My Studio Warm-Up Routine

August brought our family back to Texas, to the heat, to routine and for me - back to my studio. After some much-needed dusting, cleaning, organizing, purging, shipping of work and settling into my space, I was faced with that little voice of doubt all creatives have come to know in their days.

Even after being a self-employed artist for the past six years, I’m still figuring out my ideal schedule, puttering through some days unsure of what I should make or do. The freedom I once craved now brings its own ambiguity about what to do with my time.

I’ve mostly found a rhythm that works for me - realizing that I can truly only be productively creative for 3-4 hours a day max. Anything beyond that and I paint over the best parts of my work, disconnected from my natural state of wonder and flow. In this rhythm, I’ve also come to know that there are often days, weeks, sometimes months that aren’t productive in any way my artist soul recognizes. Summer - with a teenage daughter at home - is often one of those seasons.

I’ve been at this long enough to know that returning to the studio after some time away is just going to feel hard. Blank canvases lay against every studio surface - ready for me to begin my next collection. But my mind has gathered so much inspiration while I've been away that my hands don't know where to start. In these early days, my warm-up routine, honed over many years of studio practice, is what brings me back to center - inviting my creative energy to settle in and just move through me.

1. Time blocks. I have found that I work best in short stints - with a focused goal for each block. In my 3-4 hour block of time, I’ll spend 15-30 minutes working small, doing rapid color play and quick doodles to just warm up. I’ll then put on a playlist and shift into deep work + focus time. Working for 1-2 hours on my current project, commission or collection. For me this usually looks like working across multiple canvases at once, but in similar color palettes, so they feel like friends. A shared language of color, movement or emotion. I’ll keep in this mode until I feel myself speeding up to “finish” a piece. As soon as I feel this rush coming on, I stop. I’ve learned from too many pieces I loved, ruined by rushing towards a preconceived finish point, that when I start to get too speedy - I need to put the brushes down and step away.

   

2. Start small. For me, most days this means a few blank pages in my sketchbook filled with color swatches or random marks. Other times it’s small watercolor studies on 5” x 7” paper. Either way, I get my hands moving quickly, trying to create as many small works as possible in a short amount of time. Getting my hands dirty and busy takes me out of my mind and starts to shake out the doubt and fear that creep in over what exactly I should be making today. These small studies might become a thought starter for a bigger piece down the road, or they might be nothing that ever sees the light of day - and actually it doesn’t matter, that’s not the point. Their purpose is to connect me to my creative center and to take the fear and hesitation away from art so I can just get back to doing what I do. Quickly.

   

3. Keep an inspiration bank. I have a healthy Pinterest obsession and piles and piles of magazine clippings, printouts from the internet, tears from catalogs, swatches of fabrics, matchbooks, business cards, photographs strewn about any of my creative spaces both at home and at the studio. Sometimes I organize them by theme or color and paste them into my sketchbook - pulling color stories and ideas from them to influence my work. Sometimes they sit in piles, ready to be used. I find having access to images and ideas that once sparked something in me invites me to revisit that spark in my own work.

   “When resources shrink, imagination expands. Limits do not kill creativity. They enhance it.” David Epstein, Inside the Box

   

4. Limiting my choices. Over the summer, I was reminded of the power of working within constraints in a class I took online AND in a book I was reading at the same time. Both the instructor and the author reminded me of the gift of limiting my choices, whether in palette, medium or subject matter. As an obsessive collector of art supplies, the choices in my studio can be both inviting and overwhelming. By limiting my medium to one choice only, my color palette to 3 colors + 2 neutrals, or by choosing to work on only square canvases - I can use my creative muscles on making the work, instead of making the myriad of decisions leading into the work.

5. Continuous learning and experimentation. After I’ve tidied up from my deep work session, I’ll switch gears again and spend 30 minutes to an hour reading about another artist’s process or taking an in-person or online class to go deeper into a technique or medium I’m hungry to learn. This student mindset as a way to close my daily practice keeps me grounded in the fact that I’m always learning and improving and prevents me from taking the work I create too seriously.

Those blank canvases are still there, some days more patient with me than others. Being a studio artist means living with that stickiness, the gap between wanting to make something and not knowing how to begin again. It's fun and it's vulnerable, often in the same hour. I'd love to hear your own tricks for getting unstuck, drop them in the comments.