Creativity for busy lives - structuring your time

Something I've found in my own experience is while I have a lot of enthusiasm to be creative, often life gets in the way unless I am actively structuring my time around creativity. You can easily tell yourself "tonight, I am going to draw/paint/write" but then you have to empty the dishwasher, and there's ironing to do, and then you wanted to start watching that new Netflix series that your coworker was talking about... and then boom, it's 9pm and there's almost no point starting to work on anything because you'll be heading for bed soon.

So how can you avoid this? One way is by taking a set of evening classes on something you're interested in. I find this works in a similar way to how I think about my gym membership - investing money into the class certain makes me more committed, and having specific time and dates to work to motivate you to rearrange other parts of your life to make it work. If you know you have a class on Wednesday night, the ironing gets moved to Tuesday and the Netflix show can wait til Thursday.

Better yet, being in a class allows you a set portion of time where you don't have to think about anything else apart from your creative activity, and a chance to socialise with other creative people!

Since I live in a big city I'm luck enough to have a range of classes available to me, and my favourite one is life drawing. It's a kind of art that needs as much time looking at your subject and at your work as time spent actually drawing, if not more, to get rid of your assumptions of what the human body looks like and pay real attention to what's in front of you. I find this type of concentration incredibly soothing as most other thoughts completely go out of my head.

Here's a selection of works I've done at life drawing evening classes.