Fun little warmup

Put the pen to paper with this lowstakes exercise

Mar 04, 2025

Good morning busy Bees,

This morning I came up with a fun creative exercise that I am inspired to share with you. So I will.

Full disclosure though, in honor of my very first paid sub (hi mom), most of the results of my own process are limited to my paid tier. I will share the playlist I used and my final sketch.

Okay I'm getting ahead of myself.

This exercise is a warmup for your creativity the way that athletes warmup before practice or games. It'll get your juices flowing and force you to put the medum on paper.

This works best for visual media but feel free to experiment.

So I like to work with music playing but I didn't know what to draw, so I put my ‘on repeat’ playlist and started just drawing whatever wanted to flow out of my Crayon. No undo or erasing. When the first song finished my canvas was full so I figured I would start a new one for the next song. Letting the music inspire my marks and icons and flow. When the song ends the canvas is done. I repeated this for 7 songs total until I got to this image:

Inspired by the song Android Love by Break Science and Lettuce

I felt like this was cohesive and iconic and meant I was inspired and ready to create something more defined (this post as a matter of fact).

So the exercise is playlist play

choose or create a playlist on your music app of choice
Get a mark marking tool and a mark receiving medium (like a pen and paper). Make sure you have several sheets.
Start the playlist and start putting marks on your page. Doodles, scribbles, words, shapes doesn't matter just keep making marks
Don't over think it, edit or stop until the song ends.
At the beginning of the next song start over with a new receiving medium.
Repeat steps 3 through 5 until you feel ready to make something else.

That's it! Easy and effective and fun!

Here's a link to the seven songs I used this morning to inspire this idea.