Live Encore: Weeding Seeds of Doubt to Rekindle Creativity

1. Introduction: As humans for some reason we take that negative criticism and believe it a lot more than we believe the accolades and the positive reinforcement. These seeds of doubt that may have been planted along the way can get pulled out. You don't have to believe them. You can make the art that you want to make. Hi, I'm Danielle Krysa, I'm also known as the jealous curator. I write about contemporary art and I make my own art. There's something that's been coming up over and over for me and it's this idea of seeds that have been planted in our minds that can grow into thorny, tangly, weedy masses if we let them. If we believed them as truths. Art is just a hobby. You need to go get a real job and be responsible. Art isn't a real job. Things like self taught doesn't count. So many people plant the seeds and let them flourish, which of course stops you from doing anything at all. Today we are going to look at the seeds that we've planted in our creative minds as truths that might be stopping us from making the things that we want to make, just having fun, and just being creative because we want to be creative. This topic is really important to me because I have personally planted a lot of seeds of doubt in my own mind that have stopped me for years, and so if I can pass this on to you and hopefully you can get your garden weeded and be making the art that you want to make, just like I'm making the art that I finally want to be making. We're going to do an exercise around that and then we are going to do a little bit of art and I'm going to send you on your way with some assignments as well. To follow along with this class you don't need much at all, just a piece of paper and a pencil or your writing tool of choice. I hope what you get out of this class is realizing that these seeds of doubt that may have been planted along the way, maybe as early as grade school, maybe recently, that those seeds are not troops. You can read them and you can get going with things that you want to do and do it your way. Just something to note, this was actually a live class, so I was interacting with the audience as we went along, as we are creating, and as we were talking about. Let's go. 2. Danielle’s Creative Journey: Hi, I'm Oprah Yana from the classes and content team at Skillshare, and I'll be your host for today's session with Danielle. I think let's just dive in because we have so much awesome stuff to cover today. Let's start, yeah. I'd love to hear your story and what sort you to this weeding your garden idea? Well, growing up, I'm sure as most of you felt too, I was the art kid growing up. I was always making something. Into high school, I was on the year book committee for the design and I designed the big banner behind our grad class. If there was anything being made, I was involved. I went off to art school by a way of marine biology. That's another story. But was in fine art by my second year, and it was brutal because the art kid did not fit in at art school, which was a huge shock to me. It was a very conceptual school, this was the early '90s. You basically needed to be wearing big black boots and paint abstract paintings. Otherwise, it just wasn't going to fly. I showed up wearing a matching esprit sweater set, I'm pretty sure. That didn't really go over very well. But I continued on and I thought what I was doing was okay. I kept pushing forward until I was about to graduate, five weeks before I graduated in critique, in front of my entire painting class, my painting Prof who was the actual head of the whole department, said in front of everyone, "You should never paint again." That was a little seed I planted and unfortunately allowed to flourish. I didn't make art for about 15 years. Not seriously for about 20 years. I made it in secret for those five years in between and didn't show anyone what I was doing. I would make stuff and throw it away. Eventually I even forgot that that Prof had said that. That had just become such truth to me that I just believed that I couldn't do it. I wouldn't design instead became a creative director an art agency, and I just hid out from making art until my son was born. I quit my job and stayed home with him. He was just so, like kids are just so naturally creative. He will be a dog for the entire day and he was a method actor. He would paint himself, he painted his whole body and after just plop him in the shower after those projects. I just thought, "I used to be like that, where did that go?" I went on my journey to find myself and to find that art kid again, and that's how Jealous Curator came to be. I started looking for artists that I might like on the Internet, and I found thousands of them. But it didn't help because I just felt crushed. I felt like, "What is the point? Everything has been done in every color way better than I could ever do it, and also I should never paint again." It was a stop and start, but my husband suggested this was in 2008, and blogs were all the rage. He suggested I start one, not with the intent of anyone to read it just to collect artwork that I liked and just to see if there is a pattern. That's a really