How To Make 2024 Your Most Creative Year Yet (Patreon)

Today is the last day of 2023 so I wanted to share a few thoughts about how you can make this next year your most creative year yet 🖌️💖✨

Being creative is personal to you, so having your most creative year could mean lots of different things and it certainly doesn’t have to mean making the most amount of art ever.

Perhaps it’s the year that you finally prioritise time in your morning routine for your art practice, or it’s the year that you find your creative voice, or where everything just clicks.

Whatever it means to you, here are some tips for being creative in 2024:

Focus on what you enjoy

The more you enjoy something, the more likely you are to continue doing more of it, so focus on the parts of creating art that you really enjoy most. It might seem important to focus on theory and fundamentals in the beginning, but really I think it’s more important to just get started with the fun stuff.

Spend a lot of your creative energy on the ideas that make you excited, and then sprinkle in some theory or structured learning in between.

Make it easy

I make a lot more art when my tools are easy and accessible, because if I have to go and find my pencils in the back of a drawer or if my iPad charger has gone missing, I’m probably going to end up doing something else.

Make your art tools easy to find and easy to use so that when you feel a boost of creative energy you can get straight into it. Even better if you can put them somewhere that you can see them everyday so that you have a visual reminder as well.

Make time

You’ve probably got a busy schedule with social, family and work commitments, so finding time for your art isn’t always a priority. I’ve found that the easiest way to make time for your art is to set up an expectation that it’s an important part of your life. That doesn’t mean that you have to do it every single day, but at some point in your day, week, or month, your art and creativity gets to be a priority for a little while.

Maybe for you that’s setting aside 30 minutes in your day to do some sketching, maybe it’s an evening every week on a set day, or maybe you can designate one weekend day every month to be your art day. Whatever works for your creativity and your schedule, try and make a little time for your creativity this year.

Embrace the learning process

We’re not supposed to be good at things when we start them, so embrace being a student and learn how to get better by not being very good for a while! Practice is really such a key part of everyone’s art journey, and until we’ve spent hours and hours practising then we can’t really expect ourselves to improve.

That’s why it’s so important to focus on the art that you enjoy because you need to spend a lot of time with it to get to where you want to be.

Set a focus or a goal

Depending on how you’re feeling in 2024 and how much structure is helpful to you, you could consider setting yourself a focus for the year, a goal, or a challenge.

To me, a focus is a little more vague than a goal and is more of a general direction, so your focus for 2024 might be illustrating people, it might be illustrating animals, or it might be experimenting with colour. It isn’t the only thing you’ll do, it’s just generally where you’d like to put a lot of your creative energy.

If you want to set yourself a goal (or a few), these are usually more defined. You can use the SMART rule to set your goals and that helps a lot, and the idea is that for your goal to be successful you want to make sure that it is:S - specificM - measurableA - actionableR - realisticT - time-based

There are a few variations on the acronym, but the main concept is that the goal is clear and something that you can actually achieve within the timeframe you’ve set for it.

And lastly there are challenges, which are even more specific again and usually a little more difficult but maybe something that’s less sustainable long term. This might be a set of prompts that you want to follow, how often you want to draw, or a community challenge on social media.

I’ve just made my own little challenge to share here and on social media that I’ll attach below, and it’s 30 prompts to be completed at your own pace in 2024.

You can challenge yourself to finish them all in one month if you have lots of time and energy available, or you can challenge yourself to illustrate them slowly over the entire year - whatever works for you!

You can definitely have a focus for the year, a set of specific goals and also a challenge if you want to, or you can just pick the option that suits you best in 2024.

So I hope you have a very creative new year and I’d love to hear your plans for the year!