The Power of The Bare Minimum

Small efforts add up over time.

Sometimes I get overwhelmed by all the different things I want to make. I love thinking about all the possibilities! But sometimes it paralyzes me. Especially when I start asking questions like… What’s worth spending time on? What skills should I build? What ideas should I explore? (Should being a notoriously weighty word.) I found myself in this spot after finishing up my illustrated poetry collection Stardust. What now?! What should I work on next?!

I decided to create a low-stakes art challenge to help me stop overthinking and start feeling like I’m making small progress on something tangible.

I started drawing small circles in a watercolor sketchbook with the goal of filling up 36 circles using one color at various opacities. The single-color restraint was designed to minimize my decision making (aka… stop me from overthinking what to do each time I sat down to paint!), as well as help me practice using different water levels to achieve different results. And why 36 circles? Well, I could fit 6 circles across a landscape spread and the idea of having a full 6 x 6 grid of circles sounded satisfying.

I avoided assigning a timeframe and decided to embrace a bare minimum mentality with this challenge. All that was required was showing up each day and seeing what happened. I didn’t even need to fill the circle! One mark was all I needed to make the day “count.” It turns out once you have one mark down, it’s a lot easier to make the next mark. Sometimes I spent 5 minutes, sometimes I spent an hour. But each day, I got my brushes wet and made some marks.

These tiny circles gave me such an obtainable space to fill and return to each day that I filled these 36 circles in less than two weeks. I wanted to keep the momentum going and try some other ideas I had brewing, so I kept my commitment to watercolor for the remainder of the month. I stuck to my bare minimum requirements: one mark on the paper is all I needed to make the day count.

Here’s a video walkthrough of my sketchbook pages:

I branched outside of my sketchbook for some of the pieces. Here’s everything all together:

The folded piece on the top is my zine “Ideas” which you can see in my post How to Make a Mini Zine. Some of these pieces feel unfinished to me, or like they could become backgrounds or components for other works in the future. I’m excited to have some pieces I can continue to experiment with!

This circles and leaves spread in my sketchbook felt like the most cohesive piece I did throughout the month, so it’s today’s downloadable art print for paid subscribers!

Next week I’ll share how I transformed my 36-circles exercise into a cohesive art print!

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for being here! It truly means the world to me to connect with you every week. In case you missed it, last week I shared some Highlights from Milwaukee Zine Fest.

Paid subscribers, please keep scrolling to snag this week’s downloads! I’m sharing the image above as both an art print and as bookmarks!