good tip for anyone looking for their artistic voice. Even just separate private Pinterest board, and just go gather all of the art that you love. Even if it's all over the map which the stuff I loved was and still is, you start to see a pattern. I started seeing pallets emerge, I started seeing different materials that I liked over and over, a bit of wit in everything. It helped me harness what my voice was going to be. Jealous Curator took off. I was asked to write some books. I've written five books for grown-ups about getting a creative jump start and getting back into making art, using myself as a guinea pig. As of next week, next Tuesday, my very first kid's book is going to be on shelves worldwide. I'll get into that in a few minutes. But the main reason for it was because at all of these book tours for the grown-up books, I would meet people, 30, 40, 50 up to 90 who had been told as a child, the seed had been planted for them, that they couldn't be an artist, either they weren't talented enough or art was a hobby. All of these things that as children were planted as truths, and it's only now as adults that they're starting to realize that they can make anyway. If you haven't realized that, then I'm here to tell you that you can and we're going to weed that garden. 3. The Seeds That Stop Us: So to get started, I want to talk about the seeds that get planted in our minds that stop us along the way. Basically from that story I just told you, the seeds, there were a lot of seeds during that time that I allowed to plant. Now, granted, my parents never planted a negative seed, it was only positive. My mom is an artist. My dad was a PhD scientists Yeah, he was my biggest cheerleader. He's the one that told me to switch out of marine biology into fine art. When I was three, he framed one of my pieces in a gold frame, just like he used for my mom. So they were planting these seeds, yes, you can, and it wasn't until I got to university that it was like, no, you can't. As humans, for some reason, we take that negative criticism and believe it a lot more than we believe the accolades and the positive reinforcement. So there were a bunch of seeds that got planted. Obviously, you should never paint again was a pretty big one. I had always brought humor into my work and I was told, maybe in my third year by the same professor, by the way, said, look, it's bad enough that you're a woman. But if you actually try and bring humor into your work too, you will really never be taken seriously as an artist. So I planted that seed and I believed it, and I tried to strip. Well, I did. I stripped all of the humor of my work. But I'm hilarious. So that was hard and I didn't know what to do. I just bought a lot of black paint and did angsty. I literally had no idea what to do because back to the idea of finding your own voice, that was not my voice. My voice was to be funny. So if your voice is quiet, make quiet art. If your voice is crazy, and loud, and obnoxious, make obnoxious art, you have to embrace who you are. But I didn't. I let that seed completely fill my head, along with never painting again. When I became a mother, I remember thinking, well, I can't let anyone know that I'm a mom because you're not supposed to be a mother and an artist. If you want to be really serious, they were a bunch of articles that came out around then, that if you want to be a serious artist, you're supposed to forgo motherhood and just focus on your work. So I was nervous to let people know that when I started as curator, my son was 2.5 and I thought, well, I'll keep that separate information. Now, my God, I talk about him 24-7, but I believed it as a truth and I know a lot of women do. Yeah. The other one, again, was planted in art school.I was using thread, I was sewing on the canvases, and I was told in a critique by another woman that I was bringing down all female artists, saying that all they were capable of what's craft and not real art. So I planted that seed that anything that looks remotely craft-like was not real art. That's one of my favorite things, is incorporating domestic type items into my work. But I was like, oh God, I can't do that. So I had quite a garden growing in my head. As you can tell, that collection of seeds, how was I ever going to make anything? I wasn't. I was stopping myself in so many ways. So there are a lot of common seeds that I've heard over the years from talking to other people. Before even this analogy came into my mind, I was hearing these things for people. Here's a good one. Self-taught doesn't count. That is a huge one and it is ridiculous. It's totally wrong. I think anybody that has the gumption to go and teach themselves anything deserves a round of applause. That is amazing. You don't need a piece of paper on your wall telling you that you can try ceramics, telling you that you can try photography. You can just go and do it. Self-taught even stops people with degrees, because for me, for example, my degrees says painting, also fine arts, painting. So if I wanted to try anything else like collage, well, God forbid, because it wasn't real art and my degree didn't say it, collage. So even people who have gone to university for work, or