The Power of Ugly Art ✨ Creativity Exercise for Dealing with Your Inner Critic in Your Sketchbook

haa and welcome to my studio we're going to be doing some drawing today and I would love to invite you to join me it's just going to be a quick little creative exercise to just warm up maybe get your paints out get your colored pencils out just to really allow yourself to play and feel a little bit more free in your Sketchbook I know blank pages can be scary or sketchbooks can be scary and I really want to just show you that there are very easy ways of approaching your Sketchbook and your art practice that

kind of lessen a little bit of that anxiety that can sometimes arise if you don't know me hi if you don't know me hi my name is marinel worm I'm an artist illustrator and top teacher on skillshare where I've taught more than 80,000 students to I like to call it tap into the creativity within um it's really a passion of mine is to give you the tools that have helped me feel more free within my art practice and so that you can take those tools with you and really create the kind of art that you

want to make without all the hurdles and anxieties and self-criticism that can often get in the way of expressing yourself creatively if you don't have the time to join in today but you would like to in the future don't hesitate to hit on subscribe so that you can hear about the new videos that come out where I share some of these little tidbits with you in the future let's jump right in so I'm going to ask you to grab your Sketchbook and any art materials that you might want to play with today I have a

bunch of different things I have some colored pencils I have some neocolor I even have some gouache and some pastels I might use all of them and I might not um there's really no restrictions here we're going to open up to a blank page and already I can tell you that it doesn't need to be a perfect page so you can see that I have some uh paint that's left over from something that I was working on the other day and it kind of you know slipped onto this page and that's fine this first page

is really just to allow us to reconnect with our art practice so the biggest hurdle that I think a lot of people face is that when you open your Sketchbook you're kind of confronted with this idea aidea that you need to have a beautiful Sketchbook you know there's tons of sketchbooks on Instagram and on YouTube where each page is more beautiful than the next I want to break that myth a Sketchbook is a working tool that's it bottom line that is the thing that we need to remember and so in order for our brains and

our nervous system to understand that it's a working tool it means that we need to kind of break those expectations that are set up from the get-go so whenever I'm feeling a little stuck a little nervous this is what I do I am going to just grab whatever art material it is that sounds fun I might actually go for something like this this is a sepia and I'm just going to start scribbling if you know my skillshare classes you know that scribbling and doodling are words that I particular really love because I think that they've

been reviled for too long and that actually they are these incredible doorways into our creativity and into reconnecting with what the essence of art is which is fun play exploration and expression of the self so the key is to just arrive here with no expectations and just allow yourself to scribble to Doodle to make a mess you can even purposefully decide to put colors together that you don't like okay maybe I'll do that just to um not sure I'm going to like this the thing is the thing that's tough for me on this one is

that I actually love tons of color combinations so sometimes things that I think are color combinations that I don't like I end up loving them sorry that's my desk making noise but this isn't like my favorite color palette here so you can go ahead and just allow yourself to make something ugly because the point is really just to connect with the act of Mark making and with a little bit more freedom if you've never done this it can be pretty terrifying cuz you're like no but my Sketchbook is so precious and it cost a lot

of money and I need I need my pages to be pretty and representative of what I'm capable of if that's really getting in the way then you can go ahead and just grab some um some like printer paper or a Sketchbook that you don't like and that can be another way of doing this so right now I'm actually building a color palette that I really don't like surprisingly like I'm really not a fan of all these different colors and that's okay you can actually notice the thoughts that come up you can notice that you're like

oh this is horrendous what are these marks it looks like a child's drawing um it looks like something that you could put directly in the trash and just notice those thoughts and allow them to be there be like yep those things are all true and that's not the point the point is to allow myself to feel a bit more free so yes I can make something ugly and making something ugly is actually very valuable there is really so much power in allowing yourself to make things that you think are horrendous and that's one very underrated

art skill cuz we're always as artists especially if you want to develop your creativity it's like making something ugly is everyone's worst fear so what if instead of running away from that we lean into it and I let myself just make something really brutally ugly and how fun can that be and you can even just smudge everything like I'm doing here um just make a muddy puddle of colors kind of like when you were a kid and you didn't understand color theory and you thought oh there's all these pretty colors I'm going to put them

all together and then it just created some puke brown color who said puke Brown can't be valuable or nice all right so that's pretty ugly I think and I could keep adding on this as long as I wanted that's the fun thing about allowing yourself to be free and to make ugly art is that you can just spend like an hour allowing yourself to make something horrific and have so much fun doing it and this really reconnects us to what I think is the most important part of art making all right but for now we're

