Daily Drawing Challenge — Week 1 Roundup

How drawing everyday is helping me recover from burnout

Mar 12, 2023

Welcome to the first weekly roundup of my new daily drawing challenge!

I kicked off this challenge for myself on March 1st, inaugurated with the fiery goddess archetype energy of Beyoncé. I feel it set the tone in the best possible way. ❤️‍🔥

In these roundups I will be sharing the creative insights I’ll be uncovering through this process, particularly how it has been helping me recover from a bad burnout in 2022 and aiding in managing my recently discovered neurodivergence (I’m in the spectrum of ADHD, or as I prefer saying, I have a ‘squiggly brain’, a term coined by Michelle Pellizzon that many have fondly adopted), as well as sneak peeks of challenge outtakes that haven’t yet made it to the daily Instagram challenge feed.

If you’d like to read, the full story of my burnout was published on Medium: Creativity, neurodivergence and burnout: the healing journey from having my identity wrapped up in my work

30 Days of Drawing Colour

I’ve committed — for now — to drawing every day for the next 30 days, but hopefully can continue for longer. I did a 100 days of illustration challenge back in 2017, when I was in similar need for a restructuring of my creativity and focus, and once you get into the habit of constructive things you kind of just want to keep going.

Back then, drawing every day first thing in the morning unleashed a whole new body of work, colour palette, ways of generating ideas and finding inspiration, and connecting with my subconscious. Even now, 9 days in, I already sense a deep reconnection with my illustration practice, not to mention several fun aesthetic discoveries, some of them owing to my new interest with playing around with 3D.

Reconnecting with illustration

Part of what led to my burnout was being stuck in a cycle of perfectionism, but also procrastination, for many months. In my recovery, I’ve been committed to cultivating the space for play and experimentation in my daily life.

I’ve also committed to re-training my brain to re-familiarise itself with the habit of drawing daily through the accountability of a challenge. Reading James Clear’s book Atomic Habits has been great for learning the psychology and neural physiology behind this, but also to understand that I had gradually learned bad habits, or lost the good ones, in my year of working alone as a squiggly brain (we need to be around other people to focus best and regulate our nervous systems).

Music!

At the end of the day, no matter how much I’ve tried to intellectualise my trauma and emotions (hello Gemini stellium & Aquarius moon), it’s only through feeling things in my body that I’ve been able to shift them.

Music has been the fastest, most straightforward way to connect with my body. In another strange consequence of my year working alone, I stopped listening to the stuff that brings me joy because I was trying to train my brain to concentrate by listening to ‘focus music’, which are often mellow, instrumental soundscapes.

One day early in 2023 I realised I hadn’t yet listened to Beyoncé’s sublime Renaissance. I put it on, and I haven’t stopped since. It has helped me reconnect not only with my creativity but with my essence as a woman, and it is no surprise that the first piece from 30 Days Of Drawing Colours is a portrait of her. 💎

That’s it for now. See you next week!