Is it Too Late to Start Making Art? — The Artist's Greenhouse (2024)

It’s never too late to start making art.

You’re never too old to become an artist again.

As children, art flows through us with abandon and joy. The second we’re old enough to grasp a marker or crayon or pencil, we’re interpreting our tiny worlds through art. We don’t judge. We just make art. It feels like the most natural thing to do, expressing ourselves through marks made on paper.

Right around the age of 9 or 10, we start judging ourselves and others too. We start comparing ourselves to everyone else. Slowly, we stop making art with abandon and joy. Eventually we might stop making art altogether.

But that creative urge never truly abandons us, does it?

As we continue to grow into adulthood, maybe we find other ways to be quietly creative in our jobs and in our homes.

If we listen very closely, we can hear art whispering “hey, remember me?”

And if we’re brave, we answer. We learn to draw and doodle and paint, maybe a little uptight at first because we’re so concerned with Being an Adult. If we’re lucky and if we keep letting the joyful artist within come out to play, we’ll start making art with abandon again.

We’ll remember that art makes everything feel a little lighter.

When we make art, we feel a little less anxious and a little less stressed. The world feels a little softer while we’re brushing paint on a canvas or following a line around a sketchbook page.

I started making art again in my early-20s because a kind, creative friend noticed my habit of doodling on any available scrap of paper and gifted a simple how-to-draw book along with a sketchbook.

Six years and many reams of paper later, I left my day job to run my successful art business full time. My art business started as a humble but bustling Etsy shop and over the years grew to include art licensing, children’s books, and eventually teaching.

After many years of making art for clients and customers (and toiling through seemingly endless rounds of kid’s book revisions), my artist self felt trampled down. Suffocated under the weight of other people’s opinions about my art. I wondered how to rekindle joy in the art making process and then I remembered. Sketchbooks!

Of course I was making art every day in my art business, but it had been years since I gave in to the simple joy of a just-for-me sketchbook practice. So that’s what I did and now I’m in the fourth year of an every day just-for-the-joy sketchbook practice.

It’s taken practice to even allow myself the time and space to make art because the process is joyful to me. Years of running my art business and making art For Things, left me feeling not just creatively stifled but also like every drop of creativity had to land in the For Business bucket.

But you know what? Taking time for your creative self is never selfish. Taking care of yourself is never selfish. Won’t you feel better able to take on a job/business/life if you let in the light that art can bring?

I know I do.

My sketchbooks are a chronicle of the path from burned out and overworked to once again feeling centered and calm in my creative practice. My daily art practice is carved in stone. It’s a daily appointment with myself that I keep no matter what.

Do I make good art every day? Nope. Do I make complex art every day? Sure don’t.

But I do show up for a daily fifteen minutes of working in my sketchbook. Often a sketchbook session lasts longer than 15 minutes but sometimes it doesn’t. That’s fine. Sometimes I’ll draw or paint something that makes me sit back and marvel. Sometimes I spend 15 minutes enjoying some mark making exercises. Both feel good to me.

I’m showing up for the process, not the result. That’s where the joy lives.

You don’t have to be the best artist to have a sketchbook practice. You don’t have to make the best art. If you’re a person with even the slightest twinkle of creative curiosity, a sketchbook practice is for you. You just need a sketchbook and pencil to get started. Nothing fancy.

Give yourself 15 minutes a day to make art and just see how it feels.

What are you waiting for? Go make some art!