Creative Goal Setting

Establishing a goal for your daily practice will help support your art making.

Having a goal allows you to focus on developing your artistry. It also gives you something to aim for. Maybe it’s a week for working on building up pages with stencils or a month of working with nature quotes or a year of being BOLD in your art making. If you’re just getting in the habit of establishing a daily art making practice, your specific art goal can help focus what you will do when you open up your art journal.
It’s good to go further than just figuring out what you really want to do. Ask yourself these questions: Why is this goal important? How will you get it? What could prevent you from accomplishing it? How will you know when you’ve accomplished it?
These questions are important to answer whether you’re working on a specific goal for a week, a month, the season, or the year. The answers help you prioritize your goals as well as root their significance to your creative development. Time: 30 minutes -2 hours.

Materials list:
Art Journal. I was working in a 11x14 spiral bound, mixed media journal with 98lb paper.

Markers + pencils.

Paint. Acrylics.

Palette knife and paint brushes.

Ephemera. Collage elements.

Scissors.

Adhesive (gel medium +/or glue).

Instruction:

Brainstorm things you’d like to be able to do as an artist and how you’d like to feel. Write them down. I started by making a grid not really knowing why or where that would take me. I ended up filling in the boxes with what I generated from my brainstorm.

Then, I covered it up using a palette knife and white acrylic paint. This allowed me to move into the next step of seeing which of my many interests would rise to the surface.

Which of all these ideas resonated with me the most? Or maybe some of the ideas join together into an area to explore creatively. This happened for me. You decide where you will focus.

After I picked something to work on, I asked myself these questions about my newly articulated goal: What do I really want? Why is this goal important to me? How will I get it? What is preventing it? How will I know it worked?

The answers to these questions will help clarify your goals and figure out what is necessary to attain them.

Creative goal setting is a great way to filter out paralyzing aspects of possibility that can arise when we sit down to our art tables ready to make art, any kind of art. By predetermining what you would like to work on and why, you create structure for your daily practice as well as flushing out a game plan to keep you motivated towards attaining your creative goal.