How a Year of Creative Habits & Themes - Can Settle your Mind

I heard about Crystal Moody on one of The Abundant Artist podcasts and I wanted to take her #yearofcreativehabits idea and apply it in a way that will settle my overactive mind.

Do you have so many ideas and consume so much information that you experience creative fatigue, bouts of anxiety or even overwhelm because of the many ideas and information you're absorbing? So much information that you want to try everything and not just art!

I was thinking about this and asked the question 'what if I take the idea of creative habits and focus on one or two creative themes a year? ... Yes I'd like to spend a year creating Pop Art and a gazillion other things, but let's finish x, y & z this year to make room for Pop Art next year and while I'm at it, let's chronicle how it goes. Will this help me? Well yes, I think it will.'

Why is having creative themes important?

A theme will help organic, creative, renaissance, multi-potentialite type personalities, who love to try a whole lot of things, generally all at once! Generate a multi-discipline body of work but in a more orderly fashion. Often those of us who experience an onslaught of ideas and an often messy process, don't get past the idea phase, have a lot of unfinished projects or feel like they're not progressing in a meaningful way.

(To see if you're a renaissance multi-potentialite take this Quiz).

Seriously, if this works for me, it will work for you! And if you're a procrastinator, I have a blog post on that too called 'How to be a Smart Procrastinator'

Keeping track of your progress on your blog or website will help you with accountability and staying focused. Mine is here.

This is one solution for those of us who are allergic :) resistant to being locked into one passion project for the rest of our lives, or are passionate about a lot of things and run about doing all of them until we're exhausted and leave a trail of incompletes behind us.

If you can complete a creative theme in 6 months or 3 months, that's great! Do what excites you, finish it, then work on the next theme. If you feel you need to run three themes at a time, that's ok too. Just finish more of them before hunting for the next holy grail.

Why did I choose a year? Because at the moment I am working on middle grade books and picture books. A year is a more realistic time-frame. I also chose to set up the creative habits page because it gives me a place to show my process, stumbling blocks and to have a way of visually tracking my progress.

I'll use the hashtags #yearofcreativehabits #yearofcreativethemes and probably hashtags that include the theme tagged on the end - #yearofcreativethemespicturebooks, #yearofcreativethemespopart depending on the theme I'm working on. If this resonates with you - come and join me, it doesn't have to be painting and drawing, it could be a garden project, cleaning up your home or cooking healthy meals. Add your own theme to the end of the hashtag and let me know what you're doing, I'd love to hear about it. You can either email me using the contact form or find me using one of my social media buttons.