The Toddler Teaches Me Creativity Lessons, Yet Again

When the toddler kept pulling out blank sheet of paper after blank sheet of paper, scrawling one thing on to a page and then grabbing another, I felt myself cringe. What a waste, I found myself thinking.

Later, I watched her grab the magenta dot marker and press it onto the paper as hard as she could for 30 seconds. The ink oozed out of the marker and onto the page, making a puddle of magenta. I cringed again. She’s going to use up all the marker’s ink, I thought this time.

I resisted the urge to say, “Don’t waste the marker or you won’t be able to use it anymore!” because that’s the wrong message. Despite my knee-jerk reactions, I don’t think art supplies should be precious. We can let the ink ooze onto the paper just for the sake of seeing what that looks like. Making art is experimenting. It’s playing. The toddler knows this. I had forgotten it.

Why have art supplies if you’re not going to use them?

Later, we found her sketchbook, which she started filling with more puddles. Watching her play in her sketchbook felt completely different. She would make a mark on one page, then flip over three more and make a mark on another page, where she’d already scribbled in crayon weeks before. The ink blots mixed with earlier scribbles and made the pages more interesting.

Sketchbooks are meant to be used

Sketchbooks are an art supply that are so often treated as precious.

Buying them can feel inspiring, but the idea of using them can be intimidating.

“The blank page! Aaaah!”

“I have to have some cohesive project for this book so it all looks nice!”

That’s the pressure that often comes with sketchbooks. I’ve filled in many of my own, and I still feel this way at the beginning of a new one. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The beauty of sketchbooks is that they’re just asking to be filled. Once you start filling them, you’re doing your job. A single scribble on five pages in a row isn’t wasting resources, it’s using the tool. When you’ve used every page, even if you think the contents are hideous, you end up with a book. It tells a story of this phase of your experimentation.

How to stop being precious with art materials:

• Don’t worry about the materials you’re using. Start with something, then shift if you realize you don’t like it.

• Have a sketchbook, but don’t force a plan onto that sketchbook. All the sketchbook wants is to be filled in over time. Doesn’t matter what’s in there. In fact, if you decide you don’t like a page, you can always come back to it, paint over it, do something else with that piece of paper.

• Use the art supplies you’re most excited about. Try them in weird ways, throw out the instructions, don’t worry if they get a little dirty.

I thought I knew this lesson already, but the toddler reminded me this week that I needed to learn it again: If you’re too precious about everything, you’ll never get past square one.

Thanks for being here!