How to Successfully Create a Studio Practice and Follow It
Stepping into your studio should wake something inside of you. You should feel energized, motivated, inspired, curious, joyful, and peaceful. You should effortlessly move throughout your creative practice without question or hesitation. Working in this manner is the definition of creating a studio—habitual—ritual and when this happens these emotions come in abundance.
How to Successfully Create a Studio practice and Follow It
The Benefit of Establishing a Studio practice
Creating a studio ritual will not only inspire creativity but will also bring seriousness to your practice. It will help you form respect for your interests and skills while also building a relationship of trust. This ritual will bring ease to your practice and become something that reduces the urge you skipping out on it. This form of communication with your practice will encourage mindset changes that will forever impact your practice in ways you can’t even imagine.
Developing a strong studio habit
Your studio ritual will be unique to you and it is something that you will develop over time. The misconception, or where many feel overwhelmed, is viewing your entire practice as the ritual. Instead, the first step is what you need to create as your ritual. It may not be glorifying to view getting out supplies, diffusing oils, or driving to the studio as a ritual, but it gives you less of a chance to quit before you even begin by focussing on something small and letting yourself mindlessly move into creativity.
Finding the Right Habit as Your Ritual
When you first begin mapping out your ritual be mindful of establishing something habitual. Habits need to happen for you to be reminded to move to the next step. Walking into your studio you should be ready to start creating and moving effortlessly throughout your practice without getting caught and fumbling through the motions.
Choose a habit that you feel wakes something inside of you. This might take some time to pinpoint, but you can work through the different ways to bring this type of inspiration into your life. Think about the way you feel when you experience inspiration. What is happening around you? Who are you talking with? What are you seeing or visiting? Once you begin to notice patterns around you, begin to bring these into your space.
Personally, I really love the way rosemary and fresh earth smell. It wakes a curiosity inside of me and sparks some sort of motivation. To create this ritual every day, I choose to leave out specific supplies so they are present as soon as I enter my space. I also diffuse rosemary essential oil. My ritual then does not become about creating, but instead entering my space and turning on my diffuser. By focusing on this, I am less distracted by the grand idea of creating beautiful paintings, getting scared, and turning back. It's transformed the way I approach creativity and my practice grows from there.
Studio rituals also help eliminate the need for questioning. It dissolves self-doubt and allows you to instead focus that energy on the practice. When you choose what your start-up ritual will be, you’ll focus on ensuring that is the first thing you do. From there you will find yourself in the midst of your practice and you’ll experience your positive reactions in abundance.
Establishing a ritual will help you face the overwhelming feeling How will you bring rituals into your creative practice?
