daily and facing the inner critic?

7. Be flexible. This past year my creativity rebelled and went in unexpected directions. My job is not to judge it, just follow it. It always leads to beautiful, surprising insights.

8. Optional: document it. Not for performance (though that helps), but for insight. I revisit the learnings, remind myself how badass I was, and turn it into talks, classes, workshops, or content like this. The benefits stack up.

Working on a creative challenge—or feeling inspired to start one? Let me know in the comments ✨

❋ Thanks for reading and supporting my work! I’m an artist & illustrator, educator, and creative guide. I share stories at the intersection of art, intuition, and career so you can build a creative life full of freedom, joy, and impact. Want to go deeper? Explore my self-led course The Creative Map, book a 1:1 creative career consultation, or join my experiments and studio life on Substack. Find more of my work on Instagram, and peek at my prints and tools for creatives in my shop.