for college, or for their MFAs, or whatever, will still stop themselves with that bad little seeds. Art is just a hobby. That's usually planted when you're young and parents are freaking out that you're not going to be able to pay your rent and buy food. So that seed gets planted, that it's a fun hobby, but you can't make a career of it. So don't even think about it, and that stays in people's heads forever. So that leads to you'll never make money, be responsible, and go get a real job. Pretty much anything a teacher says. I had a woman tell me that her teacher told her in, I think the second grade, that her trees looked like lollipops and she never drew another tree again because she was mortified. That's a compliment really. Well, when she told me, I was like, maybe she meant it in a Wizard of Oz way. She was like, I don't think. So she's like, I could never get my head around that again, and felt like she needed to be able to draw and paint realistically or it didn't count. So there's all these things, feedback, "feedback," from well-meaning family members. Your family members love you so much. So sometimes when they say things, it is a really big seed that gets planted because you believe them. It's your mom, or your dad, or your grandmother. When they say something, you really take it to heart and you just get the fertilizer in the soil and some water, and you really get that one in there. 4. Exercise: Weeding Your Garden: Now we're going do a quick exercise to figure out the seeds that are actually in our mind and how they got there. What I want you guys to do now, and this is going be something, I've done this with a couple of other groups and I got an e-mail a week or two later where people were like, "Oh, I got it." This may not happen in this moment right now, but I want you to keep a little notebook or a sheet just on your fridge or whatever that when you do realize where this seeds came from, you can write it down. I want you to grab a sheet of paper where you've two columns. The first column will be, what is the seed? What is that seed? Is it the self-taught thing? Is it that you can't be a mother and an artist? Is it that collage is just a craft? Whatever those truths that you tell yourself, you might not even know where they came from. I forgot that that Prof said you should never paint again. I just, over the years, believed it. You might not even know, but you know what your inner critic tells you, you know what is stopping you this very second. I want you to write down a few of your seeds right now that you can think of. I'll just give you 30 seconds or a minute to just write a few down. People are sharing some great on. Stacy says, she had a professor once tell her, I shouldn't be a cheerleader, I should just be a museum administrator. Yeah, that hurt, it took time to get over. Another, graphic designers can't be artists. That gets said a lot, that one. The seeds are really common, like it's very rare for someone to have a seed that no one else has. It's just like inner critics. They all say the same thing, they're so not creative inner critics. They usually have foregone tools and that's about it. Yeah. The other column is who? Never paint again as mine. The teacher, I now realize, is that Prof. If you can correlate the seed with the person or the moment where you planted that seed. Now this is not to call anybody out or to go on like a vengeance spree or anything, it's basically to make you realize that these were planted by someone else. This is not truth. I want you to keep this around because, again, like this group I did this with, a woman e-mailed me a week later and said, "Oh my God, it was my mother." You even realize where that seed had come from. It was just after thinking about it and she [inaudible] one morning over her morning coffee, she was like, "Oh my God, my mom said that to me in middle school." It may take some time, you may already know. But if you don't, I guarantee it will come to you. Perfection is really brutal. I'm going to tell you right now that you have to make a lot of junk before you make the good stuff. You really have to make thousands of things that get recycled, torn up, turned into something else, thrown away, set on fire, or whatever to get to the masterpieces. We put this pressure on ourselves that we're supposed to sit down with a fresh box of paints and make something that's headed for moma. It's not going to happen. It didn't happen for the grades, that just doesn't happen. You have to go into every project embracing junk and being okay with throwing something away. You have to show up again the next day and do it again. One of my favorite stories, I met a guy whose dad worked for Andy Warhol back in the day as an intern. He said that Andy pulled thousands of prints that he threw away, that no one ever saw. They just went to the dumpster behind the factory and they got burned. If you took one as an intern, you'll be immediately fired. There are thousands of pieces by Andy Warhol that no one's ever seen because he wasn't happy with them. But you can ask anyone that's not even artsy, Andy Warhol, they know who you're talking about, they'll throw soup cans. In Maryland, they know