Noticing My Habits So I can Push My Comfort Zone

One of the wonderful ways that a daily art practice helps me grow is that with regular art-making it’s easier to notice if you have habitual ways of doing things. Of course, when you notice a habit – just as in life – you always get to decide for yourself whether you enjoy the habit and feel it serves you, or whether you’d like to expand your comfort zone and change up that habit.

Looking back on some of my recent sketchbook practice sessions, it’s clear that I have a strong habitual composition structure when I’m just playing.

They all have big shapes on the left, little ones on the right, with diagonal or curved lines flying up from bottom left across to top middle or top right.

I really do like that composition structure for a horizontal piece, but note to self to explore some different compositions!

I find one helpful way for generating new compositional ideas is to look for interesting crops in pieces I’ve already created, so here are 2 crops I kinda liked of this piece.