I asked the community to come together and spill the beans and share their creative routines!
Thank you to all who participated, and to anyone who wants to be added in the next round, please see this form and join in on the fun! (Write a response >50 words for an image feature!) I love these collaborative articles where we all can come together and help one another out.
One note about references: please make sure you use public domain images like https://unsplash.com, https://www.pexels.com/public-domain-images/, https://publicdomainarchive.com/index.html or get proper usage rights to your references. Photographers are artists too <3 Even creative commons can have stipulations, see this wiki article
Our Creative Routines
@akufta.art on Instagram
A lot has changed since I created Art-Res, and I am now a full time medical student studying more than I ever have in my life, but I truly love it and feel blessed to be in this position. For this reason, my routine has evolved as my time has become more limited.
Currently, for professional commissions my workflow involves a lot of reference gathering and studying shape design, and then creating sketches and color thumbnails to nail down a composition. I go over that with the client and tweak as necessary.
For personal pieces, I want to keep art fun and relaxing for me, so I have a much less structured creative process. I blastttt my fave music and look up fun references, but sometimes I just use my imagination and free ball it. Sometimes my anatomy doesn’t even make sense and I don’t really care haha, I just try to have a lot of fun with it. Luckily, the time I’ve spent studying it in the past means I can get pretty close to a believable look.
@Markybox on Tumblr
My approach to studying is to keep a basic year diary, I have a list of subjects and each day for two hours I focus on that subject, the diary is to keep track and keep it varied day to day. For example figure drawing fundermentals, or anatomy, or portrait studies and more. I do two hour sessions fourteen times, this means I have spent a total of 28hrs on a particular subject for example portrait studies - noses, I then move onto the next one which afterwards would be mouths. The purpose of my approach is to force myself to move forward and not hyper fixate on a specific area for too long and let other areas suffer.
@scribblndibbl on Tumblr
I spend all day reblogging, liking, or watching art videos to get inspiration and courage to put my pencil to paper and then once I’m ready, I play some music I love. I begin to draw whatever’s in my mind, mainly sketching because I want to get all my ideas out. And from there, things flow. If I don’t get to draw a certain thing, I make sure to write a note of it to myself in the hopes I come back to it.
@armourwolf on Instagram
I’m employed full time, so my art is made either on a lunch break or during nights/weekends (or the occasional PTO). I use pencils, acrylics, inks, charcoal and watercolors to achieve different results.
@battle-of-sparrows on Tumblr
The only consistent thing about my routine is that I do something every day, whatever it may be. Sketching, painting, graphic design, animating, I do something when I feel like doing something, for as long as I want to.