that. I think a lot of people just assume that Andy sat down, cranked out the soup cans, did the Marylands and was like, "You're welcome world." But he had really done thousands of things to get to those masterpieces. We all have to do. Yeah. Where more perfection start, you don't buy super expensive materials and then [inaudible] by the beautifulness of them. When I first started painting again, I bought watercolor paper and I just ripped it into squares and I worked on that. It didn't even have perfect straight edges. That where I can get hung up on the perfection because I was already starting on an imperfect surface and it just let me play and experiment and get where I needed to go. That's such a good idea. Stacy says letting go like capital A, R and just lowercase a, r. Yeah, and that's how you get to the capitalize eventually and you just find a way there. It's never sit down, it's never a plan like, "Oh, today is the masterpiece day." Is just not going to happen. As soon as you remove that expectation of yourself, you're free to make the stuff you want to make and have fun because going back to being kids, remember how fun it was just to make safe, we didn't worry if galleries were accepting work with feathers and glitter, we just glued glitter to feathers and put it on our fridge. We didn't worry if collectors wanted it, we didn't worry about anything. We just found a feather on the way home from school and stuck a rock to it and put some googly eyes on there and had the best afternoon ever. As we've gotten older, the seeds are planted, our garden has gotten weedier and weedier until we can't even see the glitter and feathers anymore because we've made such a tangled mess. When I start making excuses, I've just brought these two huge panels, bigger than I've ever worked on before. They're sitting in my studio and the other day I was like, "But wait, I shouldn't work on them yet until I know for sure I either have a show for them to go to or a buyer or something because they're huge and they're going to be expensive to make." I just thought, "Oh my gosh." Like I had to call myself out on it and be like, "Just make them." I'm so excited about these giant things, why I'm worrying about where they're going to go. If I was a kid and my mom gave me a piece of paper that big, it would have already been covered. But we can replant with better seeds, right? Yes. Replant those. I always believed I couldn't do big work because in university I'd done really big, like six foot by six foot. Since I've gotten back into making art in end of 2015, I've made quite small work and dipping my toes it's like there's, not to make light of people who actually have PTSD, but you're like, "I don't want to go back to doing the thing that scared me where I was so harshly criticized," is terrifying. If you look at the jobs curator, everyone write about so many people make gigantic art. That's what I'm drawn to, yet I'm stopping myself from doing it. Why? Because a seed got planted that I couldn't do it. I got criticized for my negative space because it was back in the day when abstract paintings filled the entire Canvas and I've [inaudible] I think that's why I became a graphic designer, I love negative space. I was harshly criticized for it. I felt like if I was going to use a big Canvas, I'd to fill the whole thing. Right now you don't. I can make those rules myself. I can have negative space in my garden if I want. Make those rules and decide what you want. As I said, as you go, you're going to start to realize there's all these little things that you don't even know they are seeds. You just think they're facts, you just think they're real in the truth. Just give yourself even 15 minutes a day to just exhale and think about what you want to be making, why you want to be making it. Is there anything stopping you? Where do that come from? I'm not saying go away for a one month artist retreat, I know that is impossible for most of us, especially right now. But 15 minutes a day of just a cup of tea and looking at your window and figure this out because I promise you it'll lead you forward. It just will. 5. Playing in Your Garden: Next, let's talk about how we can bring a little bit of play back into our gardens. This is my new kids' book, How To Spot An Artist. This might get messy. It's really funny. This is my author copy, I just got my big box of books that the publisher sent me. I showed this to someone yesterday. They thought it was just a book filled with projects. It is not. It is basically the kid version of everything I just told you guys. It's about dealing with your art bully who gets in there and tells you to quit. It's about how to identify artists, that they can be any shape, size, color. They can live anywhere from big cities to little towns. It's basically trying to get to these guys before their inner critic does. I just want them to know that, maybe their inner critic won't show up till they're 21, like me in university. But then I hope they remember that book they had when they were six, seven, or eight, that said, no, you can be an artist no matter what anybody says. That's the premise of this book. But of course, I'm physically incapable of not