I’m wrapping up the first week of my 100 day project — 100 days of art journaling — and boy, has it been fun! Showing up to the painty table every day, music playing in the background, paintbrush dancing across the page…I know that many of you are doing your own 100 day projects too. I hope you’re going strong with them and enjoying your own creative explorations!

For this month’s sketchbook exploration, I thought it would be fun to explore IMPROV, or improvisation.

When you think of improv, you probably think of stand-up comedy, or if you grew up in the 90s, Whose Line Is It Anyway?. Improv is not just for the theater, though. You can use it across most creative forms — writing, quilting, music {jazz musicians do improv all the time!}, art.

Let’s get started, shall we?

Resources + ideas

Improvisational drawing: Throw away your reference images and stop worrying about what to draw. Instead, pull out your mark making supplies — oil pastels, markers, crayons, graphite pencils, color pencils — and start drawing. Let the structure in your drawings emerge from the materials you choose. Watch a short, 4-minute demo of improvisational drawing, and a 2-minute video, also by Jane Davis, on the practice of improvisation in visual art.

Improvisational portraits: Not comfortable drawing/painting faces? Try drawing just an outline for a face, that’s easy — it’s just an oval/egg shape, after all. Then just smoosh paint around. Let the paints talk to one another. Scratch in placeholders for the facial features. Continue to splash paint. Remember, you’re not trying for realistic portraits. Heck, you could even go abstract! The point isn’t to paint the perfect portrait, but to get a sense of, or feeling for, the shape and features of the face. Need some inspiration? Watch this. You’re not limited to portraits, either. You can use this technique for almost any kind of subject — animals, pet portraits, landscapes…

Yes, And: “Most of us go through life feeling like we’re not in control; this often makes us reliant on and even addicted to forms of structure and order, for comfort. As an artist and educator, I often find it hard to notice when I default to an insistence on control. In turn, I constructed a video playlist to inspire letting go and incorporating spontaneity into one’s art practice, teaching practice, or life.” — Erica Richard. Watch her playlist here.

For the writers: Experiment with improv rules in your writing! They can work quite well for fiction writers — see this and this — this for ideas on how to use improv for a broader range of writing. Artists, see how you can use some of these techniques when you paint!

Inspiration corner: See Wassily Kandinsky’s Improvisation series of paintings; read an interview with artist Frank Bowlings, whose jazz-inspired painting style incorporates clearly defined structures with improvised variations; and watch a short discussion on Kandinsky’s painting, Improvisation 28 (second version).

Our week 2 chat space is open!

A big thank you to everyone who dropped in to our chat space last week and shared their art. I loved seeing your wonderful work, and I can’t wait to see more of your beautiful creations!

The week 2 chat is now open, so come on over and share your 100 day project with us! The chat is only open to subscribers, making it a cozy, intimate way to connect with fellow artists. I’d love to see you there! xx

Join Shinjini’s subscriber chat

Available in the Substack app and on web

Join chat

I also look forward to seeing your take on this prompt! You can email your finished pieces to me on shinjinim@substack.com or share them on Notes if you use the Substack app. If you share on Instagram, tag me @moderngypsy.in