Producing creative work—actually getting it out of your head and onto the page or into the world—requires you to deliberately suspend your evaluative brain at specific moments.
You want to temporarily defer judgment on what might work in order to explore a new concept without prematurely dismissing it as impractical or unfeasible. To develop your creative abilities, you need to learn how to turn off your internal self-judgment so it can’t act like a censor.
It’s helpful to develop a range of personal practices for dealing with your inner critic, and this assignment is a great one. This doesn’t mean every idea you have is a great one, but it gives you the discipline to separate the moments you’re generating from the times you’re evaluating.
How does it work?
Blind contour drawing is a common practice used by artists to shortcut the distance between the eye and the hand. With practice, when the eye follows a curve, then the hand draws the same curve on the page without thinking about it. The process skips the judging brain.
This assignment adapts the practice for a different purpose: to help you locate and wrestle with your critical functions (your ability to judge and to critique). It helps you experience what it feels like to not judge your work and to let your creativity flow. This activity is useful anytime you’re feeling deflated about the quality of your work or you’ve just caught yourself doubting your own potential.
The activity
Grab a pen and paper.
Identify someone you can see from where you are sitting. You could be on a train, at a park, in a really boring meeting, or sitting across from someone else doing the same assignment.
Now, take just one to two minutes to draw this person while looking at them the entire time. Most importantly: draw the other person without looking at the paper and without lifting your pen from the paper. (If you do lift your hand, you will not be able to find your way back, and the temptation to look will be overwhelming.)
You are making a translation of what you see with your eyes into a line with your hand—without any visual feedback.
When time is up, then you can look at your drawing.
Think about what you felt as you were sketching and how you feel about your drawing now.
Reflect on the following questions:
Did you make a great drawing? (Unlikely.)
What did that feel like?
Did you laugh along the way? If so, what was that laughter about?
What did the voice in your head say?
What did it try to make you do?
What’s at the base of those feelings?
Where’s that coming from?
When is it important to judge a piece of work, and when might it be important to not judge?
Credits
Originally published in Creative Acts for Curious People by Sarah Stein Greenberg. This activity features the work of Charlotte Burgess-Auburn, Scott Doorley, Grace Hawthorne, and art teachers everywhere
Related Resources
Creative Acts for Curious People
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