putting projects in my book. So there is a page, a project at the very end. This is more art projects, because who wants less art projects? Nobody. There's a bunch in here. So we're going to do one of them today that's really easy, that all you need is a pencil and a piece of paper. But I wanted to show you, I made a couple of other ones that I want to send you off little assignments, and these are things for kids. These are things that make you feel like a kid, and if you're feeling stuck, just don't do the masterpieces, do something fun and silly. This is your custom rainbow. This is my custom rainbow. What it says in the book and what the bands are, here we go. Number 1, the color of the shirt that you're wearing right now. I knew it would be black because I wear black all the time. If it is stripy and crazy like O'Brianna's, then do a stripy and crazy first band. Nice. The second band, your eye color. Blue. I have bluish-gray. So both of these I collaged out of books. This is actually Marilyn Monroe's hair poking out. But it was the only chunk of black I could find in one of my old books. There's a bit of Marilyn hair there. The next one was, my eyes are grayish-blue, this was sky in England from a travel book I had. The third band. Perfect. O'Brianna, your favorite ice cream. Mine is cantaloupe gelato. Yum. Melon gelato, I get it when I go to Venice and it is the most delicious thing ever, and it's really light peachy pink. So I couldn't find anything to actually painted this. I did like a watercolor wash on a piece of paper, and then cut the band out. The next one is the color of your bedroom. Mine is white. So there's a piece of white paper on there for that band. Maybe you have a more interesting colored bedroom. Then the fifth one is the color of the sky right now. So every time you do this, the shirt you're wearing will be different, maybe your ice cream flavor will have changed, and the sky will be different. So I did this last night, and the sun was setting and it was orangey yellowy. So this is actually a photo from a book about roses and I just found sort peachy rows and cut out the final thing. So you can do this by collage, you can watercolor, you can paint, you can do whatever you want, and make your own custom rainbow. So this is fun to do with kids, fun to do with yourself. You feel like a five-year-old when you're doing it, which is actually really nice and refreshing. You notice that my bands are not even close to perfect, [inaudible] the paper that was ripped so that I wouldn't get precious about it. Yeah, it's just for having fun, and if you want to, just make up those five categories. It doesn't need to be those five I gave you. It could be five things that change constantly so that every time you do this, the rainbow is completely different. So get rid of eye color and the color of your bedroom because that might not change. So come up with five things, change all the time and do one every day for 100 days. I don't know. I just made that up. You could do that. Okay. One of the other things in the book, in the back, make a macaroni necklace. O'Brianna, I made one. I haven't done this since I was a kid. It got pretty hardcore. Some pen aid or some glitter, and then I have these, I've been working old costume jewelry into my mixed media work lately. So I had these pretty beads and some neon string. Look, that's so cute. I'm impressed. It [inaudible] my crazy lipstick. I was in my studio alone, laughing my head off, painting noodles. All I had was pen aid, but do whatever you want. It was just fun, and by doing it, I did one that was hombre and that gave me an idea for a piece that I'm working on. So it starts by painting a noodle that fades from neon to pastel. But then I was like, that's actually really cool for a background. So working on one of my big panels, I'll do a pink background. So lots of these little, as Bob Ross would say, there's no mistakes, just happy accidents. Doing projects like this when you're feeling stuck actually lead you to really great aha moments that you can bring into your art with a capital A, as opposed to your art with a lowercase A. 6. Exercise: Playful Shape Drawings: Now grab that paper and pencil that you've got, We're going to do a quick activity from my book. What we're going to do today is just silly and fun, and again, you can do this over and over and over again. I'm going to read directly from the book. This is the activity, everybody has their pencils and pens ready. Draw a square. Easy, add eyes, and give him a funny hat. Or her, I should say him or her. Again, this can get as crazy and as involved as you like. I'm just using a chalk wall, pencil, and a piece of paper but you can paint them, you can do whatever you like. This isn't that clear, so perhaps let's just give him a giant feather too. Nice. Very fashion-forward. Yeah. Let's see. Draw a small circle besides your square. That's easy enough. With tiny eyes and a really big mouth. Then give it some animal ears. It could be antlers or bunny ears or whatever. Oh God, mine has elephant ears I think but they look like human ears, creepy. Now give each of them a name. I'm going with Mitch and Clarke because those are always the