going to leave it at that we've done a shorter version of this if you want to do it a bit longer please feel free to like either go back and then replay this part over again to extend your ugly drawing section or just pause the video and continue until you're ready to move on to our next little creative exercise so I'm just going to switch to another page and what we're going to do here is I want you to think of all the expectations that you have for yourself for your art for your Sketchbook I'm

actually going to put this little sheet here to protect as it dries and I'm going to write down some of these expectations on the left side in my Sketchbook and then I'm going to be drawing on the right side but you could actually put them in one single page if you wanted that's absolutely fine for now I just want you to pick like a pencil or a color pencil just something to write with my black Wing pencil which I love I just want you to start writing down what are the expect ations that you're most

commonly met with or what are the expectations that you're met with at this moment right now so if I apply this to me I could be like okay I'm a professional artist and illustrator and so that means that the art I share here here I make here or share here needs to be beautiful okay that's something that maybe I would kind of have let me write down a few others my ugly art means I'm a bad artist I actually personally don't believe this anymore at all but this would be one that I think is very

very common to a lot of people so that's why I'm putting that one down let me put down maybe more something slightly more expectation based I need to create something appealing and lovely to look at my art has to reflect everything I'm capable of okay those are just a few you can add more if you have more of them you can iterate on some of them if there are like little distinctions in between but I'm going to leave it at that and so on this right page what we're actually going to do is we're going

to try to draw these expectations what do I mean by that we're really going to kind of work in an intuitive way so if you've never worked with intuition the way that I like to think about it is when you are like looking at your array of colors there might be one color that pulls at you more than other colors so I want you to grab that one and whenever we're working with intuition judgment actually doesn't really have a place so just try to notice those little inklings that you have maybe before the Judgment that

doesn't mean that the Judgment won't come in sometimes it will a lot of times it will and that's okay but just try to notice what are those pulls and drives that are happening right before the Judgment comes in and I will warn you if you've not done this very often it will take a little bit of practice before you're able to really hear your intuition in that sense so if you're very confused then just go with something simple something easy the key here is something that feels light so I'm grabbing this one and I'm going

to look at my sentences and I'm going to choose which one I'm going to start with and so I'm I'm just going to start with the first one for simply say City's sake I'm a professional artist and illustrator and so that means that the art I make here or share here needs to be beautiful what if I tried to represent this expectation as a shape or a Mark or a line or a texture that's what we're going to start with so I'm going to make this kind of a thin rectangle there's something about this that

for me evokes the shape of something very square or rectangular very homogeneous kind of restricted I feel this sensation of restriction and I want to kind of convey that in what how I represent it okay but I'm going to keep building on that so I might just take this color I'm just going to keep building on this idea visually how does this restriction feel to me what other shapes or lines or textures might come in and again here the question is not to Jud it judge it it's just a kind of f follow it to

follow what feels right and if I allow myself to really just feel into that I might bring in something else that wasn't there initially okay you could keep going on this for longer but I want us to also move on to the next one so I'm going to leave this one at that and I'm going to move on to the next one my ugly art means I'm a bad artist okay what would that feel like to me what shape would that look like and the fun thing is that you know we're making these kind of

individually but you can also connect them because I think a lot of our expectations are connected to each other so that's also totally possible but you can also do them separately kind of like what I'm doing here so I don't know something there's something to me in this expectation that feels viscous if I gave it a texture it feels like some sort of like gross blob so that's kind of the the vibe I'm going for here is some sort of like kind of just a blob and maybe I would even add a little bit of

water to just make that feel even more Blobby and I think I'm happy with that one my third one I need to create something appealing and lovely to look at okay okay what does that feel like to me so funly enough I'm getting the call of this blue even though I already used it but that's the point of intuition is you're not going to judge it it's okay if you're reusing colors or reusing shapes or reusing textures so I need to create something appealing and lovely to look at that actually to me evokes a flower

and I'm going to make this one a little bit more beautiful what if I use this marker uh not the color I wanted I wanted something a little bit more pinkish oh I know what what going to go with something like this so there's something like a flower okay because I'm already there's that notion of something appealing something lovely a flower is a lovely thing but obviously this is an expectation right so what is the energy of that expectation so for me there's this there's this notion of something beautiful but it's got something really chaotic

