Waiting Room Art: How to Set Yourself Up To Make Art Anywhere

"I wish I had time to make art."

Can I tell you a secret? I get a little snippy when someone says this to me. I know, life is busy. We all have loads of balls to keep in the air. But, you get to choose how you spend the 168 hours each you get each week.

You get to choose between doom scrolling or doodling, watching Netflix or testing new art supplies, being stuck in commuting, or creating while commuting. You get the idea.

One of the best places you can find time is while you're waiting - doctors waiting rooms (any waiting rooms!) kids sports practice, buses, trains, airports - the places you might scroll mindlessly through your phone, or feel impatient about having to wait, are ripe with opportunity.

Waiting for removal of a tricky freckle/mole was where I created much of the art in the photo up there. 👆 The administration of local anaesthetic isn’t my idea of a fun time, and I knew it was gonna hurt when the local wore off. I was a bit anxious as I sat down to wait. But by the time my turn came round, I was actually having fun. Not only did I get some art made, but it helped calm my anxiousness, which is a great reason to cultivate a creative practice. (If you have doubts about the effectiveness of creativity as a strategy for managing anxiety, check out Martha Beck's book "Beyond Anxiety". There's a tonne of science to back me up here!)

With a small amount of preparation, you can be ready to dive in anywhere. Here's my go-to tips for setting up your own take-anywhere creative opportunity:

Waiting Room Art Supplies - Start by sourcing the following:

📓 A small watercolour sketchbook - mine is from moleskine and at 9cm x 14cm it slips easily into the smallest of handbags

🎨 Watercolour paints and brush

🖊️ Permanent marker in black and a white pen - I love the fine tipped black sharpie for this, and the uni-ball Signo pen is a good option for the white pen

📒 Optional is a roll of washi tape or painters tape to tape off the edges of your journal page to create a frame effect as shown in the photo here.

Preparation:

⏱️ Take ten minutes to tape off the outer edges of a few pages in your journal. (You could do it while you're on hold on a phone call, or while you're watching the News). This serves two purposes:

• It creates a crisp, clean frame around your finished page, and

• It stops the watercolour paint from seeping through the stitched pages when you add some background colour - you can see I didn't do this on one of my journal pages, and have the blue seepage to show for it.

🖌️ Very loosely add some diluted water colour to a couple of pages. Try wetting the paper first for some runny, flowing effects, or put stronger colour into one spot and then add water to let it bleed into other parts of the page. Remember to leave some white space!

That’s it!

Once the watercolour is dry, pop the journal in your bag or pocket with the black and white pens and you’ll be enjoying waiting more than you ever thought possible.

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