names that my son gives everything. Clarke with an e. Then you can color them in if you really want to, and then you're done until the next time you draw a square. The idea for this is just to be silly and fun. Every time you do this, it can be completely, completely different. You could do it with different mediums every single time. Super fun to do with kids. Next time he's got antlers and they've got different names, they're girls or whatever. It's just fun and silly and art with a little A, so that you can get out of your head and realize that you can turn a square and a circle really into anything that you want. It's just about finding that joy that we used to find so easily when we were little before anybody planted any seeds. This is awesome. It's just quick and immediately your brain can't do anything but have fun instead of questioning. That's what I always say to you. Give yourself an assignment. Because then you are playing within this sandbox. We talked about that in my other Skillshare class about giving yourself rules and playing within them. It just lets you be free, do something silly, and then do it again and again and again. There might be a happy accident in there. Like maybe for the next time I would glue a feather on to Mitch's hat. It might lead to other things and you just let yourself be open to that. Feel like a kid, bring all that stuff out, get out your googly eyes and glitter and maybe next time Mitch has a real feather and googly eyes. See, it's already all happening. 7. Q&A: Now we're going to open it up to questions. So this is a great question. Someone is asking what to do if you planted your own bad seeds. I bet you didn't. I bet you think that you planted your own seeds, but I bet that you didn't. I bet in a week or two from now, you will realize that somewhere along the way, that was informed by somebody else, even if it was a TV show that you are watching or something, it probably came from somewhere else. That's what I mean, we're not going to all figure it out today. It takes time, but give yourself that time and then email me because I feel like I'm going to be right. I really like being right. I'm pretty sure that you will figure out that it came from somebody else somewhere along the way. What is so powerful about being able to name the source rather than, oh yeah, like I have this idea that I know is wrong, of course? It just takes it out of being a truth. Because like that quack for example, I didn't actually respect him very much, and so just because he told me doesn't mean it's right, and granted at the time when I was 21, I thought he was right. But at 47, I'm like no, you're not. So it's that removing yourself from it, like that person that just said what if you planted your own seeds. I thought I had too. I just believed I couldn't paint. I believed I couldn't let people know that I was a mother. I just believed that, and thought that it was a belief that was coming from myself, and soon as you can distance yourself and realize it was someone else's opinion, and maybe somebody's opinion that you don't really need to trust, like even well-meaning family members, they love you so much, but 90 percent of the time you have no experience in a creative field. So they don't know what they're talking about. Why do you believe them? You just do because they love you and you love them, but it doesn't mean it's true. It's their opinion, and if you can remove that extra layer, you can get down back to your truths. Yeah, and I imagine everybody's seeds that they then plant and knew, they come from somewhere. So breaking the lineage. Totally. There's a lot of just social myths, human myths about creativity, that you have to be a genius to do it, or that all artists are starving artists. There's all these things that in movies and TVs we just believe as a character for an artist, it is true, they maybe stereotypes. They're not, you can do whatever you want. There's certain items like Ashley Longshore, who I love, is hilarious. She's very successful. She doesn't believe from working with galleries. She tried when she first started, they told us she wasn't marketable, that she would never sell, and so instead of quitting, she said, "Oh yeah, watch this," and she did it herself, her own way. So you can make your own rules, you don't have to just because there's this stereotype way of doing things or that artists are supposed to be XYZ or that we're supposed to be flaky and not business minded or whatever. Some of us are, and some of us aren't lucky. You don't have to buy into those stereotypes. That's very freeing. Aaron is asking, do you have any tips for integrating more creative moments into your daily routine? Yeah, I see this exercise, and again, especially with women, you find everything else that you should do before you give yourself time to either exercise or be creative. I schedule it, I have to schedule it or I don't do it, then my day gets away from me. So you have to find a time of day where it works, and then literally like 15 minutes, 30 minutes, that's it. Don't feel like you need an eight-hour runway. Give yourself, and I even set a timer. Because sometimes when you have a timer going, it's that