and uncomfortable to it that if I'm going to be honest it actually just erases the beautiful thing so that you wouldn't even know that there's something in there there's something just ick to me about that and then finally my fourth one my art has to reflect everything I'm capable of hm that's a very interesting one the thing that comes up for me here is something actually quite big that's why I'm going with a frame if I had like a massive sheet of paper that would be fun to like just use my whole arm to make

that kind of expansive thing but then there's also something very tight about it again restriction but a different type of restriction but oh this one's broken maybe I'll use a different one we'll use another kind of purple as much as I've had a lot of things that are more scribbly that doesn't mean that I can't have moments that are a little bit more still and for me in this particular sentence there's something like that my art has to reflect everything that I'm capable [Music] of within that restriction there's something very repetitive and monotone to it

and so I'm kind of trying to evoke that with my marks and then you can just allow yourself to not stay stuck to that single expectation but all of them and just build on this image that you've created looking to see what that energy is no judgment we're just here to lay all these expectations out on pap [Music] paper to see the connections between them and to let them exist rather than constantly trying to will them away or push them away what if we gave them a space to exist within our art practice within our

SketchBook and I would bet you that if you allowed yourself to do this every time you wanted to draw something every time you felt a little bit of that anxiety or that stress about creating something beautiful if you leaned into it using this sort of method I mean I'd be curious to know what you think but that the drawings that you do afterwards will have a little bit more freedom to them a little bit less of that charged anxiety and it's not to say that that's the goal of this there's no goal other than simply

letting these things be and exist but some sometimes in letting things just be and exist sometimes in doing that it allows things to shift a little bit if you start off with the goal of wanting it to shift then what does that do that ends up Landing as an expectation again which increases the anxiety so it's funny you can get into like these kind of knots loopholes of thoughts and that's why I I really want to remind you that there's no real goal here the only goal is to express and allow to exist and to

just notice how that feels and what comes up and what you notice about the energy of the marks that you're [Music] creating or about how difficult it maybe is also to allow yourself to express those marks in ways that are more chaotic and less beautiful than you would like them to be and that's okay too if it's more difficult all right I think I'm pretty much done here but please feel free to continue this as long as feels necessary sometimes I've done this sort of exercise you know for just 5 minutes and that can really

just help just to lay it out on the page and then sometimes I've spent you know 45 minutes an hour multiple drawings allowing myself to just sit with what is and I just hope that you get a sense of how important this can be to allow these things to exist within your art practice and to see them as a doorway for a more expansive Sketchbook a more expansive um acceptance of who you are as an artist even when you draw whether you're a hobbyist or a professional it's not sorry how can I say this it's

by allowing all the different parts to exist that you're going to reach these places where you're able to create more powerful art but also that simply just enrich your life this enriches your your life this enriches my life I mean maybe it doesn't maybe it doesn't enrich your life and you feel like it was a complete waste of time if that's the case that's actually cool too fine so you're like okay I don't need to do this I'm fine this doesn't really do anything for me well cool you've learned something about your own art practice

as well but I would I would venture to say that even if you are having a lot of resistance to this kind of thing like oh I don't need to do that then that might mean that um it's just a little bit trickier and more challenging for you to confront maybe the ugliness of the inner expectations that we have they can be hard things to confront they can be hard things to deal with so if that's the case then just do it a little bit at the level at the amount of time and the amount

of effort that feels right to you the key is to realize that our art practice can welcome all the parts of ourselves and that by laying down and accepting also the negative into our art practice we give room to the other parts of our our practice that we give room to a little bit more growth and compassion for all of ourselves I'd love to hear how this was for you I know it's very different from what you might have done before and I'm just very intrigued to hear whether it went well whether it was more

difficult what parts you connected with what parts you maybe struggled to connect with and how you feel looking back at these pages that you've done both the very purposefully ugly drawing and the one drawing led by your expectations and your intuition all right right so that's it I hope that you enjoyed some of these Explorations that we did and that you have a little bit of an inkling of how you can approach your Sketchbook when you're feeling a little bit more nervous if you want to you know leave any comments let me know if there's

something in particular that you'd like me to explore in a Future video just let me know I'd love to hear from you of course you can also follow me on Instagram where I share my personal projects little little Snippets of my Sketchbook and and also when I come out with a new class or you can also join me on patreon where I host live monthly art classes live sessions and Sketchbook tours and other little art tidbits that are really fun it's a nice Community we also have a Discord server called my cozy little Art Cafe

which I love it was lovely to spend some time with you today thank you for joining me and I'll see you very soon bye