Not long after I gave birth to Evie, I had a bit of a wobble with breastfeeding. I say a wobble, it felt like some sort of existential crisis, but that’s newborn hormones for you

My lovely midwife came to our house to impart some breastfeeding wisdom. As I sat on my sofa clutching the tiny pink bundle that was baby Evie, I sobbed that I just didn’t have enough milk for her.

Then, my midwife hit me with a lightening bolt:

‘Your boobs are a factory, not a warehouse. They don’t have a limited supply of milk that they store, they are constantly making it’.

And that my friends, is why creativity is like breastmilk.

We aren’t creativity warehouses. We aren’t born with a set amount of ideas and artistic flourishes. No child has ever ‘used up’ all their creativity in a crayon filled frenzy, only to be left barren and unimaginative for the rest of their life.

NO! We are creative factories! We can make a never ending supply of the good stuff!

 

However the opposite is also true. Stop creating, and the production line will grind to a halt.

If you feel like you have no creative ideas, it’s probably because you are not being creative.

Get those wheels turning; pick up a pencil and doodle, pop some music on and dance round your kitchen. The specifics don’t matter, you just need to create.

And once that creativity factory is up and running again, you’ll see production begin to crank up. Yes, some of it will be garbage. Do you think DaVinci only painted masterpieces? No! He did his fair share of rubbish too, but the prolific flow of his work meant that he got the bad ones out the way so the good stuff could come too.

 

So fire up those factories!

Ignite the furnaces, crank production up to full power!

Allow any bad work to just flow off the production line and know the good stuff will follow.

You are not a warehouse. You are a factory.

 

Much love, Johanna x

And yes. That is the dog’s nose. Best photobomb ever?!

PS: for an easy peasy way to get your daily dose of creativity, check out one of my colouring books, or my drawing book: How to Draw Inky Wonderlands.