pressure like if you do have a day with no kids or on your own or whatever, you just can screw around for ages. I will just make coffee first and maybe I'll just walk down and do whatever, water the plants. No, you have 15 minutes, you got to get cracking. So it's a really good way to force yourself, and in those 15 minutes, give yourself an assignment. So actually if you go onto my site, the [inaudible] , there are a bunch of projects under the drop-down is creative unblock. There are 12 little creative unblock projects right there. If you remember of Skillshare, my class that just came out in June, I only have one class on there right now, there's eight chapters, so I think there's six little projects. Yeah, 6-8. Yeah. So they're all sitting there, Skillshare has a five zillion classes that you can do. But the jump starters for me are the really good ones when they're like, it's a 15-minute thing. You might make crap that you then recycle, but there might be a top corner of that crap that you're like, oh, I really love that crumble of colors or oh, I'd never thought of breaking up my spiral graph. Look, I put a spiral graph guy on the front of the book because I forgot that I had a spiral graph kit. I didn't even know what that was. Now I know what that is. A spiral graph. Wait, are you too young to know what spiral graph is? Don't make me come over there. I do know what a light bright is, I got that. No dear. Okay, well, spiral graph is awesome, everyone needs one. It's just fun to bring all that stuff out. So if you've got 15 minutes, set things up. Sometimes what I do is I'll give myself 15 minutes, half an hour and I'll decide I'm only going to use pink supplies. So I only pull out everything that I have that's pink, and then I have to make something. I don't know if we did this. I don't think we did this on Skillshare with the jars. Did we use the jars? No, not jars. You can do idea jars. So make yourself three jars on your desk. Fill the first one with little strips of paper with colors, all different colors. A strip that says black, a strip that says green or whatever, fill it up. Then the next one is patterns, so stripes, dots, triangles, whatever you want. Then the next one is mediums, so watercolor, pencil, clay, whatever. Then you don't know what to do, you go and you pull one slip from each jar, and you set a timer, and you force yourself to make black triangles out of clay, because those are the three things you put. It's not your fault, the jars made you do it. So it's a really good way against super friended it with kids, and just get yourself going, and then the honor is on you because the idea got put in front of you. Just like I made you draw a square with the funny hat, the jars are going to make you do with the jars are going to make you do. That's such a good idea. Man, there's so many amazing thoughts and ideas in the chat. Karen says, I have twin-one-year-old and a three-year-old home with me right now, and I just started doing 15 minutes of art a day on the diaper table and it's changing my life. Pretty awesome. Change the diaper, change your life. Yeah? Yes. That's all it takes. I met a guy who I was teaching a collage workshop and he owned on a sign company, busy guy owns his big business, but he was a collage artist too. So what he would do is he set up his studio in his garage at home, he would get home from work at 5:00, but he wouldn't go into his house until 6:00. He would go through the garage and he would stop, and he would make art. His wife and kids knew that he wasn't home from work till 6:00, and he would make one hour of collage a day, and at 6:00, he would go in and help with dinner, and help with homework and whatever, but he wasn't home until he had that one hour. You have to protect that time. We protect time for so many other things. Why don't we protect time for our creativity? It's so important and vital. Everyone that's on this call, you're here because this stuff is important to you. So if it's important to you, schedule it in. We all have apps on our phones, schedule it in, set a timer, do it. No excuses. 8. Final Thoughts: You guys, we just covered a lot of things, and I know it can be overwhelming, especially when the garden is really, really needy as mine has been for years. But like I said several times, give yourself the time and space to think about this. Find those seeds, weed them out. I know that they're in there and you do too. They might just not be really clear right this very second, but that's perfectly fine. It's part of the journey. I'm so excited that you are on this journey. Good luck and have so much fun. As you move forward with all of this, I would love to see what you're doing. I'd love to see these seeds, your little squares and circles, your custom rainbows, your noodle necklaces. You can upload anything that you make into the project gallery. That way, everybody can take a peek and I can follow along on what you're doing. Thank you so much for being here today. If you want to follow along on Skillshare, you can follow my profile. I have another class on here that I would be thrilled if you took, and I will see you out on the interweb. Bye. Thank you so much for coming.